Archive for the ‘Arts & Cultures & Societies’ Category

Por Santiago Iñiguez de Onzoño, Executive President of IE University

Una de mis citas favoritas, que uso con frecuencia cuando me dirijo a mis alumnos en IE University y a directivos, está sacada de las memorias de Peter Drucker, de cuando asistió a una clase de John Maynard Keynes en la Universidad de Cambridge en 1934. «De pronto, me di cuenta de que Keynes y todos sus brillantes estudiantes de economía estaban interesados en el comportamiento de las mercancías, mientras que yo estaba interesado en el comportamiento de las personas»[i].

Me acuerdo de esta cita cuando me preguntan sobre la esencia de la dirección, el núcleo del liderazgo. Algunas veces, leemos que dirigir está relacionado fundamentalmente con conocer técnicas y conceptos empresariales, con la importancia de interpretar las tendencias macroeconómicas o con leer informes financieros. Sin embargo, yo me siento más identificado con la visión de Drucker sobre la vital importancia de entender a las personas para ser un buen director: a fin de cuentas, dirigir es liderar personas.

Por supuesto que los buenos directivos conocen los principios básicos del negocio, porque lo han aprendido a lo largo de su educación o porque han adquirido ese conocimiento con la práctica. Sin embargo, si nuestro objetivo es destacar como directivo, es mucho mejor aprender de los comportamientos, los ideales y las aspiraciones humanas. Los buenos líderes empresariales del futuro necesitan cultivar estas áreas:

·      Conocer profundamente a la gente con la que trabajan y se relacionan, sus preocupaciones y sus inquietudes, sus ambiciones personales y sus circunstancias familiares mejora el perfil directivo. ¿Cuánto tiempo les dedicamos? ¿Sabemos esos aspectos de sus vidas?

·      Identificar y retener el talento. Claudio Fernández de Araoz, experto en gestión empresarial, a menudo pregunta en sus ponencias a los directivos cuántos de ellos saben qué es lo fundamental en la selección de talento[ii]: la mayor parte de ellos no han leído ni estudiado los principios básicos de la selección de personal. Tocan de oído cuando deberían ser profesionales.

·      Leer literatura, filosofía e historia. Esto puede potenciar el conocimiento de la naturaleza humana, que es fundamental para gestionar personas y para ejercer de líder. Las Humanidades son el mortero que unen el resto de las ciencias y los saberes.

·      Mantenerse actualizado y entender que la formación continua es el mejor medio para continuar ser siendo competente y empleable.

Dirigir es una actividad esencialmente humana, no técnica ni reducible -hoy por hoy- a logaritmos: cuanto más sepamos de las personas con las que trabajamos, mejores directores podremos llegar a ser.

Notas

Este es un extracto de mi libro “The New Global Leaders”, que publicará la editorial LID en el próximo mes de Octubre de 2019.

[i]Drucker, P. F. 1993. The Ecological Vision, pp. 75-76. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

[ii]Fernández de Araoz, C. 2014. It’s Not the How or the What but the Who: Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best, p. 23. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.

On the occasion of the 800th Anniversary of the Convent of Santa Cruz La Real (Segovia), IE University and IE Humanities Center will host the International Conference on the Birth of Universities in the Peripheries of Europe: “From the Scriptorium to the Library”  on June 10-12, 2019 at the Campus of Santa Cruz la Real (Segovia)

The model of the birth of universities in Europe has long been established taken as a model the developments that occurred in continental Western Europe particularly as a result of well-known processes: the Carolingian Renaissance, the vernacularisation of culture, the increasing relevance of cities, the empowerment of new social groups. Nevertheless, in large parts of what today is considered Europe, let alone Eurasia, the social and intellectual factors that defined this emergence of universities were often not present, or not all of them. In areas where the process of Christianization, and sometimes also literacy, had taken place later, or where the role of monasteries as the only centres of learning and literary activity lasted longer, or where a more or less permanent warfare existed, or where the adequate social environment had not yet been developed, the scriptoria and the libraries of monasteries and convents kept learning and cultural traditions for longer, often against all odds.

Registration is now open. If you wish to attend please click here

Conference Program Read more…

Who is going to save the humanities?

On all fronts, fields like history and English, philosophy and classical studies, art history and comparative literature are under siege. In 2015, the share of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the humanities was down nearly 10 percent from just three years earlier. Almost all disciplines have been affected, but none more so than history. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of history majors nationwide fell from 34,642 in 2008 to 24,266 in 2017.

Last year, the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, facing declining enrollments, announced it was eliminating degrees in History, French, and German. The University of Southern Maine no longer offers degrees in either American and New England Studies or Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, while the University of Montana has discontinued majors and minors in its Global Humanities and Religions program. Between 2013 and 2016, US colleges cut 651 foreign-language programs.

The primary cause of these developments is the 2008 financial crash, which made students—especially the 70 percent of whom are saddled with debt—ever more preoccupied with their job prospects. With STEM jobs paying so well—the median annual earnings for engineering grads is $82,000, compared to $52,000 for humanities grads—enrollments in that area have soared. From 2013 to 2017, the number of undergraduates taking computer science courses nationwide more than doubled. A study of Harvard students from 2008 to 2016 found a dramatic shift from the humanities to STEM. The number majoring in history went from 231 to 136; in English, from 236 to 144; and in art history, from sixty-three to thirty-six, while those studying applied math went from 101 to 279; electrical engineering, from none to thirty-nine; and computer science, from eighty-six to 363.

University donors and public officials, hoping to duplicate the success of Stanford and Silicon Valley, are flooding STEM with money. In September 2017, Cornell University opened a $2 billion tech campus on New York City’s Roosevelt Island on twelve acres of land donated by the city, which kicked in an additional $100 million for the project. Columbia, which in 2010 opened a fourteen-story science center on its Morningside Heights campus, has recently built another, even larger one (designed by Renzo Piano) on its new Manhattanville campus. The City University of New York in September 2014 opened a 206,000-square-foot Advanced Science Research Center dedicated to disciplines like nanoscience, photonics, and neuroscience, while NYU is working closely with the city to transform an abandoned building in downtown Brooklyn into an innovation hub for STEM.

Few comparable investments are occurring in the humanities. The contempt many officials feel for them was expressed most bluntly in 2011 by then-Florida governor (now senator) Rick Scott: “You know, we don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state… I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, math degrees,” so that “when they get out of school, they can get a job.” It’s not just Republicans who feel this way. In 2014, President Obama, speaking at a GE gas-engine plant in Wisconsin, extolled the virtues of learning a vocational skill: “I promise you, folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.”

Defenders of the humanities generally emphasize what the field can do for the individual: they promote self-discovery, breed good citizens, and teach critical thinking. In a 2017 essay in The Washington Post, “Why We Still Need to Study the Humanities in a STEM World,” Gerald Greenberg, the senior associate dean of academic affairs at Syracuse, maintained that by studying the humanities, “one has an opportunity to get to know oneself and others better.” Such study “opens one to the examination of the entirety of the human condition and encourages one to grapple with complex moral issues ever-present in life.” His argument was recently echoed by a writer for the Harvard Business Review: “A practical humanism, paradoxically, is of little use. When we turn to them for tips, but not for trouble, the value of the humanities is lost.”

No doubt the humanities do broaden the mind and deepen the soul. In one form or another, they have been at the heart of higher education since the founding of the university itself in the thirteenth century, and they remain a repository of a society’s cultural and creative values. But to dismiss their practical worth seems both short-sighted and self-defeating. Far from lacking material value, the humanities are economic dynamos. The arts and entertainment industry that plays such a central part in people’s lives today is largely the creation of people who have studied literature, history, philosophy, and languages.

Overall, arts and culture contribute more than $760 billion a year to the US economy—4.2 percent of GDP. Compared to the tech industry, that may seem modest—Apple’s revenue alone totaled $265 billion last year, and its market capitalization is about $900 billion—but arts and culture employ nearly 5 million people in communities across the country. Moreover, the value of the liberal arts to society extends far beyond the numbers. They incubate ideas, provide ethical standards, and raise questions about the status quo—functions that are becoming ever more important as the tech world, ridden by scandal and crisis, faces a moment of reckoning. Read more…

Atomic Energy and the Arrogance of Man: Revisiting the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster
FRIDAY MARCH 22ND 2019, NEW TIME 9.30 to 11 am
ROOM F001 (MARIA DE MOLINA 2, MADRID)

On the morning of April 26, 1986, the world witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine. Dozens died of radiation poisoning, fallout contaminated half the continent, and thousands fell ill. This lecture will draw on new sources to lay bare the flaws of the Soviet nuclear industry, tracing the disaster to the authoritarian character of Communist party rule, the regime’s control of scientific information, and its emphasis on economic development over all else. Today, the risk of another Chernobyl, claims Plokhii, looms in the mismanagement of nuclear power in the developing world.

Serhii Plokhii is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. Author of several well received books, including, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (2014), The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015) and Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation (New York, 2017). His most recent book, Chernobyl: A History of Tragedy won the UK Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in November 2018.

Coffee and refreshements will be served afterwards

If you would like to attend please register here