By Dominique Jacquet

It did not escape you that ChatGPT would profoundly change many professions, starting with education. Faced with pupils, students and other learners who have access to the service, the issue of knowledge control is at the forefront of concerns.

How to react ? An excellent paper published by Harvard Business Publishing (ChatGPT and AI Text Generators: Should Academia Adapt or Resist, February 1, 2023) clearly suggests adaptation and I fully agree with this position.

Let’s follow Talleyrand’s recommendation: you have to know how to accept the inevitable in order to make it usable, a great precept of pragmatic management.

The article refers to another publication, in the Financial Times dated January 21, which reports that ChatGPT can earn quite satisfactory grades in Operations Management, a pillar course in Wharton’s MBA program, performing above many students.

This finding leads to several questions:

1. Are the students badly selected?
2. Is the subject badly posed?
3. Does the teacher teach what is useful to the students?

Students are selected on a GMAT score (average of entrants = 730+, a good score is 750+, 1% of GMAT applicants score between 760 and 800), an interesting profile and good interviews. The system is rather favorable to candidates who are “in the mould” and fairly conformist, ultimately recruited by investment banks and large consulting firms at high salaries, a criterion that enters into the institution’s ranking… Let’s not go over this well-known shortcoming.

The subject of the examination must make it possible to control the level of knowledge of the student. For example, in a basic finance course, the student must compile data in order to calculate cash flows and the cost of capital allowing them to be discounted in order to produce a NPV, an IRR, a payback and a breakeven. If the results are correct: A+! It is perfectly legitimate to ask future decision-makers to master a few basic techniques to understand the challenges of each function of the company. But, this should not be an end in itself.

In the training process, must appear at some point:

1. The integration of the different functions allowing to have a global vision (systemic) of the problems posed;
2. The ability to ask (oneself) the right questions.

Some courses try to answer the first question, for example, business strategy. But the battle is not won, because strategy teachers teach… strategy! I remember convincing a strategy colleague in an executive program for leaders to teach a case of strategy with a financial perspective. Having retrieved (and adjusted, because there were errors and gaps…) the financial data, I built an additional case and the participants had to issue one recommendation in the strategy course and another in the finance course.

Unfortunately, the recommendations diverged between strategy and finance… An in-depth discussion with the participants was very rich and enabled them to understand that the situation encountered was “normal”: the business world is not made up of simple solutions to questions crystal clear. Their role as leaders is to navigate this complexity to make decisions and manage their consequences. No problem with the participants, but the colleague informed me that he stopped using this case… Of course, this situation put him outside his comfort zone.

Teachers are satisfied when cases have a well-hidden solution that they can reveal in class after all learners have chosen other more obvious and misleading solutions. This is very good for the prestige of the teacher and his rating by the learners.

Incidentally, many MBA students are perfectly satisfied with this mode of operation. A very technical exam with unambiguous questions and predictable answers is much more reassuring for a population that pays a lot of money and wonders about its future. The professor prepares the students for the exam and acquires a good reputation with his Dean because the students are happy, they have learned to pass the exam, not to manage a business…

This is what Henry Mintzberg described with acuity in a very disturbing book: Managers, Not MBAs. His comment “The MBA trains the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences” is very violent and perhaps a bit caricatural. However, it is clear that a business leader must know how to ask the right questions, surround himself with people who will provide technical insight and recommendations, then make a decision and manage the consequences.

A good exam topic should look like: “In the situation presented below, answer the following questions: 1- What are the questions? 2- Answer the questions of question 1”. Needless to say the degree of popularity of the professor who proposes this subject…

ChatGPT does not ask questions (maybe in a later version…) and provides answers that are sometimes useful and instructive, but which encourage intellectual laziness. Using the process indiscriminately leads to a dangerous intellectual conformism and, above all, does not prepare you at all for the reality of business.

The Ecademy presents situations in which the firm’s economic context and financial concepts must interact to identify problems, transform them into questions and propose some solutions, knowing that there is no “best solution” and that each solution is ” created” by its decision-maker with its own objectives.

The film dedicated to McDonald’s and Starbucks shows how the top management teams, operating in similar economic contexts, have weighted their own objectives differently and created different solutions which, thanks to the quality of the operational teams, achieve the same result, a considerable creation value. To the question posed by one “how to control franchisees?” answered the question posed by the other: “how to maximize operational flexibility?” “.

This is our modest contribution to what seems to us to be sorely lacking in business education: learning to (oneself) ask questions.