HEC in the press

Weeding out confirmation bias can help leaders make better decisions, but training has been of little help – until now, writes HEC Paris marketing Professor Anne-Laure Sellier, in an op-ed for Australian Financial Review. 

Laurence Lehmann Ortega, a strategy and business policy professor at HEC Paris, fears that cost cuts in response to coronavirus could reduce the focus on purpose. “This might happen for leaders who were talking about purpose for cynical or ‘greenwashing’ reasons. However, for those who walk the talk, it will be more relevant than ever,” she says, in an interview with 'Executive Courses". 

HEC in France runs the executive certificate program in Innovation and Social Business, which explores inclusive business models as a way of expanding into emerging markets.

Tony Somers, director of employer engagement at HEC Paris, expects to see growth in public sector jobs for MBA students as governments pump unprecedented stimulus into their economies. “Depending on how things develop in the next six months, governments will have a much more interventionist role in daily life, therefore creating more employment in roles that are more strategic and lucrative for graduates,” he says, in an interview with Find MBA. 

Somers adds that currently, the financial technology sector (fintech) is a growing area of employment, particularly in retail banking in more developed countries as bank branches are closed and services forced online because of the Covid crisis. 

It has become an annual tradition at Poets&Quants: Every December, the American publication gives the floor to the business schools they cover to offer their unvarnished expectations for the coming year. Strangely enough, last year no one accurately predicated what 2020 would look like. But that didn’t stop schools from jumping at the chance to prognosticate once again this year.

According to Andrea Masini, associate Dean for HEC Pari's MBA and EMBA programs, In 2021, “digital will become a commodity." “The pandemic has accelerated the development of digital tools and tremendously increased the level of acceptance of distance learning by both MBA candidates and executive education clients. In the post-pandemic world, even after we return to ‘normal,’ digital learning will keep playing an important role in the value proposition, becoming an order qualifier. Consequently, schools that underinvested in their digital strategy will struggle and be left behind.", he adds. 

The troubled Conference on the Future of Europe, intended to reconnect the European project with its citizens, remains in deadlock due to an ongoing institutional dispute over who will chair it.

"The conference was announced as the largest public consultation ever organised, but paradoxically its preparation has not benefited from any public input, having been concocted among the three institutions," pointed out Alberto Alemanno, professor of EU law at HEC Paris, in an interview with the EU Observer. 

It is important to know when children derive more happiness from personal experiences than from material possessions, write HEC Paris professors L.J. Shrum and Tina Lowrey, in an op-ed for Channel News Asia. 

Marcelo Stilman wanted to come to the U.S. to study. But coronavirus made that impossible this year — and he couldn’t get a deferral from his school of choice. In response, Stilman, 31, began to look elsewhere. Among the other schools where he applied was HEC Paris, which has a 16-month MBA that appeals to the newly married business manager with experience in the pharmaceutical industry. He was accepted and will start in the fall of 2021, writes Poets & Quants. 

Some legal experts say EU leaders overstepped their role by giving the commission instructions on how to interpret the new rule even if their declaration is not binding. “It will have a chilling effect,” said Alberto Alemanno, professor of EU law at HEC in Paris, in an interview with the Financial Times. 

“Hungary/Poland lift their veto on EU budget, after being reassured that new Rule of Law mechanism won’t be applied to them until a judgment of ECJ will define ‘methodology’ to be applied. This is not only unprecedented, but also legally questionable,” Alberto Alemanno, professor of European law at HEC Business School in Paris, said on Twitter on Thursday, writes CNBC. 

France 24 speaks to HEC Paris' Interim Dean Eloïc Peyrache, following the publication of the Financial Times' European Business Schools Rankings, in which the school came out first.