Introduce your self in three phrases or phrases.
I’m, at my core, “an educational entrepreneur”. My purpose is to form skilled destinies for right this moment and tomorrow’s challenges and create the suitable instructional environments for that function.
In my imaginative and prescient, these challenges span throughout enterprise, human, and societal dimensions, the place abilities should discover their path each personally and inside the broader financial and social panorama. This requires dynamic collaboration and engagement with numerous stakeholders.
With my various background as a professor, researcher, director at a number of ranges, and as Dean for years, I’ve a robust dedication to high quality enchancment and processes enrichment, each nationally and globally. I’m pushed by my private convictions on training challenges and I dedicate my power to innovating and serving in significant methods.
What do you want most about your job?
No 12 months seems to be like the previous one. Folks consider that the tutorial cycles are similar however in no way, in fact! In 30 years of profession and throughout totally different establishments and positions, it has by no means been the case for me.
Furthermore, my job is on the junction of training, economic system and society, with a holistic imaginative and prescient worldwide. I feel what we do is among the richest attainable actions and doubtless one of the vital impactful!
Finest work journey/Worst work journey?
Truthfully, I consider that the very best journeys are at all times these but to come back. As an educational entrepreneur, all what I’ve witnessed was on the identical time distinctive and invaluable. There may be at all times one thing to be taught, to know, and combine into your reflections and tasks, and there may be at all times one thing totally different to expertise.
When you might be taught a language immediately, which might you choose and why?
If I could lead on a number of lives, I’d be taught a couple of language, no less than one per continent. Having solely three in my portfolio (French, English, and Arabic), I do know that languages are total worlds and mastering many languages offers you the flexibility to create bridges and due to this fact the flexibility to behave and rework.
If I had to decide on just one language then, I’d say a programming language. Right now, machines are audio system with which it’s important to discuss as a result of they’re on the coronary heart of immaterial and social areas and environments. I’d like to have the flexibility to work together with machines in a deeper manner, as that is the language of right this moment too!
What makes you rise up within the morning?
Giving love, sense and power to my household and enriching my skilled neighborhood in a manner or one other, particularly the scholars who stay our function!
Finest worldwide ed convention and why
As Dean of a triple accredited faculty, I take part in lots of worldwide conferences on enterprise training that typically permit us to share widespread challenges and determine rising matters and practices.
The final Annual Convention of the European Basis for Administration Improvement (EFMD) in June 2024, which passed off in Bologna, Italy, was actually excellent from my perspective. It was hosted within the coronary heart of the historic metropolis, on the venerable College of Bologna, the oldest increased training establishment in Europe, established in 1088. The subject was “Navigating geopolitical tensions, AI, and fostering a human-centered future,” and it was imbibed with originality, imaginative and prescient and in a spirit of refoundation. It was really refreshing and provoking to share that second with greater than 600 attendees coming from everywhere in the world.
Worst convention meals/beverage expertise
Thank God none! My desire is for home-cooked household meals so my expectations are comparatively restricted in that regard. However I admire the mental meals in the course of the conferences, and that is linked to the folks attending and the angle with which matters are tackled. What makes meals good could be very typically the corporate!
Ebook or podcast suggestion for others within the sector?
I extremely suggest studying the works of Edgar Morin, an excellent French sociologist and thinker who turned 103 years previous this 12 months. His holistic reflection, superb mental capacities and huge human expertise throughout the centuries and throughout the theories are really inspiring. Notably, he labored on the advanced thought and the concept of “reliances”, which is the flexibility to ascertain bridges past current classes and compartments. This dialectics of aligning variations and creating congruence past remoted rationales is among the key challenges for any social and societal transformation.
Describe a mission or initiative you’re presently engaged on that excites you.
For 3 years, Excelia Enterprise Faculty has been engaged on the Blue Training Expertise, an enormous and world educational and institutional initiative focussing on the strategic useful resource of water. Water represents one of many key challenges that firms, the society at massive and the planet are dealing with. Our ambition is to extend college students’ consciousness, generate and disseminate information. We’re deploying intensive pedagogical tasks geared toward growing cutting-edge information and enhanced competencies in what I name “inventive, sustainable, and entrepreneurial options for the longer term”.
