On March 3rd Rome Business School hosted the third CAB Workshop 2022 focused on the topic: “CEO & General Management”. It has been such an inspirational and enriching meeting, where more than 10 top managers from prestigious companies debated and provided their insights on future trends of the managerial world. Rome Business School has in fact planned the organization of 6 CAB workshops throughout 2022 in which the CAB members are invited to meet with faculty and other professionals pertaining to the same sector, with the aim to continue improving our ongoing process of enriching our Masters and MBA while making the connection with companies tangible and fruitful.
The top Managers, CEOs and faculty members that took part at the CAB Workshop “CEO & General Management” are:
HMD Global, Alberto Matrone; Jaguar Land Rover Italia, Daniele Maver; Ferrarelle, Marco Pesaresi; Oracle, Alessandro Ippolito; Altromercato, Alessandro Franceschini; Essity, Andrea Di Paola; Tree, Francesco Pantoro; Auditorium Parco Della Musica, Daniele Pitteri; SIT – the Italian Society of Telemedicine, Gianfranco Gensini; Opinno, Tommaso Canonici; Stocard, Valeria Santoro; Bludigit SpA, Marco Barra Caracciolo.
They key aspect debated during the meeting has been: Which are the peculiar characteristics of General Management that do you see necessary and emerging for future CEOs / presidents / senior managers?
The CAB members agreed that pragmatism and soft skills are the key factors to handle today challenges in the daily work, especially for those entering the job market. More specifically, all the participants underlined the very strong need for the students to have a pragmatic, concrete approach and to develop a know how to “do” immediately when they enter the company, in particular the most senior graduates from the MBA. Therefore, their suggestion for RBS is to offer a learning methodology and approach that is extremely concrete and experiential: concrete in the classroom and experiential in connection with companies.
In fact, the CAB Members participating strongly suggested to give the opportunity to students to experience companies by carrying out Business Challenges and/or specific projects – especially on the macro-trends of Digitization, Sustainability and Innovation – from inside the company environment, by entering and working from the company venue itself. CAB Members also suggested to take students to Fairs / Exhibitions / Conventions / Congresses: this way RBS would be the 1st business school in Italy to do so!
Not only pragmatism, but soft skills for leadership, emerged to be especially relevant during the meeting. in particular, the CAB members stressed on the following soft skills, in order for students to become agile, successful and engaging leaders:
teamwork, concentration and focus of key concepts, lexical + syntactic + analytical synthesis, ability to “engage” with top executives, empathy and capability of building professional relationships, to “connect” in the company and encourage change (stakeholder management), holistic thinking and construction of future scenarios (also to manage a VUCA environment).
All these are aspects soft skills-related, have to be trained from the start of the Master, in order for the students to: develop the change-management skills, to embody and become agents of change, to then assume leadership (in the medium to long term). Therefore, it is needed not the detach soft skills from the company reality, for RBS graduates to emerge as future leaders “knowing how to move within the company in order to then change it”.
Other relevant insights:
The Corporate Advisory Board is a committee composed by Leaders, Managers and Professionals from key areas of National and International Businesses, and its purpose is to Advise the school in the definition of the best strategy in order to ensure a continuous improvement in quality and in the innovation of managerial training, answering to the needs of the current job market.
Through the Corporate Advisory Board, Rome Business School activates a process of continuous updating of its activities and training programs, relying on the numerous business interactions and inputs provided by the members of the committee.
The Rome Business School CAB counts today with 81 members, among them: Microsoft, IKEA, EY, Deloitte, Valentino, Procter and Gamble, Nokia, Sony, Enel, Coca-Cola HBC, Eataly, Bvlgari, Warner Media.
