HBS Professor on AI, Leadership and the Future of the MBA | Ep 98

What does the future of business school look like? Harvard Business School Professor Joshua Margolis joins host Harold Simansky and MBA Admissions Executive Director Jessica Shklar to explore how AI is reshaping the MBA experience.

Joshua Margolis is the James Dinan and Elizabeth Miller Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the Unit Head for the Organizational Behavior unit. He is also Faculty Chair of the Program for Leadership Development. His research and teaching revolve around leadership and ethics, spanning courses on Leadership and Organizational Behavior, Leadership and Corporate Accountability, Authentic Leadership Development, and FIELD Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development.

Whether you are applying to business school or already in the workforce, this conversation offers honest, practical insight into leadership, learning, and the evolving value of an MBA.

00:00  Introduction: Three Paths to Business School
02:51  Finding Your Story Through-Line
04:15  From Research Assistant to HBS Professor
10:45  Managing Human Beings in the Age of AI
13:21  How HBS Students Are Using AI in the MBA Classroom
15:33  The Ethical Line: When AI Use Goes Too Far
17:15  Why the People Side of AI Is Harder Than the Technology
21:52  Closing Thoughts

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Transcript

Introduction: Three Friends, Three Paths to Business School

Joshua Margolis 0:00

Using AI to do your work is shortchanging yourself. Be thoughtful about how you're using AI as a tool to augment your learning and equip yourself for the future and put in the hours to truly learn it in addition to being curious about it. You can just synthesize so much more information now than you could before.

Harold Simansky 0:32

We spent a lot of time on the NBA Mission Podcast talking about how business school works today. But in this episode, we're looking to what is next. I'm joined by my colleague Jessica Scar and HBS professor Joshua Margolos. We actually grew up together. So we start with how those shared experiences shaped our view on leadership and education. Then we dive into the future, especially how AI is transforming the MBA classroom, how students are using it, and how schools are adapting. We also explore how the value of an MBA is evolving and what skills will matter most going forward. So whether you're applying or just curious about the future of business school, this is a great conversation to tune into. Hello, Joshua. Hello, Jessica. Hello. We could be having the same conversation, or three of us could be having a conversation 50 years ago.

Jessica Shklar 1:17

Yeah, well, we're not that old.

Harold Simansky 1:19

Well, well, well, well, I'm not sure.

Jessica Shklar 1:21

I may not be old, but you're a lot.

Harold Simansky 1:23

So we're all from Brookline, Massachusetts.

Jessica Shklar 1:25

We're all in the same year in high school.

Harold Simansky 1:27

Exactly.

Jessica Shklar 1:27

We went to school together.

Harold Simansky 1:29

I actually live just a couple miles away from each other.

Jessica Shklar 1:31

Yep.

Harold Simansky 1:32

Where you guys still live. Yep. That's right, where we still live. And here we are at the MBA Mission Podcast talking about business school, MBA applications. But so Joshua, I'm I'm here because I'm an MBA mission consultant.

Jessica Shklar 1:46

I'm here because I'm an MBA mission executive director.

Harold Simansky 1:48

You're here because you're an HBS professor. So let me understand this. What happened over the last 40 years?

Jessica Shklar 1:55

How'd you get here?

Joshua Margolis 1:56

So so what I also want to observe is that had you asked the three of us back when we knew each other as kids if we would be going into business or business academia, we wouldn't have known what you were asking us. That's right. And I think that's a really good lesson for everybody who's uh who's watching or listening to the podcast, which is business schools attract a wealth of different backgrounds, people who have come to business and business schools from different paths, and that even if you feel I don't have a traditional business background, or you feel as though I came into business because it's what I always wanted to do, those paths cross when you come to business school. So I I think in some ways uh it's emblematic that three folks who would not have predicted that we'd be sitting around a table talking about business schools. Um Right.

Finding Your Story Through-Line

Jessica Shklar 2:50

I think we all came from like legal men medical families, legal families, and I didn't know anyone who was in business school.

Harold Simansky 2:56

Listen, I would have been retired as after my great career with the Boston Red Sox.

Jessica Shklar 2:59

Well, that's a dream.

Harold Simansky 3:00

Yeah, I'm not a lefty.

Joshua Margolis 3:02

So I had to give that one up pretty early. Um so so the I sort of the short version in in actually in my field of organizational behavior, we talk a lot about retrospective sense making, that I can tell an elegant story about how it was a perfectly hatched plan and everything clicked into place.

Jessica Shklar 3:20

That's what we do with admissions essays too, by the way. But that's what we're looking for. It's I mean, it's looking to figure out what was that through line that makes the story make sense. And as you're living it, you might not recognize it. But in retrospect, I love that phrase, is you you see that there are through lines, even if it didn't make sense at the time.

From Research Assistant to HBS Professor

Joshua Margolis 3:37

Aaron Powell Admissions essays are a little bit like the personal statements that faculty have to put together at various promotion stages. And they serve a very important function, which you just laid out, which is it your life may not have proceeded in the linear way you tell it, but it gives you this moment to look back and say, wait, how do I put this together and find that coherent underlying thrust? And wow, do I embrace that? Or given where I've been, what's the new direction I want to take that's built upon it, but may be um a point of departure. So for for me, it was that um that as an undergraduate, I became fascinated uh in ethics and in taking courses in ethics. And I didn't know what I wanted to do when I graduated um from college, but I knew I didn't want to do more school right away. So I saw that they were interviewing for these jobs to be a research assistant at Harvard Business School, where you would help faculty with their research projects and with their case writing. And I worked for a professor of organizational behavior who was studying cross-functional teams. So, how did you how do you bring together teams composed of people from different functions to accelerate and enhance the development of new products? And what fascinated me was that a lot of things that philosophers discussed speculatively and theoretically and conceptually were coming to life in organizations. Like how do we balance individual interests and the collective good? How do we think about fair distributions? You see them come to life in organizations, but in organizations, you actually have to keep moving forward even in the face of imperfections, and you've got to make decisions, even though you may not have perfectly worked out the right way to do something. You have to go for better rather than worse. And so I wondered like, well, what if I studied the intersection of uh business organizations and ethics? And that took me to graduate school.

Jeremy Shinewald 5:48

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Joshua Margolis 6:23

And uh the other key element that put me on this path is that I was fortunate enough to be a teaching fellow uh one year for the late J. Richard Hackman, who taught an undergraduate course called the Social Psychology of Organizations. And he required all of his teaching fellows not only to run the section of 20 or so undergraduates coming together once a week to discuss the material, but he also required you to give one of the lectures. And I thought there is no way I'm gonna be able to do that. Like an introvert, quiet, I was uh comfortable in books and reading and writing. Um, you know, writing's excruciatingly painful, but like I can do that on my own time, right? Not in front of a group of folks, but he required it because he saw it as a growth experience. And this is why I'm such a believer in the case method, because I think that for students who are intimidated by it, it helps you grow, right? It actually allows you to build a capability you even didn't know you had. That experience where I was able to teach something related to uh power and teach about the theory of power and teach about ethics, all revolving around um the example of Ben and Jerry's ice cream at the time. Um and he gave me the advice. He gave all of his teaching fellows the advice, which is I know this is like a 90-minute class, but if it looks like you're going to race through it, just put people into buzz groups and you'll exhaust the full 90 minutes. But the fact that he required us to do that and that I had that experience with the undergrads, um, being a teaching fellow was like just an amazing growth experience and excited me about the prospects of teaching alongside theory building and and research. And and that and that's kind of what put me on the path.

Jessica Shklar 8:15

Was the first year of the required year of business school as hard for people like you who were going through it as part of a PhD program as it was for people who are the MBAs? Was the experience the same? Or did you feel like you had an out because you knew it wasn't really the end goal?

Joshua Margolis 8:30

No, I I think it was probably harder for me because I didn't have the same sort of experience that many of my most of my section mates had. Um, and and then I would have this in terms of company experience. In terms of company experience. Yeah. And so I had seen a lot of companies from my three years as a research assistant. I had seen lots of different companies doing lots of different things. Um, experience that probably is not far different from, let's say, someone who's worked for a management consulting firm, but just through a different, a different lens. Um and then there would be these moments where I would hear someone in class say, but and everybody knows that a happy worker is a good worker. Well, actually, I knew from having taken the general exam uh in sociology that like the research shows that happy workers aren't necessarily better workers. Um, that in fact, you know, it's a complicated relationship. And so figuring out how to uh capture and convey what we know from extensive and deep research to folks who are on the front lines of having to get stuff done. I learned so much that year. Um, and I would say uh the kind of the third piece of really fueling my excitement for this profession came from, and I can, it's a case that still taught at Harvard Business School, the Benny Hana case. And I remember my technology and operations management professor, Kaz Masina, building this glorious board based on the conversation that was going on in class to show you the process flow, which you had no idea reading the case the night before, and he built it in front of us. And I remember thinking, like, how do I do that in my field? Like, how do you how do I learn to do that kind of thing in my field? And how can I excite, energize students to see the importance of the field of leadership and how you manage the human beings in an organization? How can I get them as excited as I was by what Cas Machina did for me and my entire section around technology and operations management?

Harold Simansky 10:45

So you actually stumbled on a question that I had in terms of the managing the human beings. It's interesting, of course, that you use the term human beings. So let's talk AI now, at least for a minute. How do you manage non-human beings, or how do you manage human beings who are really going to be working with non-human beings a big portion of the day?

Joshua Margolis 11:04

I think that every company, every government, every business school is trying to figure this out because it's moving so fast. And I think the important point is to put yourself in learning mode. And and the danger for academic institutions and a danger for professors, it's also a danger for students who get into top business schools, is to think that like, I've arrived, I have my expertise, I've been credentialed, I've been kind of certified because I am where I am. And therefore, like, do I really need to learn this? Do I really need to make myself uncomfortable? Um, and the answer is yes. We all need to put ourselves in learning mode and figure out how we're going to use AI alongside um, you know, the human beings, the people we work with to get to get things done. And and I would um echo something that my colleague Mitch Weiss says, which is students who are coming to business school have to, and and faculty in business schools have to match their curiosity about AI and its implications and how it will change work with their industriousness around AI, which means putting in the time, putting in the hours, actually like sitting down and playing with it if you're not familiar with it. Um, and and I think we're all trying to figure out how it will affect the classroom, how we can teach more effectively with it and manage and address the downsides, because it could rob students of their critical thinking if it starts to substitute for work that's essential for building your capabilities, to become successful in business, to build strong organizations, to lead organizations. So, how do we figure out how best to use it in educational institutions and encourage our students to use it, both so they'll be equipped for the AI future and so that they'll continue to equip themselves with everything that they need to be true value creators and game changers in the world?

Harold Simansky 13:04

Sure. So you see it across a couple of different dimensions. One is obviously you're, as we talked about in other podcasts, you're out, you're inside companies, you're looking at it. What are you seeing inside companies? But what are you just seeing in the classroom in terms of expectations about how your students learn, actually how they interact with the people.

Jessica Shklar 13:18

Yeah, how are they using AI right now?

How Students Are Using AI in the MBA Classroom

Joshua Margolis 13:20

So I think students are using AI in a variety of ways, and we're experimenting with AI in a variety of ways. So obviously, it it can help students accelerate preparation, whether it's for class and in just whether it's for class, whether it's for um the uh recruiting process, you can just synthesize so much more information now than you could before. You can use prompts effectively so that you can prepare yourself to understand things you didn't understand before. Um I think its most powerful usage right now in educational institutions is to help students who either are struggling to grasp something or students who have grasped something and they want to learn more, they want to be stretched more. And so we do have a number of our courses that um use various types of bots to support students learning. We've got one in accounting, for example, that does in our um uh in our first-year accounting course that does that. In one of our elective courses in entrepreneurship, there's extensive use of AI to help students really grasp the material and stretch what they're learning. So I think both in sort of elevating the floor so that everybody feels far more adept with what they're learning and in terms of extending the ceiling so that people can augment what they're learning. Um, and of course, I'll be totally honest, people are, students are tempted to use in every educational institution, they're going to be tempted to use uh AI to cut corners, right? To shorten their studying, to be in what I will say to students is you came to business school, you are dedicating two precious years of your life to business school. Get out of business school what you came for. And so using AI to do your work is shortchanging yourself. I'm not a Luddite, I'm not saying don't use AI, but think, be thoughtful about how you're using AI as a tool to augment your learning and equip yourself for the future and put in the hours to truly learn it in addition to being curious about it.

Jessica Shklar 15:33

Have you seen any unethical uses or what you consider inappropriate uses of AI, or how easy is it to pick up on that as a professor?

Joshua Margolis 15:40

So I am sure that for faculty, there's lots of stuff we don't see. What I would say is there are times when it's pretty clear to me people have used AI because they will say something in class that there's like no way you know that from the case alone. Okay. I I personally think we're in this transitional moment where we're trying to figure out what the boundaries are. Um, make sure that those boundaries are clear to everybody, make sure that there's a rationale for the boundaries, like the one that I just shared, which is, you know, we're not trying to penalize your ingenuity for using AI. What we want to do is make sure that we sustain the integrity of your learning experience. Because what matters is not whether you can get all the work done this week. What's going to matter is in 10 years, when you are in the driver's seat of this very powerful vehicle, you are charged with responsibility for immense assets and for the livelihoods and lives of the people you're leading and the people you're serving through your goods and services. Are you equipped for that? And this is why you can't shy away from really diving into AI and seeing its power and learning how to use its power. And at the same time, why you should not use it to shortchange your learning and to short circuit your learning.

Harold Simansky 16:59

Yeah. No, that's really fascinating. And you again, you're really inside a lot of companies. And what are you seeing on the inside of the companies? You're talking to CEOs. What what are their concerns? How are they asking you questions about AI and how it affects your own teaching?

Why the People Side of AI Is Harder Than the Technology

Joshua Margolis 17:14

So and this could easily be self-serving, but I think the phrase I hear most frequently, either from my faculty colleagues who are studying AI in organizations or from people leading companies, is the technology is the easier part. Adapting the organization, getting the people to adopt AI, figure out how to use it, and adapt to a world in which it's people and AI, it's the people side of the change that is the bigger challenge and the bigger puzzle right now. Now, obviously, that's self-serving in organizational behavior. In my unit, we study leadership and and and the people in an organization. But I think that as especially as AI continues to evolve, helping people keep pace with that, helping the organizations continually adapt. When adaptation and change are challenging even before we had AI, to me, that's what leaders are wrestling with. And why I would say business school remains so important. It is one of the few educational institutions where you're going to encounter both. You're going to encounter the techn the technological edge and how do I gain mastery of that and figure out how to use it effectively and think deeply about the enterprise and the people in the enterprise and how to design and lead the enterprise to draw on technology to truly deliver.

Jessica Shklar 18:38

I'm reminded of when all of us having given away our how old we are at the beginning of this, we all started our immediate post-college working world before there was email, if you remember. And then we all were in the corporate or business or some kind of institutional world when email rolled out. And I remember hearing stories of executives who simply wouldn't use it. And they would have their secretaries print it out. And it was trying to, it's an organizational change. How do you get people to use email? Which now seems ludicrous to us, but I remember hearing about the effective companies simply stopped doing communication any other way. And the senior leaders had to go on email if they wanted to know what's going on in their company. And that's the only way you could have done it. Now, of course, I can't imagine anyone has a problem with it, but I think in 10 years that will be the AI conversation.

Joshua Margolis 19:25

Well, flip it on its head, Jessica. Now we have students who say, email what's email? Who's using email? I mean, or it's over. That's true. It's come whole cycle.

Jessica Shklar 19:35

Right. But I think about an executive, someone who's 60 and has been in the corporate world and has come up through an old manufacturing organization in the Midwest, who now, and I'm not I'm aligning any of that. I think there's a huge impact that they have in the world. But they're suddenly faced with this change that they don't know how to handle it and they hear about AI and they don't know what it is. And maybe they see when they Google something that now there's a little more of an extensive answer because it's integrated with AI. But that's really terrifying, I would think, for those executives.

Joshua Margolis 20:06

And this is where I would draw in the fascinating and outstanding research of my colleague, Professor Ting Zhang, who has done research on learning direction and actually finds that people are better mentors when they themselves realize that they can learn in all directions. We we often walk around with this assumption that, like an apprenticeship assumption, that like where I learn is from looking at those who are hierarchically above me or in terms of age are older than I am. And that if you are able to adopt the mentality that says, I can learn from people who are lateral, I can learn from people who are below me in a hierarchy or younger than me, I open myself up to much more learning. And by the way, I become a much better mentor because people can sense that. And I think that that's fundamental also when you come to business school is realizing that even if uh you have the gold-plated resume, um, you need to open yourself to learning from everybody you are surrounded by. Um, they're gonna know some things that really open your world. And especially in the age of AI, um learning from as many people as possible, and especially the more seasoned executives, being able to open themselves to learning from the younger folks is really important.

Jessica Shklar 21:24

I did speak with a potential client recently who talked about the her organization has instituted a reverse mentoring program, where it's designed for the younger staff to teach, they're be partnered with and teach not just AI, but also what are the younger people thinking. And it's it's very much intended as a mentorship and it's called a reverse mentorship program. And I thought it was fascinating. That is, that's really fascinating. Advanced, like of a of a company's mentality to reflect that belief that you have to learn from all sources.

Closing Thoughts

Harold Simansky 21:52

Right, right. On that note, Joshua, thank you so much for being with us today. We learned a tremendous amount from you, and hopefully it was bi directional, and maybe even learned a little bit from us. Yeah, of course. Great to be here. Great.

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