Business schools need to get involved in the communities they serve and help the entrepreneurs of the future – that was the message from a celebration of 60 years of the Alliance Manchester Business School.
The school is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year and is celebrating with the launch of a book called Reimagining Business Schools for the 21st Century.
The essay collection, edited by AMBS head Prof Ken McPhail, says business schools and their graduates need to help tackle the challenges the world faces today, from inequality and climate change through to the rise of AI and the global challenges to democracy.
It’s an ambitious mission and one that needs to start locally, as BusinessLive heard at the book’s launch event.
One of the panelists was AMBS graduate Christina Taylor, who founded social enterprise Aim Sky High and its sister talent agency in Manchester, and has gone on to win global recognition.
It was quite a week for Christina, who two days after the AMBS event won the Football Industry Awards Rising Star of the Year title at the Global Football Industry Awards. She has already been and in 2020 was named one of Business Insider’s .
Christina told the audience how she found her way to Manchester University through its outreach programmes and ultimately ended up doing postgraduate research into enterprise in disadvantaged communities – an area she said remained under-studied.
She said the business school needed to keep reaching out into all Manchester’s communities. And she added: “I’m so passionate that if you find the right entrepreneur and give the people from those communities a chance, the majority of the time they’re going to invest in their own communities because they want to solve the problems that they grew up with.”
MBA graduate and entrepreneur Niaz Rayan also talked about his route into the school – and said its “Manchester Method” had proved practical and helpful in his business journey.
The university’s president and vice-chancellor Prof Duncan Ivison welcomed the book and said: “It’s a really important question – what kind of business schools do we need for the 21st century?”
Prof Fiona Devine, dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Manchester, said the book was helping to answer the question on how business schools “can be less like ivory towers”.
They talked about – its focus on learning by doing, and on using theoretical skills in the real world.
Ken McPhail, head of the schools since 2023, has said: "Business schools must stand firm in the face of anti-intellectual scrutiny. We can’t afford to sit on the sidelines of the big questions facing society."
At the event, he said business schools could be a “huge source of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship".
And he added: “It’s that combination of wanting to be a catalyst for economic growth in the region, but to do that in a way that’s inclusive and where everyone benefits.”
Speaking to BusinessLive after the event, Prof McPhail stressed the importance of making sure the business leaders of the future took social responsibility into account.
He said: “The business world is littered with businesses that have failed because of poor leadership, where they've just not had that kind of moral compass, where they've just not had that sense of broader social responsibility.”
Future “unicorn” high-value businesses, he said, would likely be created by people looking to work in areas including mental and physical wellbeing, and tackling climate change.
He said: “I think that's what we're really trying to get out of the book – business for good. So you can have a really successful company, but it can be run in a way which is also beneficial for employees, for society and for the environment.”
And he added: “Our ambition is over the next decade to be part of this Manchester moment, to have a real impact on the economy, a real impact on lots of the social issues that mean that people in and around Manchester don’t feel as though they've got a stake in society. And we want to try to try and address, if we can, some of this political polarisation which I think is one of the most dangerous challenges we have to navigate.”
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