Together is Better When You Want To Build The Future

04 April 2022

With conference season upon us, Ian Hawkings looks ahead at AACSB ICAM 2022.

There’s a book by Simon Sinek called ‘Together is Better’, and on one of the pages there is an illustration of two young boys looking up at a high wall. The caption reads “A vision is like a dream – it will disappear unless we do something with it. Do something big or do something small. But stop wondering and go on an adventure.”

Simon himself says this is his favourite page in the book - “We all imagine brighter futures, and it’s as if we’re standing at the foot of this wall and we don’t know how to get over it, but the desire to find a way over or around the wall is what distinguishes those that find a brighter future from those that do not. But it’s much harder to climb this wall alone – and with these two boys, the most important thing is that they’re doing it together.”

Simon is one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming AACSB ICAM conference in New Orleans at the end of April, and looking at the conference agenda makes me think we’re all just groups of people staring at walls.....

There’s a session for small schools – their wall is limited resources. How can they work together to compete? There’s a session on diversity and inclusion – how do you create a truly inclusive institution? There’s one around support for student wellbeing, one on sustainability, one on the power of purpose. The list goes on.

All are walls of one type or another. All signal a brighter future if we can figure out how to get over them. Working with business schools and universities around the world, CarringtonCrisp plays a small role in shaping that future, not just for those in the world of higher education, but beyond too.

And, as Simon says, we’ll need to work together. So ICAM offers a great opportunity to continue the discussion and the journey to the future of global business education in 2022. Add in the EFMD Annual Conference in June in Prague and the power of working together to build the future is enormous.

After the last two years, I think we can all agree that together is, indeed, better.