Thierry Burger-Helmchen, Professor of Management Science and Innovation Management of the University of Strasbourg, Vice-President of the University of Strasbourg, has recently visited in Yerevan, within the framework of the Pan-European Executive MBA programme and the open doors of CITY College, University of York Europe Campusto deliver an open MBA seminar to the interested candidates, as well as to teach the ongoing MBA module of Strategy Development and Business Decision. The Pan-European Executive MBA programme is being delivered in Yerevan by CITY College, the University of York Europe Campus and leads to the MBA degrees of the British University of York and the French University of Strasbourg.

Banks.am talked to the professor about the skills of a modern manager and the advantages of studying at the Executive MBA.

- These days, you have held a number of trainings in Yerevan, including the training on “MBAs or Sherlock Holmes?” Do you often offer parallels from literature during your trainings? How does it help the audience understand the material better?

- When presenting the material especially to a wider audience, I always try to relate with something they know and then make a link with standard management principles. So, using fictional heroes like Sherlock Holmes, or using events that everybody knows about, relating to TV shows or music, would be a good approach.

However, such approaches have their natural limits. At one moment, you have to go full into business orientation. It is nice to make some parallels, but we should consider that there are some things that only exist when you are doing real management.

This approach helps students represent complex situations like a puzzle or mystery, so they start searching for solutions. In the process, they understand that we are having managerial skills.

- What other trainings did you conduct during these days?

- I teach Executive MBA students strategic analysis and decision making. I teach how to analyze the current position of the company, and see how this company is positioned against others.

For this, we had three days to cover the basic topics. At first, I have introduced the Armenian students the basic knowledge that is the same for all our students around the world, and then we have analyzed how standard models apply to the Armenian case or the Armenian companies working for other countries.

We have also done something about how the current practice and management are impacted notably by technology like artificial intelligence, Chat GPT, the big data phenomenon, how management is impacted by cultural issues when you have to work with people from France, Germany, Italy, Armenia, and elsewhere together.

And we also found some ways to describe a good way of taking decisions. We know that in management there is never a perfect decision that makes everybody happy. So, you have always to find a way to accommodate for everyone, and that we teach to our students.

- How would you assess your Armenian students?

- Pretty good. There are several things that I like for Armenian students. First of all, they are on time which is not the case elsewhere or everywhere, and two, they are both listening and participating.

And besides all of this, they work great in teams. I also give them practical exercises to do in groups, and I could really see people who wanted to work together and had a spirit to compete with other groups.

- It is interesting to hear that, because there is an opposite opinion in Armenia that Armenians cannot work in team. For example, we succeed in individual sports, but we do not perform well in team sports.

- I am not sure about sports, but in a business case, it works fantastically, so they did a very good job because you could feel that each team wanted to be better than the other ones.

Perhaps, your ideas are among the old generation of Armenians, and the new managers see things differently.

- Within the framework of the Executive MBA education programme, students get familiarized with all the areas the companies work in. Why does a good manager need to understand how everything works?

- Well, a manager needs to understand the main fields of everyone he/she is supposed to work with. More and more teams are multidiscipline. We have someone from marketing, someone from supply chain, someone from finance. So, MBA students have to understand the basics of all the participants to be sure that what those people will tell them is true or not true.

Also, the manager should be specialized in something to be able to even challenge the team on that.

- During your training, you also emphasized the importance of self-management skills. I think that it is necessary not only in career, but also in personal life. Do you teach that to your students too?

- This is a topic that became super important after the Covid-19 when work-life balance issue emerged. We all have our personal lives and our professional lives. Both are very demanding and more and more managers struggle to find a good balance.

So what we are giving them are certain numbers of routes: the way of seeing things and especially the way of prioritizing them. Manager should be able to understand what tasks he/she can give to someone else and what is the core of his/her activity that brings value the team needs. Once they start to think in that way with these different categories, they are able to have better results in the work to free up time.

And it is true that MBA are usually students who have to balance work, life, and studies. If they do not demonstrate good management skills, it can be difficult to them. This “challenge” also contributes to the improvement of their professional qualities.

- I also talked with the Armenian students of Pan-European Executive MBA. Some of them have mentioned that at first it seems easy to combine education with work and personal life, because the classes are only once a month, but the material is quite dense and voluminous, making it rather difficult to digest it after intensive classes. How do you help your students overcome this difficulty?

- First of all, we give them some materials to read before the class to know what the topic will be so they prepare themselves. Then, during the class, as I told you, there is a lot of interaction. We do many exercises and play games. We apply the knowledge right away, and that’s a good way of acquiring new knowledge.

And after the class, from time to time we organize a zoom where they can again ask me some questions. This can be a zoom one by one if needed on a very specific topic. And usually two to three weeks after the class there is a general zoom where all students can do online session, and where every student can connect.

We also follow students feedbacks and try to integrate all modifications.

- Executive MBA students are impressed with the three education weeks, during which they visit the universities of York and Strasbourg, as well as the CITY College in Thessaloniki. How does this cross-cultural contact help develop management skills?

- Each experience in each city is a little bit different. For the case of Strasbourg, they have a course, a general thematic, which is based on openness. How can we open our process for strategy? How can we integrate topics like sustainability and create much more exchange between the companies and the clients? Besides, certain exercises they are doing, students also visit a company which apply these techniques.

Then, the students get a challenge. To give you an example, last year we visited a company that was making office chairs and office tables and because of COVID their business model had to change. They were working mostly with B2B format. The company gave big amount of data to students and they started to work in teams to build a strategy. They proposed a certain numbers of ideas to the company and some of them were quite creative.

There is also a platform where students are playing a game where they are running a company. The game is quite complex. They have many decisions to take and the platform tells them will they make more sales or not. Here also they are working in teams.

- Those interested in the Pan-European Executive MBA programme often ask what advantage the combination of British and French education models gives?

- British education is usually much more pragmatic, case-based: we have a problem, let’s find a solution. And the French education is more based on theory. So, that’s the general world we are in, the concept we believe, and then we try to apply it and see how it is related to real problem. The process is a little bit reversed.

We believe that students need to be able to make both because if you do not know what to do sometimes it is good to have a nice theory to rely on.

Besides that, in our programme, we have professors from different countries of the world, and each of them has his own style of teaching withdifferent cultural background.

- You also teach Innovative Management. What is the difference between the management we know?

- The techniques we are using to manage people today have not existed ever since.  We are continuously inventing new tools, new concepts, new way to structure companies but also to manage people.

Let me just give you one example: a few years ago, with the explosion of startups, there was a new trend in the way we organize companies in different layers of hierarchy. We have to organize a new flat version. So, it is called flat organization. That was something new. The way we also take decisions trying to incorporate more and more opinions of all employees and of the shareholders and stakeholders is also something quite new. In finance we have new ways of reporting data. That means that the way you manage people, the way they work is not the same.

And we try to show to the students not only what other companies are doing as a benchmark, but also what questions they have to ask inside a company if they want to adapt the practices.

- I think it is a quite new thing for many that a good manager should also motivate his/her subordinates. We are used to the fact that the one who pays is the one who demands, and you are the one who should seek to please him, while the new approaches in management imply something completely different.

- First of all, times are changing, generations are changing. We give them names like X, Y, Z and so on. Those generations have all small differences, small expectations about what they will do at work. You have to adapt your managerial skills, style to the expectation of new employees.

They have to give an example. They have to be a positive leader.  They do not just have to say, okay, I expect this and this from you and that’s it. They have to work with the people to help them to be sure that everything is working.

If you want your company to have a nice performance, you need to have happy customers. Having happy customers is not just a question of product, it is a question of additional service, if you have unhappy employees they will not be able to make your customers happy. If you want at the end, to sell many products to happy customers, you first need to have happy employees, and this is something that in the last 10 years almost completely returned the way we are managing people.

- We live in a time of rapid changes. How good education has changed in recent decades?

- Well, education has changed in several ways. First of all, it is becoming much more applied and skill oriented than before. Couple of years ago we had MBA students who knew things in practice, they came, saying they want the theoretical base, a refreshment in the concepts.
Now we say, yes, we want the concept, but we also want to be able to do things better.

It is also becoming more individualized. So, when I come to Armenia, I have to document myself about what’s going on right now, in the last year, and the economic situation. What will the students expect? What are the backgrounds of the companies that are working?

- Who is the Executive MBA designed for, what kind of students do you expect to see?

- It should be first of all a student already having years of experience. They do not need to have any managerial background, they could have forgotten what they have learned in bachelors or in master degrees.

They need to have the willingness to improve the management skills. What is most important for me is that they need to come with an open mindset. So not saying okay, I have my certainties, I know how everything is working, because it is not working the way they are thinking. They come with an open mindset.

The willingness to learn new things – it is a very good start. Then, being part of a class means that you want to interact with others both local and, also because we are international, they will have to interact with students with other nationalities and network with them.

Gayane Yenokyan talked with Thierry Burger-Helmchen

Photos by Emin Aristakesyan