With the publication of the special summer issue of Global Voice magazine #26, Prof. Adrian Zicari, ESSEC Business School and Academic Director of the CoBS, offers an inspiring analogy of travel, exploration, and the learning journey that all of us might undertake during our lives.
The Journey of Learning Revisited by Adrian Zicari.
In these times of massive travel, we may have the impression that wherever we go in the world, airports, hotels, and tourist attractions are more or less the same. While we may come back home relaxed, chances are that we did not discover much new. We only passed through varieties of the same travel experience.
However, true travel is different. A long time ago, travelling was sometimes a risky endeavour, taking long periods of time, without a complete certitude of what would happen. More importantly, travelling implied a profound, life-changing change in the traveller. One came back as a different person. The expression remains today: a “well-travelled person”.
In literature, there are many examples for those great travels: Pigafetta’s account of the first travel around the globe (with Magellan), Goethe’s Italian Journey, and Kerouac’s On the Road. However, the emblematic travel book remains the Divine Comedy. In that symbolic poem, Dante, who is lost in a jungle, is chased by two dangerous beasts. Dante saves his life thanks to his master Virgilio, who then leads Dante on a long trip, visiting mysterious places where no living person has ever been.
Travels of learning happen in our schools
At a smaller scale, of course, I think that some of these travels happen in our schools, whenever we explore the never-ending challenges of responsible leadership and sustainability. We professors take the role of Virgilio, accompanying our Dante-students all over their learning, taking them beyond their comfort zone, challenging them, inviting them to think on their own.
The path of learning is tough, students have to make great effort, they have to rely on us masters for guidance and inspiration. Sustainability is broad, it involves many different, sometimes competing viewpoints. As a further complication, sustainability is a moving target. Oftentimes, new perspectives appear, new guidelines are developed and new challenges arise. And students still need to cope with that complexity, make sense of it, and learn how to make decisions.
The Learning Circle: Bringing it all back home
As it was the case with Virgilio, we professors have to accompany our students, but at some point, we need to leave them on their own. Perhaps one of the toughest moments of the Comedy is the verse when Dante leaves his master forever. Dante is now a new master. He will miss Virgilio, but there is still a long way to go. Our students will eventually reach a criterion of their own, initially based on what we taught to them, and they will be able to go beyond, and hopefully do much better things that we did.
At the end of the poem, at the end of the travel, Dante realises that he has come back home. He once again meets the love of his youth. He reconciles with the faith of his childhood. Indeed, everything has been there all the time, only that he had failed to realise it.
And, this is precisely what our students end up realising at some point. We always knew that a company is a community of people, that finance is necessary but not an end in itself, that clients have to be protected, that our economic activity has to serve some purpose beyond making a legitimate profit. We always knew those truths, only that we forgot them at some point. And suddenly, at the end of the travel, we realise that we are back home.
Useful links:
- Link up with Prof. Adrian Zicari on LinkedIn
- Download Global Voice magazine #26
- Read a related article: Business education and the inevitable change
- Discover the Council on Business & Society and its member schools
- Download magazines, research pods, books, white papers and masterclasses from the CoBS website.
Learn more about the Council on Business & Society
The Council on Business & Society (The CoBS), visionary in its conception and purpose, was created in 2011, and is dedicated to promoting responsible leadership and tackling issues at the crossroads of business and society including sustainability, diversity, ethical leadership and the place responsible business has to play in contributing to the common good.
Member schools are all “Triple Crown” accredited AACSB, EQUIS and AMBA and leaders in their respective countries.
- ESSEC Business School, France-Singapore-Morocco
- FGV-EAESP, Brazil
- School of Management Fudan University, China
- IE Business School, Spain
- Keio Business School, Japan
- Smith School of Business, Canada
- Stellenbosch Business School, South Africa
- Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
- Warwick Business School, United Kingdom.
