Sanjay Gupta is the Eli and Edythe L Broad dean of MSU’s Broad College of Business. He joins Spartans athletic director Bill Beekman and MSU associate athletic director for communications Matt Larson on MSU Today.
He talks about the newly opened Minskoff Pavilion at the college and the impact it will have on learning at the school.
“It’s a facility devoted entirely to teaching and learning and to the student experience, to their success,” Gupta says. And he talks about the college’s strategic plan.
“We have four strategic themes within the plan, and these themes come from recognizing what it would take for our students to be successful, both in getting placed but really eventually in their career paths as well. The digital transformation of business that is taking place is one. And that is not a fad. It's going to continue forever. The other one is around a global mindset. There is no business, there is no organization, it doesn't matter, even if it is based here in East Lansing, that doesn't have global implications in terms of all of their activity. The third one was around ethics and integrity. With everything that is going on, especially in the business world, employers tell us it is ever so important for the people to really understand what ethical conduct means and for people in leadership roles to really adhere to those principles.
“And the last one is around diversity, equity, and inclusion. It gets manifested in many different ways around the world, especially among business organizations. The one thing that we learned especially about diversity, equity, and inclusion was how important it is to go beyond the demographic aspects of it. Very often those conversations end up being just about the composition of the people in a classroom or on the faculty. And that is not enough. And we have really embraced that to say diversity and equity and inclusion go so much beyond that. It's diversity of thought. It is diversity of backgrounds. It is diversity of the orientations that they might have, nationalities. There are so many different ways of thinking about diversity. Then we need to include them in everything that we do. We have enjoyed putting the flesh on the bones, so to speak, around these strategic pillars and themes as we worked with all of these external stakeholders in making it come alive inside the Broad College.”
Gupta talks about the research mission at the college. And he describes the challenges Industry 4.0 is creating and the digital disruption students need to be prepared to face. The college is focused on building skills “that are going to be relevant going forward.
“It's things like creativity and innovation, the ability to solve unstructured problems, the ability to be able to synthesize and then communicate the effects of the tasks that you've done, the ability to actually be understanding of what will it take by way of teamwork and team effort to produce a viable solution, the understanding that you're going to learn just as much from your failures as you're going to learn from your successes, and the desire to persevere even in the face of not finding the right solution.
“We will continue to work to be a top of mind business school.”
MSU Today airs Sunday mornings at 9:00 on 105.1 FM and AM 870.