At The Money: Preparing for a Career During in Age of Artificial Intelligence

Bloomberg Audio Studios.

Podcasts.

Radio.

News.

In the age of artificial intelligence, how should students prepare for this job market? Let's bring in Harvard professor Nitin Nuria. He's former dean of the Harvard Business School. His new book is The CEO, The Role, The Reality, and The Responsibility. He's also executive chairman at Thrive Capital. which is the venture firm run by Joshua Kushner. So let's start with AI.

If artificial intelligence is attacking that entry rung of the career ladder, how should recent college grads build their skills and judgment that used to come from those entry-level jobs?

So I think that first, students should continue to use their time during their education to even be more determined to cultivate critical thinking, the capacity to interrogate themselves. When I teach cases now, one thing I've started to do is to ask students, so tell me what AI said about this case. Actually, read to me, not just even tell me, read to me what your AI agent said to you about this case. Because I want them to say, you can use this you can use these tools. In fact, you'd be required to use these tools when you get to work. And then I asked them the second question, what did you agree with? What did you disagree with?

What further questions did you ask to get your thinking to be improved? I think this form of critical reasoning where we rely upon AI to inform ourselves, but then we interrogate it deeply. We learn how to think alongside it. This is a capability that they will be required to do, uh, And I think the best students will prepare themselves this way.

So your preference is rather than just become a very inch wide, mile deep domain expert, really have the broad meta skills, critical reading, critical thinking, and more intelligent form of learning and working with AI? Is that the takeaway?

I think so. I think that you have to, my view increasingly is that you should think of AI as a very much like in the Marvel comics. Each person can develop their own superpower. You don't need a Marvel suit. AI becomes the equivalent of your Marvel suit. But you have to tune it to yourself, right? Like everybody, it's not like all Marvel heroes have the same superpowers. You will develop your own superpowers and that'll be your distinctive edge.

And how you use this extraordinary capacity to distinguish yourself, to make yourself special, That will be the new edge that people will have to find.

So undergraduate, does the major a student takes really matter? Should they be, you know, we saw such a push towards STEM, but now it seems a lot of those technical skills are getting commoditized. How should a student be thinking about what they should be studying, how they develop judgment and communication skills? How important is the major?

So I think that, again, in the same metaphor that I used about you have to find what your unique Marvel superpower is, expertise could be one of them, right? So it's not the case that expertise disappears. So if you end up being the person who has dug deep into computer science and you can therefore answer questions... about the right way to program using AI, about the right way to create safety, all of the questions that are now being done by the leading researchers at the top labs, that's not something that I, who doesn't have that same level of intuition, experience, expertise will be able to do.

For others, it may be writing. For others, it may be history. So I do think that a major will continue to be important, but then there will be people who take interdisciplinary majors like social studies at Harvard who say, I'm not going to differentiate myself on expertise because that would be for some people. I'm going to be the generalist.

And I think that being a generalist is going to be deeply important in this world too.

Yeah, no doubt. So let's talk about that first job, which when I was coming up was described as the all-important first job. Is that still the case? Should, should people think about that first gig out of college as something that's a little bit of an experiment to figure out what they like and what they're good at, or should it be a commitment to the company, to the industry, to their bosses and just jump in with both feet or, or somewhere in between?

In my experience, having taught for now almost 40 years, uh, I have found, and I teach mostly business school students who are graduate students, but I've also had an interaction with lots of undergraduate students. I find that students are two types. There's people who somewhere very early in their life know exactly what their life's mission is. I've always said to those people, get on with it. Find a place, commit, dig deep, because you already know what you want to do.

Don't waste time trying. flitting around, running experiments. The experiment of your life is already known. Now you have to find a way to deliver on it. And there are other people who, and I will put myself in that category, who didn't have a clue about what I wanted to do when I joined an undergraduate institution, didn't even have a clue of when I went to graduate school, and had to discover through experimentation what it was that we were going to be good at. And for those people, I say, don't be afraid of experimentation. Don't get anxious that you don't know exactly what you want to do.

But when you get the signal that this is what you want to do, listen hard. Your body, mind, and heart will tell you that this is what you were meant to do. And when that happens, lock in and pursue it with all your heart. But don't get impatient if you don't know very early on what it is that you want to do and cut yourself some grace.

Really interesting advice. So you're executive chairman of a venture capital firm. I've played around in that space over the years. And one of the things I'm kind of fascinated by is how often startups, really very new companies, pivot from the initial idea to a variation, to a derivative of the original technology. And sometimes it's to something entirely different.

How should students and new grads think about those career pivots? How should they think about hey, is this just tough and I have to fight my way through or am I really more interested in this adjacent area of practice?

So I think for entrepreneurs, there's a level of persistence and the willingness to pivot as needed because there's such a determination to come up with the right solution for a problem that may initially have presented as A, but over time looks like it's its adjacency A colleague of mine, Amar Bhide, did this research at Harvard Business School of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and he found that in 80% of the cases, as you said, where they ended up was a distant cousin at best of what they started, even when they were successful. I think that's not very different from people who pursue careers. Even if you're not an entrepreneur, where you start may not be where you end up.

In your career, you may start as a consultant because that feels like the right way to gain some experience. And you may start as a journalist and, you know, you could end in very different places. So I think people should remain permanently open to explore adjacencies that they're drawn to. Certainly to recognize when what they're doing is a dead end and it's not going to actually yield anything.

It's the hardest thing for people to do sometimes is to recognize a dead end. But I also say to people, don't be too quick to allow irritations or frictions that appear to be seen as a dead end. So I say to people, if you're unhappy, allow yourself to be unhappy for at least three to six months before you decide that this is a dead end. Because if you switch every time you experience unhappiness, you're just never going to have the persistence to work through the things that you have to work through in almost any job or any career.

That persistence reminds me of a quote I've heard about so many different areas. I want to see how much it supplies to a career. It should be treated as a marathon, not a sprint. True?

100%. And yet, as you know, a marathon is not run at the same pace. If you see the great runners in a marathon, they try and set the pace early. So sometimes you want to actually set the pace early. In the middle of the race, you might slow down, but you're always trying to set a pace. At times, you want to run with the group. you want to run alone. So just as a marathon is not, yes, it's a long race, but it's not run at the same cadence throughout. I think that's what a good career looks like as well.

Tell us about experiential learning. How should universities and students design higher education so that students really get the most out of their four years or so in college and are best prepared for a career?

I'm a huge proponent of experiential learning, but full disclosure, I'm very biased in this regard. I think the case method that we taught by at Harvard Business School was an opportunity for students to confront experience in the classroom because we bring, in many ways, I used to think of it as the best flight simulation that you could have in business. We can't possibly put you into 100 business situations in the real world, but we can give you 90 minutes of simulation of different business problems. But in each case, you have to act as the protagonist.

You have to think about the problem with no solution given. So that's one form of experiential learning. But then in my time as dean, we ask students to, every one of our students to travel abroad, to get involved in real company situations. I think the only way to test whether the ideas that you're learning, how do they play out in practice? How do you apply your judgment? You can only do that through experiential learning. And I believe that in an age of AI where the knowledge that you have available will be at your fingertips. Learning how to apply it in practical, experiential contexts will be the one profoundly powerful way in cultivating the kind of critical thinking and judgment I started our conversation with.

You know, I was speaking with Bob Michael. He's the head of fixed income at J.P. Morgan. And he has this quote that he tells his interns, the way to differentiate yourself is mastering AI tools the way my generation had a master of the spreadsheet. Good advice?

Very good advice.

All right. Our last two questions, and because you were dean at the Harvard Business School, these are going to be a little tailored to that. What is the prestige trap? What is the issue with chasing brand name employers? Is that a sound strategy?

So brands are brands because they reflect something real. I don't think that brands can sustain themselves if they don't reflect real opportunities. So if you go to Goldman Sachs, there is something that you will learn at Goldman Sachs that's important. Or if you go to JPMorgan Chase in banking, if you go to consulting firms like BCG, Bain, McKinsey, These are brands that carry cachet because they're important. If you are interested in media, you go to Bloomberg or Disney.

And these are places that are good places to go to because the brands carry something. But I think increasingly, I find at Harvard Business School that many of our students have learned that there's a lot to be learned in places that are not brands. So the courage that people now have to start in places that aren't already established brands has dramatically increased. And the reason why that increases, I think these people have come of age where Great companies have been built in front of their eyes, like who knew what Facebook was going to be, who knew what Google was going to be, right? So in the span of 10, 15 years, extraordinary brands have been built.

And so I think our students have become much more comfortable saying that while a brand provides some assurance of a good learning experience, I can also get a great learning experience if I put myself in a setting where there's a lot more risk. But if it succeeds, it can succeed in an extraordinary way.

And the question I'm very curious about, you've not only taught decades of students at Harvard and elsewhere, as well as the business school. I'm curious, what career paths of alumni from the Harvard Business School really surprised you?

I think the thing that has constantly surprised me is when do our students decide to stake out their own entrepreneurial journey. 50% of our business school students by the end of their careers will have chosen an entrepreneurial path. And it can be from opening their own small consulting firm to at some point deciding to start their own investment shop to buying a small company or even sometimes returning to their family company and deciding that I want to run this company. So it's interesting in the end, people want to have the opportunity to feel like I am reporting to no boss. This is, I have ownership over what I'm building. And yet some people will do it as soon as they graduate from the school. Some

people would do it 25 years later. And what has constantly surprised me is what's the trigger that finally causes someone to say, okay, I now need to have the opportunity to be an entrepreneur. And it's amazing the different ways in which people arrive at that decision.

Really, really fascinating stuff. Thank you for being so generous with your time, Professor Noria. We have been speaking with Nitin Noria, author of the new book, The CEO, The Role, The Reality, and The Responsibility, and former dean of the Harvard Business School. You've been listening to Bloomberg's At The Money.

At The Money: Preparing for a Career During in Age of Artificial Intelligence

Kapitelklicken springt direkt hin

Shownotes

Transkriptvom Podcast bereitgestellt · Zeitmarken springen hin