EBF interviews Finn Junge-Jensen about CBS

The president of Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Finn Junge-Jensen, explains why in today’s world it is an asset for a management school to employ psychologists and anthropologists alongside professors of finance and business strategy to European Business Forum (EBF).

EBF: CBS is known for a broad range of faculty. Why do you feel it’s important to employ, say, anthropologists and philosophers, along with more typical business professors?

FJJ: Unless you have a broader range of disciplines, you are not able to focus on the complex problems facing companies, public organisations and international organisations. You are not able to trade knowledge that is relevant to business. In a sense, you could say that our broad range of disciplines is an attempt to live up to the new world of complexity that is facing the global company. Probably you could argue that when we hired the philosophers in the late 80s, there was not that clear need for philosophy. But with the advancement of business in a global world, with knowledge being more and more dominant, the need for reflection in what you could call broader perspective issues is something I think will become more and more relevant.

Anthropology, for example, is important if you talk about user-driven innovation. How do we see these communities actually interacting with the technical development, the new products and services? It’s not only about listening to what the users want, because very often they don’t know what they want until they get it. It’s also about being involved with the user community, having constant dialogue and feedback. Anthropology can be a very useful tool for identifying ways of organising this process dialogue between users and developers.

We are the most broad spectrum business school in the world, encompassing political science, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, all that. I think it’s an enormous strength. Of course, we had the opportunity to do it because we’re quite large, so you can have critical mass in a number of disciplines that would not be possible for a smaller business school. You could also argue that we could do because we have very active collaboration with the University of Copenhagen. The problem in engaging in close collaboration with, let’s say, the philosophers at the University of Copenhagen, would probably be that they would not be geared to leadership or management issues.

Our focus is: how can organisations be competitive, develop, creative and innovative? With private, public and voluntary organisations, the focus is all about the organisation. That’s the interesting thing, not so much the individual. Of course, we talk about leadership and the need for these entrepreneurs and individuals, but it’s all within an organisational context. This is our focus and I think that’s the traditional focus for any business school.