The world of management is changing faster than the institutions that have traditionally prepared leaders for it. Technological disruption, artificial intelligence, geopolitical uncertainty, sustainability pressures and evolving workforce expectations are fundamentally altering how organisations operate and how decisions are made. In this environment, management education can no longer be centred simply on transferring knowledge or teaching established frameworks.
The next generation of leaders will need to navigate ambiguity, work alongside intelligent technologies, understand human behaviour and make decisions where there may be no obvious right answer. This raises a larger question for business schools: what should management education deliver when knowledge itself is no longer scarce?
Prof Arvind Sahay, Director of MDI Gurgaon, believes the answer lies in moving beyond conventional notions of competence towards adaptability, judgement, ethical reasoning and continuous learning.
With over three decades of experience studying business, leadership and organisations across industries and geographies, Prof. Sahay brings a perspective shaped by research across marketing, branding, consumer behaviour, behavioural science and AI. As Director of MDI Gurgaon, he is also focused on positioning the institution for a future where technology, sustainability, entrepreneurship, interdisciplinary learning and responsible leadership increasingly converge.
In this exclusive conversation with ETEducation, Prof Sahay discusses the reinvention of management education, the changing value proposition of the MBA, AI’s impact on leadership and marketing, India’s opportunity to influence global management thinking, and the future he is building for MDI Gurgaon.
Here are the edited excerpts from the interview.
Q1. Business schools have traditionally prepared managers for relatively stable environments. Today, leaders are navigating unprecedented technological disruption, geopolitical uncertainty, climate challenges, and shifting workforce expectations. How must management education fundamentally reinvent itself?
Management education used to work fine when change arrived in predictable waves, with enough gap in between to catch your breath and adjust. That gap doesn’t exist now. Change is constant, which means the old approach — teaching students a set of frameworks and trusting they’ll apply them later — just doesn’t hold up anymore.What matters more is whether someone can operate without a clear answer in front of them, borrow reasoning from a completely different field, and still make a call that actually works. Technology, behavioural science, sustainability and public policy need to be built into the spine of how management gets taught.
The classroom itself also needs to get closer to how real problems behave — unpredictable and often unresolved. Give students something genuinely difficult, let them fail, try again, and process what went wrong.
At MDI Gurgaon, we don’t treat a first job offer as the goal. The goal is a graduate who’s still asking hard questions five years later, still learning because stopping never occurred to them. The ones who do well won’t necessarily be those who arrived knowing the most. They’ll be the ones who kept adjusting without losing their footing.
Q2. If AI increasingly performs the analysis, writes the reports, and recommends decisions, how do we ensure future leaders develop wisdom, ethical reasoning, creativity and the courage to make difficult choices?
AI has changed where the raw material for a decision comes from, that part’s obvious. What hasn’t changed is that leadership was never really a contest over who had more information. It’s about judgement, taking responsibility for what happens next, and being willing to act even when there’s no certainty to hide behind.
As AI absorbs more routine analytical work, the instinct might be to relax on ethical reasoning and critical thinking. That would be a mistake. If anything, those skills matter more now, not less.
Knowing how to get good output from AI isn’t the same as knowing when that output is wrong, or understanding what actually happens once a recommendation leaves the screen and lands in a real business. AI should be making the thinking sharper, not doing the thinking instead.
At MDI Gurgaon, we treat it as a serious tool, while making sure the person, not the model, stays accountable for the outcome. The leaders who matter will be those who can combine technical fluency with empathy, context and judgement.
Q3. The value proposition of an MBA is being questioned as AI, online learning and alternative credentials make knowledge more accessible. What is the biggest existential challenge facing business schools over the next decade?
Here’s the uncomfortable part for business schools to admit: the thing that used to make them valuable — controlled access to knowledge — isn’t scarce anymore. AI and digital platforms took care of that.
So the real question is what an MBA is actually worth today, and the honest answer is judgement, the ability to collaborate well, and the capacity to solve problems that don’t come with a textbook solution attached.
If I were starting from zero and building a school for 2035, a significant proportion of what exists now would change. Learning would run on live, ongoing projects, and it would flex around each student.
Students would work on problems that are actually happening, and case studies that stretch reasoning with AI, entrepreneurship, sustainability and behavioural science built into that work rather than taught as separate subjects.
Faculty would function more as guides than as the sole source of information. Ultimately, the MBA won’t be judged by what a graduate remembers. It’ll be judged by what they can actually do with intelligent systems at their side, especially when the outcome isn’t guaranteed.
Q4. Has management education become too focused on producing competent managers rather than courageous, responsible leaders? What needs to change?
Competence hasn’t become irrelevant, it’s just no longer sufficient by itself.
What organisations need now are leaders capable of making a principled decision under real pressure, when priorities conflict and long-term consequences aren’t visible yet. Management education has to build integrity, resilience, empathy and ethical judgement alongside technical skill, not as an afterthought.
That means exposing students to dilemmas that genuinely don’t resolve cleanly and giving them time to sit with the discomfort. None of that comes from a lecture. It’s built through experience, honest conversation and accountability for the choices made.
Placement statistics shouldn’t be the only measure business schools use for themselves. The harder question is what kind of leader is actually walking out of the door. Responsible leadership is ultimately about earning trust, particularly when the easy answer clearly isn’t the right one.
Q5. Do you believe the next generation of globally relevant management thinking can emerge from India? What can Indian institutions contribute to the world?
Yes, and I’d go further, this is genuinely India’s moment to do it.
Leaders here are managing scale, diversity, fast digital adoption and real resource limits, frequently all at once. That pressure has produced real innovation — digital public infrastructure, inclusive growth models, frugal engineering — ideas that are increasingly being studied well outside India.
Rather than adapting frameworks built for entirely different economies, Indian institutions have a genuine opportunity to build knowledge that comes directly from what’s happening here, while still speaking to challenges that show up everywhere.
There’s something worth saying about balancing growth with social responsibility, managing stakeholder groups that are actually diverse rather than diverse in name only, and leading transformation in markets that are still working themselves out.
MDI Gurgaon isn’t only producing leaders. Part of our job is producing the research and ideas that shape how management gets thought about globally.
Q6. How do you see the convergence of human psychology, neuroscience and intelligent technologies redefining marketing, customer relationships and strategic decision-making?
Marketing used to focus heavily on tracking what people do. The more useful question now is why they do it.
AI gives organisations the ability to study behaviour at a scale that used to be impossible, while behavioural science and neuroscience add the missing layer — attention, emotion, and the mechanics of how a decision actually forms.
Combine the two and the shift is real, moving away from broad audience categories toward experiences that feel genuinely specific to the person and the moment.
But technology by itself has never earned trust or built a relationship with anyone. Marketing that actually works going forward depends on pairing machine intelligence with real human insight, creativity and a genuine commitment to using data responsibly.
The organisations that pull ahead won’t just have better algorithms. They’ll understand people more deeply and be transparent about how that understanding gets used.
Q7. As Director of MDI Gurgaon, what is your long-term vision for the institution, and what are the bold bets that will define MDI over the next decade?
The vision is straightforward to state and genuinely difficult to execute: I want MDI Gurgaon recognised globally for academic rigour and for real impact on society, not one instead of the other.
Technology, sustainability, entrepreneurship and responsible leadership can’t exist as isolated bullet points in a syllabus. They need to be present in how we teach, how we research, and how we work with industry.
Right now that means expanding interdisciplinary learning, growing our research footprint in AI and behavioural science, and deepening partnerships that put students in front of real contemporary problems.
We’re also investing heavily in faculty development and trying to build a culture where curiosity is rewarded rather than just permitted. The institutions that matter a decade from now will be the ones still generating knowledge that’s genuinely useful, while producing leaders capable of creating value that outlasts a single job or project.
Q8. What genuinely keeps you awake at night while leading a premier management institution through this transformation?
It is not the speed of technological change itself that concerns me most. It’s whether managers & leaders are managing their brain neurochemistry (The Chemical Locha) well enough to engage with and use AI to make good decisions and judgements in a world where business, technology and society are all shifting simultaneously.
Just as critical is making sure graduates leave still curious, still resilient, and still holding onto ethical judgement, even as automation becomes an ordinary part of the environment they work in.
Q9. Looking ahead to 2035, what widely held assumption about management, leadership or business education do you believe will prove wrong? And what advice would you leave for the next generation?
The assumption I expect to age badly is that leadership is primarily about having the right answers.
As AI puts knowledge within reach of almost anyone, what will actually differentiate leaders is the ability to ask better questions, bring in perspectives that aren’t their own, and exercise real judgement in situations where certainty simply isn’t available.
Leaders will spend more time coordinating a mix of human and machine intelligence than making every decision alone, which is a genuine shift in what the role even involves.
My advice to whoever inherits that world is simple to say, harder to live by: stay curious, stay ethically grounded, and keep learning without treating it as optional.
Technology will keep advancing quickly, but integrity, empathy, adaptability and the willingness to question your own assumptions aren’t things that get replaced. The people who end up shaping what comes next will be the ones who can hold onto both — real technical skill and real human judgement — at the same time.
