Recently, the Dean of the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School, Oleksandr Savruk, participated in the program "Smart Ukraine" with Volodymyr Yermolenko on Hromadske TV. They talked about who a modern leader is, why an idea leads better than a person, about open systems, and why they will define the future. We share the key points of the interview.

About the essence of business

Business is about creating value, and creativity is definitely present here. And it's no longer just about production, as it was in the last 100-150 years. It's about value that must be accepted in both personal and broader perceptions. So in today's changing environment, it's always a very creative task.

About what brings people to business school

Money in business is a possible reward for certain efforts. The times when a person compensated, say, for a semi-hungry childhood are ending. Today, when you have "a house, three sons, three trees," check-ins in all museums and on all islands, the question arises: "What's next?" Of course, this happens mostly after 30. And if a person is proactive, they want something more.

They are successful by formal indicators accepted in society. And the rules where success is measured by money, numbers, and so on, no longer satisfy the person essentially. They want and can create more, influence more. At the same time, earlier their whole life was in those dimensions of success. They didn't know other rules of the game, other points of support, other models of action, but they see that they exist somewhere abroad, in "normal worlds." We try to provide for these new searches.

At kmbs, we create an environment where, in a certain logic, we think "out loud" together, share. Participants bring their experience, their doubts, their hidden deep questions to the audience. When they see that there are others like them, it becomes easier for them to open up. We work together on systemic findings, consider cases, reflect. We find understanding. All this creates the opportunity to create one's own proactive subjective logic: "How will I now relate to the world, with an understanding of human nature and the nature of systems," as we call it, social systems. Then our participant begins to see new opportunities in themselves as a leader, the ability to influence on a larger scale.

About idea and art

We delight in compositional solutions, design, synthesis. We have the concept of a model, composition, harmony in a model. We work on creating natural balanced systems, human systems, regardless of whether it's a company or another community. State, city, ministry, if necessary. It doesn't matter what kind of community it is if it has a common semantic field, an answer to the question of why it exists. The leader of this community, system, needs to create an Idea — such a composition of rules, infrastructure, material and immaterial things, so that it becomes harmonious and exists without "pushing" from the manager. And here there is a lot of creativity akin to modern, relevant art.

About management

People are not managed. Either systems or roles that people take on are managed. You can't manage a person. Let someone manage me. Those times are gone. But if I consciously enter a role, choose my own identity through the choice of role, then I accept the rules of the game offered to me. And for joint success, it's better to play together by these rules of the game. If you don't want to be in this game — you want to play football, and here they play basketball, then obviously, you are not in the right place and not in the right role.

About leaders

In the industrial era, and even earlier, management approaches were built on managers with a "divine gift," as charisma is called. Then it ensured a more effective influence on people around. Today, however, the world is transitioning from closed systems, where someone influences, pushes, and someone reacts to this push, to open systems, with a common semantic field, where self-motivated subjects consciously unite.

Recently, I heard an interesting word self-starters about such people who are capable of doing something themselves, making decisions, with their own vision of the world, who naturally understand what responsibility for themselves is. If they enter the "game," they understand their role, the measure of influence on broader systems, the effectiveness of joint actions through this game. And the "rules of the game" are the idea that someone has to create. Influence through an idea is much more powerful, systemic, than any direct influence of a person on a person.

About roles in open systems

In such systems, you don't necessarily have to choose the role of the creator of the idea. There are executive roles. Usually, people gravitate towards their natural type of self-realization. We are looking for congenial work according to Skovoroda. For example, creators of new things — they are not very convenient for a stable system, but they ensure progress. There are pioneers of new paradigms, apostles who take responsibility and implement new, but not their own, ideas and ensure the sustainability of the new system. And there are those who are happy just to follow the rules of the game, and everyone benefits from that.

About ecosystems

Today, the important concepts of yesterday have fundamentally changed. State borders are no longer what they were 50 years ago, and the type of relations between the state and citizens has also changed. In business, it's the same — it can no longer be regulated in the logic of just one state and competes and interacts regardless of state or cultural borders.

So through information and semantic flows, you can work with Americans and Chinese on one project while being in Ukraine. In this case, IT, energy, science, education, military models already have an ecosystem logic. Clusters are examples of regional open systems that ensure both competition and interaction.

If a Ukrainian businessman sees themselves, for example, in the Facebook ecosystem, they must work according to Facebook standards. These standards are not created by them, so they must accept this logic and understand what their strategy is — a niche player, R&D player, etc.

In Ukraine, there are people who create their good value propositions for broader systems, but they are still not supported as effectively and quickly infrastructurally here as it could be in more developed societies.

Take, for example, Elon Musk, although it's a bit of a clichéd example. Recently, a phrase was said that today Roscosmos competes not with NASA, but with the "collective Elon Musk," and who will win, in my opinion, is already obvious. That is, the subject has an idea and comes out with a proposal to some professional community, and it unites. Such conditional "valleys" of people ready to unite exist in different countries, including Ukraine. Even if yesterday I had problems with them or competed, today I say: "Let's combine our efforts and fly to Mars," and they respond: "Oh, how interesting."

All agreements usually happen much faster than before, creating an open structure where there are no heavy traditional management relationships inside. This structure can also quickly dissolve after the semantic interaction of subjects ends. In the process, subjectivity is not lost at all — after you have created new opportunities, each subject moves on as a subject.

Some things are impossible to do if there is no ecosystem, consciously interdependent logic of relationships. For example, you want to switch to an electric car, but for this, there must be a charging station, repair, suppliers, etc. Without the existence of a broader system of players, standards, you will not be able to realize this idea.

So far, in Ukrainian society, there is no understanding of the necessity of this process among the critical mass of decision-makers. But we see that there are such aspirations among people who have studied at business school — they tend to cooperate with each other and try to spread this logic, culture of interaction in their circle of influence.

About education

Often in our educational institutions, there is still no essential, value-based attitude towards knowledge, skills in the context of their application in creative actions. University is a very important thing, but it has become an extension of secondary school. And here, few emphasize capabilities — creative, leadership, etc. Instead, they concentrate only on skills and competencies, such executive entities.

I often tell kmbs participants about the so-called Singaporean type of educational "product" in secondary school. There, definitions begin with two nice phrases: to be able to… — creating a person's capabilities to… The knowledge paradigm today is no longer enough, everything can now be solved in 1001 ways. You need to know what these knowledge are for, where to get them, and what to apply them to. You need to educate a person with an open, imaginative, and holistic perception of the world.

For example, management is no longer an economic discipline. The problem is that our management concepts are taught based on yesterday's economic specialties. This is wrong because management is primarily about relationships between people in social systems. And this is a different nature of knowledge.

Secondary school should form a person. Form a personality, form character, primarily. And the ability to be open, self-sufficient, strong, understand how the world is arranged, make their own conclusions. There is a popular phrase "to teach critical thinking." This is not enough for me. Critical thinking is still secondary. It means something happened, and I have to evaluate it critically. Creative thinking is more appealing to me. And secondary school should also teach a child to learn independently throughout life.

University should provide that type of universal knowledge, after which a person should go into any specialization — from entrepreneurial-creative to scientific-research.

About Ukraine's prospects

In the future, Ukraine is a country with its own identity, which is not a pale copy of Western states, Western civilization, creating value for world civilization, its contribution. Obviously, it takes a lot from there, but it has found itself, gained experience of interaction with other civilizations of the eastern, southern type.

We regularly receive "vaccinations" from various situations that give us the opportunity to understand more about who we are, how different we are, what different visions of the future we Ukrainians have. But now Ukraine is open, people travel around the world, study around the world. Ukraine has shown that we have subjects capable of self-organization. We still need to learn how to work with ideas, create leadership and leaders who can work with complex ideas that unite people.

The cultural aspect — the ability to interact and negotiate — is also gradually forming in us. This is respect for others, understanding others, empathy. All this is more or less appearing in the youth. Of course, there is the problem of social networks, which fragment. After all, you can create a mini-world through the screen and stay there forever. And then the important question is: the youth sitting in the screen — do they see the broader context? But our Maidans, the development of intellectual sectors in Ukraine show that we have a very good human and emotional potential that can be manifested in a creative sense. When we start creating and offering the world Ukrainian things that become in demand and popular, then Ukraine has succeeded.

Source: hromadske.ua

Oleksandr Savruk: "Now a leader is a person with an idea, not charisma"