News Articles

New AGSB Vision/Mission/Values

December 14, 2021

To the AGSB Community,

 

With humility and a renewed sense of purpose, I am presenting the new Vision-Mission-Values (VMV) statement of the Ateneo Graduate School of Business. This updates the Vision and Mission that we’ve had for more than a decade, and sets our course for the next decade and beyond.

Why was there a need for a new VMV?
There have been profound changes in the business environment that we had to recognize, and there will continue to be significant changes that we need to anticipate. Our School needs to adapt to these changes, and even strive to be ahead of them.

Many would say that the pandemic has been the biggest change. A more accurate statement is that the pandemic has accelerated various shifts in the environment, and many of these shifts already started before the arrival of Covid 19, and will persist as we head into the post-pandemic period.

What are these key shifts in the environment?
We tracked at least a dozen groups of changes. We will emphasize our responses to three we consider as most vital: the changing role of business in society, the pervasiveness of digital, and the call for the kind of leadership that the future normal will require.

Business needs to have a bigger impact on solving the problems of society. We must raise the bar on businesses’ performance in terms of social impact, environmental impact, and good governance.

We recognize that every business is now a digital business. To become more effective leaders in their companies, our students would need to exert a firm grasp of enterprise technology, not as technologists but as leaders who could drive digital transformation.

Our graduates often cite “leadership” as the part of their AGSB education that made a big impact on them. We will have a renewed commitment to our students’ formation as leaders, starting with mastery of self and the portfolio of skills for thriving in the industrial revolutions to come.

Our response to these three big shifts form what we now call the three cornerstones of the programs and their curricula, for which the work is already under way.

Amid these changes, which aspects of an AGSB education continue?
As a business school, AGSB will continue to build on core management and business functional disciplines as the foundation of the MBA degree. These disciplines would now evolve toward greater interdisciplinarity.

As a Jesuit learning institution, AGSB teaches individuals to be persons for others first, and then to be effective business managers. More than ever, Ignatian values are at the center of the value proposition of our School. We continue to learn, together with our fellow Jesuit business schools around the world, how to guide students in embodying these values in the context of the shifts that we’ve outlined.

How did we generate the new VMV?
From the start, we envisioned and followed an inclusive, consultative, and collaborative process. We worked with various groups of stakeholders – University officials, Jesuit leaders, the executive leaders of top companies with whom we have partnerships, our AGSB advisory committee who are themselves prominent business leaders, officers of the alumni association, the student council, and various teams of faculty members and administrators.

Their work has resulted in a strategic and organizational development plan for AGSB 2026, the year when our School celebrates our 60th anniversary. The Vision-Mission-Values statement is the spearhead of that plan. The other segments – program portfolio, revised curricula, learning modes, external quality assurance, research, formation, student journey, faculty journey, and staff journey – will be unfolded as we execute the plan.

The road ahead is exciting and demanding. Given how everyone has pulled together in this pandemic era, I’m confident that we’re up to the challenge.

AMDG