MBAus conference — Day 2
This is Part 2 of a three part series. Check out MBAus Conference — Day 1 or MBAus Conference — Day 3 if that’s more relevant for you.
Mark Ritson (Adjunct Professor of Marketing at Melbourne Business School) kicked off day two of the conference with a welcome speech challenging the status quo of today’s generation.
We were privileged to have the Founder & CEO of mwah (making work absolutely human) Rhonda Brighton-Hall for the keynote address on ‘diversity in the workplace.’ Rhonda is a recognised champion of true workplace diversity; her fundamental belief is that inclusion and good leadership are not only the foundation for good people practices in organisations but also more equitable and prosperous economies and communities.
Rhonda provided practical tips on how leaders can address diversity in the workplace including appreciative inquiry, sponsorship, peer assessment, blind resumes and resume-free recruitment. The participants also enjoyed an excellent Q& A session on the topics of gender quota, same sex schools, unconscious bias, parenting and gender schemes with Rhonda afterward.
Warren Mahoney from Edith Cowan University introduced the next session — a panel on ‘after Trump and Brexit’ with Australia’s leading economists Ian Harper (Senior Advisor Deloitte & Board of RBA), Andrew John (Assoc. Professor of Economics, MBS), Arpita Chatterjee (Assistant Professor, UNSW Business School) facilitated by well-known financial journalist Alan Kohler (also Adjunct Professor at Victoria University).
Ian Harper spoke on the importance of free trade and globalisation for creating, high quality and more productive economic growth. In Australia, we have a long tradition of setting and fairly distributing economic growth. He also reminded that from an economics perspective, we would not be a wealthy population without skilled migration.
Arpita emphasised the importance of having a public debate for pushing economic growth, especially since we often live in a social bubble and miss the real picture. She also warned us that Trump is a much bigger problem than Brexit.
Trump is a much bigger problem than Brexit! Arpita Chatterjee
Despite having a lot of evidence that diversity is good for organisations and teams, Andrew John challenged us on how we can make it a sustainable business choice.
In the afternoon, we ran three workshops in parallel on collaborative negotiation, LGBTQI allies and personal branding. Hannah Browne (General Manager, Cevo) and Paul Larkin (Director, The Wavelength Agency) conducted a workshop on Collaborative negotiation — how we can make win-win outcomes the norm.
This session explored collaborative negotiation, looking at how openness, trust, and shared goals can more readily lead to mutually beneficial outcomes. They also addressed why this approach is more efficient in the context of a digital economy where creative problem solving, innovation and rapid evolution are key competitive advantages.
We were thrilled to have Michelle Sheppard (Founder, LGBTI Jobs) to run the ‘LGBTQI allies in the workplace’ workshop. Michelle is a trans woman, former co-host & co-producer of ‘Transpositions’, which was JOY 94.9’s flagship trans-weekly radio program. She has also appeared on various radio and television programs over the last three years and has raised the public profile and national dialogue of transgender, gender diverse and intersex issues on a national scale.
In many workplaces, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender & intersex (LGBTI) employees still have negative experiences at work due to their sexual orientation and gender identification. Through the workshop, Michelle focused on how to build more LGBTI-inclusive workplaces where diversity is recognised and respected. She shared that one of the best ways to be an ally is just to have a one-on-one conversation with someone and get to know them and their story.
A key take away was the difference between sexuality and gender, and being an ally means recognising people for what they can do, not for their gender or sexuality. Michelle also reminded us ‘diversity is what comes through your doors; inclusion is what you do after that.’
If you’re changing yourself for a career, then you’re an idiot. Don’t change yourself; everyone is beautiful in their own way. — Mark Ritson
There’s no denying the importance of personal branding. Our workshop ‘Finding your voice: The IN’s and OUTS of personal branding’ brought together two amazing individuals Mark Ritson (Adjunct Professor of Marketing at Melbourne Business School) and Travis May (Education Industry Lead, LinkedIn) to share their authentic views on personal branding.
Mark kicked off the workshop sharing issues of personal branding, how it is different from corporate branding and then some lessons from his journey of personal branding. He reminded us to be comfortable with people disagreeing with us as we build your personal brand. Oh, I love Mark’s recent article on personal branding, if you’re interested in this topic, check out his article here.
During the second part of the workshop, Travis shared LinkedIn best practice and growth hacks to build a personal brand. The focus was on how to optimise your LinkedIn profile, tips & tricks on how efficiently one can use LinkedIn and unlock the full power of the platform.
Libby Marshall, (MBA Program Director, University of Queensland) introduced our final speaker of the day Robert Wickham (Regional VP, Innovation & Digital Transformation at Salesforce). Robert delivered the closing keynote on ‘Big data and the fourth industrial revolution,’ the topic might sound too jargony, but it was one of the major highlights of the MBAus Conference.
Even though artificial intelligence (AI) emerged in 1956, Robert shared that now we are in AI spring as we witness some incredible breakthroughs in recent years. He observed that 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years, but most companies today are not equipped to harness the power of the customer data to drive business decisions. Robert also shared the importance of using AI and machine learning (ML) to enable businesses to get smarter about their customers.
As AI and ML continue to gain traction, Robert believes ‘Chief Algorithms Officer’ would be an essential part of the C-suite leadership team in the future.
A major purpose of MBAus was connecting with each other, and so we headed down to Touche Hombre with the majority of the group where we had some delicious margaritas and tacos and enjoyed some good conversation about the differences in MBA programs and the best parts of the conference proceedings. It was excellent to see so many groups of people talking to people they didn’t know before the weekend and starting to build their networks across Australia.
