Podcast: Michael Pirson and the Effort to Humanize Business Education

May 11, 2022
  • Brent Stewart
  • Brent Stewart
    Digital Strategy & Content Leader at Barry-Wehmiller

This past March, this blog told you about a very special meeting of the minds to bring humanistic leadership to business schools.

The goal, as BW CEO Bob Chapman shared, is “to transform business education from being institutions that train people to ‘manage’ into institutions that foster humanistic leaders who honor individual dignity and demonstrate the courage to care for others.”

The group included professors from Fordham University, University of Chicago-Loyola, Case Western Reserve, Bard, Creighton, and St. Norbert College. Like-minded organizations like the UN, the Association of Jesuit Business Schools and Ashoka were also represented. You can see a group photo of participants in the image above.

This initiative, launched by Barry-Wehmiller with Fordham University and these influential business schools and organizations, is called “Humanizing Business Education.”

As a future goal, they are working to launch an Academy of Humanistic Leadership with the hope of providing some of Barry-Wehmiller’s foundational training, like Listen Like a Leader, to business school professors.

Leading this focused effort are BW’s Director of Strategy, Improvement and Culture, Brian Wellinghoff, and Michael Pirson, an Associate Professor of Management, Global Sustainability, and Social Entrepreneurship at Fordham University and Research Fellow at Harvard University.

On this episode of our podcast, Brian and Michael have a conversation about humanistic leadership, what it is and how the Humanizing Business Education movement can change the world. You can listen to the podcast through the links above. 

During the episode, they talk about a "manifesto" of goals that was a result of the March meeting, which you can see below: 

And here is a video summary of the Humanizing Business Education summit from this past March:


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