opinion
Mayowa Babalola: Rise of the machines makes the human touch more valuable

Australian business education is failing our future and it’s time we admitted it. AI is demolishing jobs overnight, climate change is forcing entire industries to reinvent themselves or die and inequality widens despite our so-called prosperity. In this reality, business schools face a defining question: are we preparing leaders for the world we’re living in, or the one we’d like it to be? As the Stan Perron Chair in Business Ethics at The University of Western Australia, my conversations with business leaders across Australia have revealed an uncomfortable truth: our traditional approach to business education is increasingly out of step with today’s challenges. We built our programs for a world of stable career paths and shareholder-first thinking. That world is vanishing. A large portion of Australian jobs will face automation within the next decade. Yet employers aren’t panicking about technical skills – they’re desperate for people with essentially human capabilities: communication, ethical judgment, adaptability, cross-cultural understanding and the wisdom to navigate uncertainty. Our current approach isn’t working. Some business schools still teach business through disconnected subjects — finance here, marketing there, ethics as an optional extra. Is it any wonder this fragmented education shows in our business culture. Robodebt. The banking royal commission. Environmental negligence. These aren’t isolated incidents but symptoms of the same disease: leaders trained to optimise numbers without thoroughly weighing human consequences. The greatest danger isn’t producing graduates with outdated technical skills. It’s sending bright, capable people into leadership positions without developing their moral compass. When we equip students with powerful analytical tools but not the wisdom to use them responsibly, we shouldn’t be surprised when short-term profit thinking leads to long-term harm. It’s time for radical change. We need to break down the artificial walls between disciplines. Today’s business challenges don’t arrive in neat packages labelled “finance problem” or “marketing issue”. They demand insights from technology, humanities, sciences, finance and design simultaneously. Our teaching should reflect this reality. We must end passive learning. Lectures and pre-packaged case studies only go so far. Students need to roll up their sleeves and engage with messy, real world problems through experiential learning, cross-disciplinary teamwork and community partnerships. These experiences build the adaptability and ethical judgement that classroom instruction, on its own, cannot. We also need to rethink what success looks like. Only celebrating job placement rates with top organisations and starting salaries sends a clear message about what matters (that is, performance metrics). What if we equally celebrated graduates creating sustainable businesses, building more inclusive workplaces and developing solutions for community challenges? Our metrics must reflect our values. Strengthening collaboration with industry partners is also vital. Business schools are trusted advisers and can provide evidence-based frameworks to help leaders navigate uncertainty and complex environmental situations. But it’s a two-way street. Industry leaders need to actively seek and support this collaboration, opening their organisations as learning laboratories and bringing real challenges into the classroom. Working together, we can create knowledge that is both rigorous and relevant. Australia has a unique opportunity to lead this transformation. Our position connecting East and West, our experience navigating complex transitions and our cultural commitment to fairness give us a distinctive perspective. By placing ethical reasoning and practical wisdom at the heart of business education, we can develop leaders ready for today’s global challenges. This goes beyond revamping our academic offerings and approach. As educators, we have a moral responsibility. Ethics cannot remain a theoretical discussion; it must be embedded into every aspect of our teaching. In UWA’s Ethical Leadership in Contemporary Organisations MBA classroom, an elective our students can choose to take, we don’t just analyse business cases; we wrestle with their human implications. We practise having difficult conversations about the real world impacts of business decisions. We challenge traditional assumptions about what business is for and who it should serve. This transformation won’t happen through small adjustments. It requires a fundamental rethinking of business education. The stakes are too high for half-measures or gradual change. Ultimately, the workplace of tomorrow isn’t something that will happen to us — it’s something we’re actively creating through our choices today. For those of us responsible for developing future leaders, there’s no task as important as re-imagining how we prepare them. The quality of leadership we foster today will shape Australia’s economic and social landscape for decades to come. We need to act with courage, clarity and conviction. Our students deserve it. Our businesses need it. And our society depends on it. Professor Mayowa Babalola is the Stan Perron Chair in Business Ethics at The University of Western Australia Business School.

opinionMayowa Babalola: Rise of the machines makes the human touch more valuable

opinion
Mayowa Babalola: Rise of the machines makes the human touch more valuable