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First, a moment of silence for those who have fallen. Then, before the debate could begin, the air raid siren protocol: instructions for what to do when Russian missiles or drones approach.
That was a first. My family had sensibly vetoed my attending in person, so I was there on large screens, at a safe distance, when I served as Intellectual Provocateur at a public event hosted by the Graduate Business School of Kyiv School of Economics.
Dean Valentyna Sakhno had designed the event with care; Academic Director Olena Khomenko moderated it with skill. The audience comprised Ukrainian business managers, C-suite executives, alumni, and current EMBA students. Valentyna gave me four minutes, not five, to frame the opening. “You’re setting the terms, not arguing a side,” she instructed. “I expect you to have the most intellectually precise response in the room. Challenge the limits. Hold the bar high.” The audience must judge. Here are my views on the three provocations that followed.
Does AI make managers more powerful, or does it make bad managers more dangerous?
A manager who has learned to generate and consume analytical outputs rather than construct analytical arguments is more dangerous with AI than without it. Outputs arrive faster, with higher confidence and lower traceability. The manager acts on them because they look right.
Business schools bear specific responsibility here. For decades, the dominant pedagogy optimised for analytical technique: build the model, run the numbers, present the recommendation. That training produced managers skilled at performing and consuming analysis. AI has made that skill abundant and cheap.
The scarce capability now is integrative judgment: the capacity to sense what the data cannot capture, to hold competing interpretations in tension, and to decide when the elegant answer is the wrong one. That capability requires a different kind of education, one built around ambiguity, contestation, and reflective practice, not around technique.
Can the most valuable leadership capabilities be taught in a classroom?
The two most valuable capabilities are practical wisdom, knowing when optimal is wrong, and the capacity for genuine collaboration, building shared meaning with people who see the world differently.
The provocation is half right: these capabilities cannot be taught through lectures, case discussions, or online modules alone. They require embodied experience, struggle with real consequences, and structured reflection on that struggle. The provocation is also half wrong. Structured environments for reflection are precisely the mechanism through which experience becomes wisdom. Without them, experience accumulates but does not compound.
At a major business school conference in Vienna last year, I combined Oxford-style debate with AI-augmented reflection. What emerged was structured confrontation, the requirement to engage seriously with a position you disagree with, shifted thinking in ways that neither a lecture nor a casual conversation could achieve. The format was the pedagogy; the room was the container, not the content.
Business education at its best changes your relationship to your own judgment, as I develop in Human Magic, my forthcoming book. People discover capabilities they did not know they had. Most schools are not doing this. Most are teaching analytical technique, credentialing for career advancement, and providing networking opportunities. Those are valuable services. But they are not the services the provocation is asking about.
Do the business schools that will matter in 10 years already exist, or must they be built from scratch?
The AI and leadership conversation defaults to Western management frameworks designed for slower, more predictable change. At a CEEMAN conference last September, I worked with 200 educational leaders from 28 countries, encountering practical wisdom traditions that address this challenge: Chinese zhi hui, wisdom through rapid iteration; Vedic viveka, discernment at speed; African ubuntu, collective learning rooted in mutual obligation. If the schools that matter in 10 years are still teaching only the Western canon, they will be irrelevant to most of the world. They must be built on different foundations.
Adding an AI module to an existing curriculum is like teaching someone to drive faster on a road that leads to the wrong destination. The question is whether the model itself, semester-based, course-packaged, individually assessed, can produce capabilities that matter once algorithms handle what the old model taught.
At the close, I held up a mirror to the audience, and to Team Valentyna.
The 2026 Drucker Forum theme, “Next Generation Innovation: When Everything Depends on Ingenuity,” describes Ukraine precisely. Not only in the obvious sense. Ingenuity here is not improvisation under pressure. It is disciplined, distributed, feedback-rich learning under conditions that clarify what matters.
Ukraine’s defense sector has built what business schools describe but rarely achieve. More than 500 companies learn and iterate faster than any curriculum cycle, producing five million drones a year, treating failure data as a strategic asset, and updating their understanding from direct field experience rather than from case studies about someone else. KSE has a rare opportunity to co-create short, adaptive programs that plug directly into this live learning system rather than document it after the fact. If it does, the most relevant management education for the next decade may well emerge from Kyiv.
It is already happening. Beetroot Academy launched its defense-tech courses for engineers in 2025, building curricula from real-time feedback from over 70 defense companies. Any institution willing to learn from practitioners rather than merely about them has the same opportunity.
When I first visited Ukraine in 1997, the transformation away from Soviet planning had barely begun. Today, imperfect like the rest of us, Ukraine offers lessons the West would be unwise to ignore. Ingenuity is not a talent you discover in a crisis. It is a discipline you build before one arrives.
About the author:
Johan Roos is Professor and Executive Advisor at Hult International Business School, Partner at Inthrface, and Senior Advisor to the Peter Drucker Society Europe. His new book Human Magic: Leading with Wisdom in an Era of Algorithms (humanmagic.one), Routledge, will be published in April 2026.