At The Money: Preparing for a Career During in Age of Artificial Intelligence

In the Age of AI, how should students prepare for the job market? Nitin Nohria is the former Dean of the Harvard Business School (and current Harvard professor). His new book is “The CEO: Role, Reality, and Responsibility.” He is also executive chairman of Thrive Capital, Joshua Kushner’s venture firm. Each week, “At the Money” discusses an important topic in money management. From portfolio construction to taxes and cutting down on fees, join Barry Ritholtz to learn the best ways to put your money to work. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 2:51Barry Ritholtz?

  In the age of artificial intelligence, how should students prepare for this job market? Let's bring in Harvard professor Nitin Nohria. He's former dean of the Harvard Business School. His new book is The CEO, The Role, The Reality, and The Responsibility. He's also executive chairman at Thrive Capital, which is the venture firm run by Joshua Kushner. So let's start with AI. If artificial intelligence is attacking that entry rung of the career ladder, how should recent college grads build their skills and judgment that used to come from those entry-level jobs?

• 3:34Speaker 05

  So I think that first, students should continue to use their time during their education to even be more determined to cultivate critical thinking, the capacity to interrogate themselves. When I teach cases now, one thing I've started to do is to ask students, so tell me what AI said about this case.

• 4:01Speaker 05

  Actually reads to me, not just even tell me, reads to me what your AI agent said to you about this case. Because I want them to say, you can use this, you can use these tools. In fact, you'll be required to use these tools when you get to work. And then I ask them the second question. What did you agree with? What did you disagree with? What further questions did you ask to get your thinking to be improved? I think this form of critical reasoning, where we rely upon AI to inform ourselves, but then we interrogate it deeply, we learn how to think alongside it, this is a capability that they will be required to do. And I think the best students will prepare themselves this way.

• 4:41Barry Ritholtz?

  So your preference is rather than just become a very inch-wide, mile-deep domain expert, really have the broad meta-skills, critical reading, critical thinking, and more intelligent form of learning, and working with AI, is that the takeaway?

• 5:00Speaker 05

  I think so. I think that you have to, my view increasingly is that you should think of AI as very much like in the Marvel comics. Each person can develop their own superpower. You don't need a Marvel suit. AI becomes the equivalent of your Marvel suit. But you have to tune it to yourself, right? Like, everybody, it's not like all Marvel heroes have the same superpowers. You will develop your own superpowers, and that'll be your distinctive edge. And how you use this extraordinary capacity to distinguish yourself, to make yourself special, that will be the new edge that people will have to find.

• 5:42Barry Ritholtz?

  So undergraduate, does the major a student takes really matter? Or should they be, you know, we saw such a push towards STEM, but now it seems a lot of those technical skills are getting commoditized. How should a student be thinking about what they should be studying, how they develop judgment and communication skills? How important is the major?

• 6:09Speaker 05

  So I think that, again, in the same metaphor that I used about, you have to find what your unique Marvel superpower is. Expertise could be one of them, right? So it's not the case that expertise disappears. So if you end up being the person who has dug deep into computer science and you can therefore answer questions about the right way to program using AI, about the right way to create safety, all of the questions that are now being done by the leading researchers at the top labs, that's not something that I, who doesn't have that same level of intuition, experience, expertise, will be able to do. For others, it may be writing.

• 6:54Speaker 05

  For others, it may be history. So I do think that a major will continue to be important, but then there will be people who take interdisciplinary majors like, you know, social studies at Harvard, who say, "I'm not going to differentiate myself on expertise," because that will be for some people, "I'm going to be the generalist." And I think that being a generalist is going to be deeply important in this world, too.

• 7:20Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah, no doubt. So let's talk about that first job, which when I was coming up was described as the all-important first job. Is that still the case? Should people think about that first gig out of college as something that's a little bit of an experiment to figure out what they like and what they're good at? Or should it be a commitment to the company, to the industry, to their bosses, and just jump in with both feet or somewhere in between?

• 7:52Speaker 05

  In my experience, having taught for now almost 40 years, I have found, and I teach mostly business school students who are graduate students, but I've also had an interaction with lots of undergraduate students. I find that students are two types. There's people who, somewhere and very early in their life, know exactly what their life's mission is. I've always said to those people, get on with it. Find a place, commit, dig deep, because you already know what you want to do. Don't waste time flitting around, running experiments. The experiment of your life is already known, now you have to find a way to deliver on it. And there are other people who, and I will put myself in that category, who didn't have

• 8:37Speaker 05

  a clue about what I wanted to do when I joined an undergraduate institution, didn't even have a clue when I went to graduate school, and had to discover through experimentation what it was that we were going to be good at. And for those people, I say, don't be afraid of experimentation. Don't get anxious that you don't know exactly what you want to do. But when you get the signal that this is what you want to do, listen hard. Your body, mind, and heart will tell you that this is what you were meant to do. And when that happens, lock in and pursue it with all your heart. But don't get impatient if you don't know very early on what it is that you want to do, and cut yourself some grace.

• 9:16Barry Ritholtz?

  Really interesting advice. So you're executive chairman of a venture capital firm. I've played around in that space over the years, and one of the things I'm kind of fascinated by is how often startups, really very new companies, pivot from the initial idea to a variation, to a derivative of the original technology, and sometimes it's to something entirely different. How should students and new grads think about those career pivots? How should they think about, hey, is this just tough and I have to fight my way through?

• 9:58Barry Ritholtz?

  Or am I really more interested in this adjacent area of practice?

• 10:04Speaker 05

  So I think for entrepreneurs, there's a level of persistence and the willingness to pivot as needed, because there's such a determination to come up with the right solution for a problem that may initially have presented as A, but over time looks like it's its adjacency. A colleague of mine, Amar Pide, did this research at Harvard Business School of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and he found that in 80% of the cases, as you said, where they ended up was a distant cousin at best of what they started, even when they were successful. I think that's not very different from people who pursue careers.

• 10:47Speaker 05

  You know, even if you're not an entrepreneur, where you start may not be where you end up in your career. You may start as a consultant, because that feels like the right way to gain some experience. And you may start as a journalist, and you know, you could end in very different places. So I think people should remain

• 11:04Speaker 05

  Permanently open to explore adjacencies that they're drawn to. Certainly to recognize when what they're doing is a dead end and it's not going to actually yield anything. It's the hardest thing for people to do sometimes is to recognize a dead end. But I also say to people, be quick to, don't be too quick to allow irritations or frictions that appear to be seen as a dead end. So I say to people, you know, if you're being, if you're unhappy, allow yourself to be unhappy for at least three to six months before you decide that this is a dead end. Because if you switch every time you experience unhappiness, you're just never going to have the persistence to work through the things that you have to work through in almost any job or any career.

• 11:50Barry Ritholtz?

  That persistence reminds me of a quote I've heard about so many different areas. I want to see how much it applies to a career. It should be treated as a marathon, not a sprint. True?

• 12:04Speaker 05

  One hundred percent. And yet, as you know, a marathon is not run at the same pace.

• 12:10Speaker 05

  There, there, you know, if you see the great runners in a marathon, they try and set the pace early. So sometimes you want to actually set the pace early. In the middle of the race, you might slow down. But you're always trying to set a pace. At times you want to run with a group, at times you want to run alone. So just as a marathon is not, yes, it's a long race, but it's not run at the same cadence throughout. I think that's how, what a good career looks like as well.

• 12:40Barry Ritholtz?

  Tell us about experiential learning. How should universities and students design higher education? So that students really get the most out of their four years or so in college and are best prepared for a career?

• 12:57Speaker 05

  I'm a huge proponent of experiential learning, but I, I full disclosure, I'm very biased in this regard. I, I, I think the case method that we taught by at Harvard Business School was an opportunity for students to confront experience in the classroom because we bring, in many ways, I used to think of it as the best flight simulation that you could have in business. We can't possibly put you into a hundred business situations in the real world, but we can give you ninety minutes of simulation of different business problems. But in each case, you have to act as the protagonist. You have to think about the problem with no solution given.

• 13:39Speaker 05

  So that's one form of experiential learning. But then in my time as dean, we asked students to, every one of our students to travel abroad, to get involved in real company situations. I think the only way to test whether the idea is that you're learning, how do they play out in practice? How do you apply your judgment? You can only do that through experiential learning. And I believe that in an age of AI where the knowledge that you have available will be at your fingertips, learning how to apply it in practical experiential context will be the one profoundly powerful way in cultivating the kind of critical thinking and judgment I started our conversation with.

• 14:17Barry Ritholtz?

  You know, I was speaking with Bob Michael. He's the head of fixed income at JP Morgan. And he has this quote that he tells his interns, "The way to differentiate yourself is mastering AI tools the way my generation had to master the spreadsheet." Good advice?

• 14:37Speaker 05

  Very good advice.

• 14:41Barry Ritholtz?

  All right, our, our last two questions, and, and because you were dean at, at the Harvard Business School, these are going to be a little tailored to that. What is the prestige trap? What, what is the issue with chasing, uh, brand name employers? Is that a sound strategy?

• 15:02Speaker 05

  So brands are, brands because they reflect something real. I don't think that brands are, can sustain themselves if they don't reflect real opportunities. So if you go to Goldman Sachs,

• 15:17Speaker 05

  there is something that you will learn at Goldman Sachs that's important. Or if you go to JP Morgan Chase in, in, in banking. If you go to consulting firms like BCG, Bain, McKinsey, these are brands that carry cachet because they're important. If you are interested in media, you go to Bloomberg or Disney, and these are places that are good places to go to because the brands carry something. But I think increasingly, I find at Harvard Business School that many of our students have learned that there's a lot to be learned in places that are not brands. So the courage that people now have to start in places that aren't already established brands has dramatically increased. And the reason why that increases, I think these people have come of age where great companies have been built in front of their eyes, like who knew what Facebook was going to be?

• 16:02Speaker 05

  Who knew what Google was going to be, right? So in the span of ten, fifteen years, extraordinary brands have been built. And so I think our students have become much more comfortable saying that while a brand provides some assurance of a good learning experience, I can also get a great learning experience if I put myself in a setting where there's a lot more risk. But if it succeeds, it can succeed in an extraordinary way.

• 16:28Barry Ritholtz?

  And the, the question I'm very curious about, you, you've not only taught decades of students at Harvard and elsewhere, as well as the business school. I'm, I'm curious, what career paths of alumni from the Harvard Business School really surprised you?

• 16:47Speaker 05

  I think the thing that has constantly surprised me is when do our students decide to

• 16:56Speaker 05

  stake out their own entrepreneurial journey? Fifty percent of our business school students by the end of their careers will have chosen an entrepreneurial path. And it can be from opening their own small consulting firm to, at, at some point deciding to start their own investment shop, to buying a small company, or even sometimes returning to their family company and deciding that I, I, I now want to run this company. So it's interesting, in the end, people want to have the opportunity to feel like I am reporting to no boss. This is, I have ownership over what I'm building.

• 17:33Speaker 05

  And yet, some people will do it as soon as they graduate from the school. Some people will do it twenty-five years later. And what has constantly surprised me is what's the trigger? That finally causes someone to say, okay, I now need to have the opportunity to be an entrepreneur. And it's amazing the different ways in which people arrive at that decision.

• 17:56Barry Ritholtz?

  Really, really fascinating stuff. Thank you for being so generous with your time, Professor Noria. We have been speaking with Nitin Noria, author of the new book, The CEO, The Role, The Reality, and the Responsibility, and former dean of the Harvard Business School. You've been listening to Bloomberg's At the Money.

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