Rotman professor Mihnea Moldoveanu discusses his book “ Soft Skills: How to See, Measure and Build the Skills that Make Us Uniquely Human."

By Rotman Events

Wed, Sep 11, 2024 5:30 PM - 6:30 PM EDT

Location

Rotman School of Management

105 Saint George Street Toronto, ON M5S 3E6

Show map

Refund Policy

Refunds up to 1 day before event

Agenda

5:30 PM - 6:30 PM

Author presentation & audience Q&A

6:30 PM - 7:00 PM

Meet-and-greet, book signing & light refreshments

About this event

• Event lasts 1 hour

Following the conversation, we invite you to join us for a meet-and-greet with the author, book signing and light refreshments.

Topic:

Soft Skills: How to See, Measure and Build the Skills that Make Us Uniquely Human (De Gruyter, April 22 2024)

Speaker:

Prof. Mihnea Moldoveanu, Marcel Desautels Professor of Integrative Thinking; Director, Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking; Professor, Economic Analysis and Policy; Director, Rotman Digital, Rotman School of Management

Moderator:

Maja Djikic, Associate Professor, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management; Executive Director, Self-Development Laboratory; Academic Director, Rotman Executive Coaching Certificate, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Co-presenter: Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking

Book Synopsis:

Although communicative and relational skills are currently in the greatest demand in organizations large and small, we are as educators, executives, and talent developers very far away from the kind of precision in identifying, measuring, selecting and developing these skills that we have achieved with cognitive and technical skills. At the same time, the relentless automation of swaths of human tasks has placed a sharp light on the ‘quintessentially human skills’ – those that cannot and in some cases should not be subject to algorithmic automation. This book aims to ‘change the soft skills game’ by introducing language for identifying and describing them, ways of measuring the degree to which a person possesses them and selecting those who possess them in the utmost from those less skilled, and ways of helping students and executives alike develop them, through a methodology that has been designed and practiced for the past ten years.

We need a ‘re-set’ in the way we think about human skill and in particular the ways we think about those human skills which cannot be sub-contracted to an algorithm running on silicon. This book aims to provide that re-set.

Grounded in state-of-the-art research on communicative and relational skills embedded in HR and executive talent selection and development practices.

About our Speaker:

Mihnea Moldoveanu is a researcher, author, educator and high technology entrepreneur whose work focuses on the algorithmic foundations of human and machine learning and specifically on the ways in which they apply to skill identification and development in an era in which some human tasks can be replicated, and some skills augmented or transformed by learning machines. He is the author of 9 books – including The Future of Executive Development (Stanford, 2021, with Das Narayandas), The Future of the MBA (Oxford, 2008, with Roger Martin), and Master Passions (MIT, 2002, with Nitin Nohria) and over 100 articles and papers.

He is currently the Desautels Professor of Integrative Thinking, Professor of Economic Analysis and the Founding Director of the Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking at the University of Toronto. He is also the Founder and Director of the Mind Brain Behavior Institute and the Self Development Laboratory at the University of Toronto, globally recognized for the design of cognitive and brain science-informed platforms, tools and pedagogies that help learners develop complex skills through interaction and feedback. He is the Founder and Director of the Leadership Development Laboratory at the University of Toronto. He is Founder and Director of RotmanDigital, the Rotman School’s online learning and learning analytics platform. Moldoveanu was a Visiting Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School from 2015-2020. Moldoveanu is an experienced academic administrator and program designer and was the Associate Dean of the MBA Program (2010-2014) and Vice Dean for Learning, Innovation and Executive Programs (2014-2021) at the Rotman School of Management.

He is the Founder and Past CEO and CTO of Redline Communications, Inc., a global leader in the design and manufacturing of broadband wireless systems for commercial and military applications (IPO:2007; acquired, 2022) and of Hefaistos, Inc., developer of the world’s first software-based Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) modem (acquired, 1999). He is the designer and chief architect of several distributed machine-learning and LLM-enabled platforms in the educational technology industry, including a fully dialogical learning management system that makes learning and evaluation of skills in different knowledge domains fully conversational.

Moldoveanu is a senior advisor to the Boston Consulting Group (on the algorithmic foundations of business problem solving) and to the United Nations (on skill assessment and development in the generative AI era) - and was previously a Senior Advisor to McKinsey&Co (on problem solving in unstructured environments) and a member of the global advisory board for McKinsey Academy.

About our moderator:

Maja Djikic, Ph. D. is a personality psychologist specializing in adult development. She is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Executive Director of the Self-Development Laboratory, and Academic Director of the Rotman Executive Coaching Certificate at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. She has published more than 35 articles and book chapters in the area of personality development. Her research has been featured in over 50 media outlets (including The New York Times, Salon, Slate, and The Scientific American Mind) in 15 countries. Maja has been selected by Thinkers50 as one of 30 thinkers around the world whose ideas have the potential to shape the future of organizations. Her first book, The Possible Self: A Leader's Guide to Personal Development was published in March 2024 by Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc.

Event Logistics:

This event is available to attend in-person only.

Rotman Events is committed to accessibility for all people. If you have any access needs or if there are any ways we can support your full participation in this session, please email [events@rotman.utoronto.ca] no later than 2 weeks in advance of the event and we will be glad to work with you to make the appropriate arrangements.

General Admission: In-Person Ticket Details

The event will be hosted in Desautels Hall at the Rotman School of Management (105 Saint George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3E6).

Cancellation & Refund Policy

• Refunds will only be issued for cancellations received in writing NO LATER than 24 hours prior to the event. Please email events@rotman.utoronto.ca for processing.

• In-person registrants who do not pick up their book at the event will have 5 business days to request postal delivery by emailing us at events@rotman.utoronto.ca. All unclaimed books will be returned to the publisher after that time.

Questions: events@rotman.utoronto.ca, Megan Murphy