Positive transformation at Antwerp Management School

Antwerp Management School is one of three European business schools ranked as ‘transforming’ in the Positive Impact Rating. At AMS, we share our PIR results with our staff, faculty, students, chairs and corporate partners, because we believe it is necessary to walk this talk together with our peers and industry partners who are fully and explicitly supporting our focus on sustainability.

‘Transformation’ has been a unifying theme over the past few years as we have transformed as an organization, including moving from rented premises to our own low-impact building; sharing the same workspace to create a one AMS culture and building a healthy and innovative work-climate geared around our human assets; transforming our brand and positioning around our inspiring slogan of ‘Opening Minds To Impact the World’; and transforming our strategy: educating future leaders in society, enabling organizations in today’s VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world to transform for sustainable impact whilst operating in a larger international ecosystem.

This is how one of our students, Sandhya Paul, expressed the AMS difference:

“How I feel about my AMS journey so far? I enrolled for a master’s degree to get to the next leg of my career. But it became clear that the AMS promise goes greatly beyond that. AMS is helping me open my mind to come out as not just a leader but a better person, self-aware, with a global perspective and capable of making a real impact on the world. I believe our AMS tagline “Opening minds to impact the world” sums it up nicely”.

During onboarding days, we share the results of the PIR rating with our students, encourage them to execute the Sulitest, and start the debate on sustainability dilemmas. At AMS, we are convinced that a ‘responsible management mindset’ is absolutely necessary to grow in a highly dynamic and challenging environment.

One of the main objectives of AMS, when it comes to management and business education, is to make the shift from mere knowledge transfer - the traditional aim and intent of management education - to the broader development of impactful and responsible managers, leaders and global citizens; in other words, the creation of sustainable mindsets.

To end, we will continue the PIR journey, in order to manage and unleash new perspectives, get networked with aligned organizations, connect with strategic partners, get mission-driven, include stakeholder opinions, use applied tools, and get transparent with performance reporting.

I am delighted to share with you our PIR case study for further reading into the work that we are very proud of here at AMS.

Dean Steven De Haes

Antwerp Management School