#125 - There Is Nothing Wrong With Those Kids

In September 2025, I joined Kozminski University as a full-time faculty member and entered a new profession for me - academia.

Time flies. I have now finished my first year as an academic teacher — a kind of chimera, one of those sometimes called pracademics: practitioners who decide to move into research and teaching.

This background has its pros and cons. Students seem to like my stories based on thirty years of management experience. At the same time, when it comes to research and teaching skills, I often feel like a newborn baby. My colleagues who have spent their whole careers in academia know so much more. It makes me humble and hungry to learn and develop.

The last two days of the academic year in July were particularly intense and fulfilling. My first nine students passed their bachelor diploma exams, ready either to fly into the business world or continue to the next stage of their education.

It was a touching moment. One of those rare moments when the purpose of your work becomes very tangible. And a good time for reflection.

I entered the university with many questions in my head.

Who are today’s students? Are they really so different from us?

I have never been particularly comfortable with generational labels. X, Y, Z — they reduce millions of individuals to one big mass and often come with the familiar bias of judging those who come after us.

Still, the world around us has changed so fundamentally that perhaps they really are different. So much has been written about Generation Z - their alleged inability to focus, their dependence on technology, their difficulties interacting in the physical world, and so on.

After a year of working with students, I am even more convinced of my original position.

There is nothing wrong with those kids.

I see far more similarities with my own generation than differences. Some are very ambitious. Some are still searching for their place and purpose. Most are not yet very serious.

And that is probably a good thing.

It was certainly one of my own reasons for studying: to postpone the moment when I had to become serious, find a job, get married and have children. What a nightmare.

Much better to have fun, learn as little as possible in the classroom, and as much as possible through interactions with other equally unserious students.

This is not just ok, it is desired at the exploration phase of life, allocate time for creativity rather than efficiency, which we all will be forced to embrace later on our journey.

Harsh judgments toward those who will eventually replace us have a very long history.

More than two thousand years ago, Horace wrote:

Is this criticism of the young driven by fear? Resentment that our own time is passing? Or genuine concern for the future?

Perhaps it does not matter very much. What matters is that the pattern keeps repeating. There is nothing particularly new about older generations worrying that the next one is somehow worse.

I want to believe that, for many people, this criticism comes from genuine care. But even then, Plato offered an uncomfortable challenge to this way of thinking.

He argues instead that older people should watch their own behaviour:

And in conclusion:

Translated into our times: if you want your children to spend less time on social media, spend less time on social media yourself. If you want them to work hard and resist the traps of comfort-obsessed societies, work hard yourself. Stay humble. Buy fewer unnecessary things. Show through your behaviour what you expect from them.

Not as easy as it sounds but every journey begins with a first step. Mine is to remove generational labels from our vocabulary and look more actively for connections rather than differences.

My second reflection after this first year concerns artificial intelligence and its impact on education.

The pace of change is extraordinary, and it forces universities to confront a fundamental question: If everyone can access knowledge through AI, what should a university graduate be able to do that his less educated peer with access to the same AI cannot?

For centuries, education was partly about access to knowledge. Today, facts, explanations, examples and increasingly sophisticated analysis can be produced almost instantly by an AI companion. So what remains?

Perhaps the better question is not what will change, but what should remain as the foundation of an educated person.

Forecasting the future of work has become more fruitless than ever — although, to be fair, it has never been particularly useful. A more resilient approach is to prepare for several possible futures rather than betting everything on one forecast.

But how do you prepare for multiple scenarios?

One interesting idea is the “π-shaped” approach to career development promoted in Singapore: developing deep expertise in two areas while maintaining a reasonable level of competence across several others [1]. This points toward a combination of breadth and depth rather than extreme specialisation. But underneath both lies something even more important: hunger for continuous learning. In this new world, education does not finish when university ends. In some ways, that is when real learning begins. This might be an attitude that will no longer differentiate the best from the average, but rather become the new normal.

Teamwork, networking and collaboration are also high on my list of capabilities that will matter in the future. Not surprisingly, they are also important components of resilience [2].

Yet this often conflicts with traditional university assessment, which remains heavily focused on individual performance.

At Kozminski, we are increasingly moving toward team projects and assignments in which collaboration itself becomes part of what students need to learn and demonstrate.

Another paradox is that increasingly powerful AI tools will increase rather than reduce the need for expertise. People with stronger foundations will be able to use these tools far more effectively than those without them.

In that sense, AI is not fundamentally different from other tools humans have invented. A powerful tool still requires a skilled operator — not only someone who understands the technology, but someone who understands the domain in which it is being applied.

The more powerful the tool, the larger the potential difference between skilled and unskilled use.

So access to extraordinary technological capabilities may not make professional development easier at all. It may actually raise the bar.

And the same applies to faculty members.

In this new reality, we have to learn faster, improve our teaching methods and continuously rethink what education should provide. At the same time, we should be careful not to lose focus on the foundations: curiosity, deep knowledge, collaboration and the willingness to keep learning.

After my first year of teaching, I have become less interested in judging what is changing and more interested in identifying what should endure.

I entered academia thinking primarily about what I could teach students after thirty years in business. I am beginning my second year increasingly aware of how much I still have to learn myself.

And it starts already next week. :)

I publish one short reflection like this each week, well almost each week. If you would like to receive them by email, you can sign up to the newsletter here

References and Notes

1 - #39 - Can you be creative when you are 50?

2 #55 - Can Networking Impact your Resilience?