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Bill Winters, the CEO of Standard Chartered, said the MBA he received from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School wasn’t the best use of his time.
Winters was speaking to Bloomberg’s Francine Lacqua in an interview that aired Tuesday when he was asked about the advice he would give to a teenager on what to study.
“I studied international relations and history. I got an MBA later, but that was a waste of time,” Winters said of his own education.
A representative for Standard Chartered said the firm had no further comments on Winters’ remarks. Wharton did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Winters graduated from Colgate University in 1983 with an international relations degree. He graduated from Wharton with an MBA in 1988.
“I learned how to think at university, and for the 40 years since I left university, those skills have been degraded, degraded, degraded. They’re coming back now,” Winters said.
The CEO said that with the rise of AI, learning how to think and communicate effectively matters more in the workplace.
“The technical skills are being provided by the machine, or by very competent people in other parts of the world who have really nailed the technical skills at a relatively low cost,” Winters said.
“I’m going to go back to curiosity and empathy. Really, really understand the audience that you’re dealing with and anticipate those needs beforehand,” he added.
Winters started his banking career at JPMorgan. He spent 26 years there, rising to become co-CEO of JPMorgan’s investment bank. Winters was seen as a potential successor to JPMorgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, but was ousted by Dimon in 2009.
He founded his own private credit fund in 2011 before taking the helm of Standard Chartered in 2015.
Winters isn’t the only business executive who thinks that soft skills will become more important in the age of AI.
Salesforce’s chief futures office told BI last month that empathy is the most important skill in the AI era.
“Parents ask me what should my kids study, shall they be coders? I said, ‘learn how to work with others,'” said Peter Schwartz.
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