Australia is suffering from “complacency culture”, says Dr Aniss Chami, the CEO of Vitex Pharmaceuticals. Organisations are stagnating because their people have stopped striving for improvement.
“That complacency,” he says, “is arresting a lot of the creativity that was flourishing when I first started in this business.”
Chami, who studied his master of business administration (MBA) at Macquarie Business School early in his career, remembers a sector that took genuine risks. Today, in the wake of machine learning and a risk-averse geopolitical climate, he watches businesses base decisions on what’s safe or proven in the market; not what could become extraordinary.
“When I was starting, we were far more innovative around making medicines and label claims for certain active ingredients,” he says. “That’s all gone. We used to be an industry and a nation of quite creative thinkers in this space, but we’ve become mainstream manufacturers.”
AI can give you the room to think differently
With AI reshaping the nature of human work, it would be easy for Chami to blame modern technology for our flagging creativity. But he doesn’t.
“AI has not replaced anyone at Vitex,” he says. “On the contrary: we need more people.” What it has done, he says, is make the working environment smarter, faster and safer.
The result, Chami believes, is more room for creativity, not less. “AI is the one tool we need to bolster human creativity and processing,” he says. “Modern business has all the right ingredients for human creativity to reclaim its edge, as long as the right people are equipped for the challenge.”
Rediscovering the language of business
Chami credits Macquarie Business School with giving him the tools to combine a thirst for knowledge with powerful business acumen.
“The MBA formalised the language between the different departments,” he says. “When I speak to finance, I can speak their language. If I go to marketing, I speak in their language.”
That fluency, he says, allowed him to think strategically, expediting his “transcendence to a leadership role”. As a CEO, he now encourages the next generation of leaders to lean into their natural curiosity and bring innovation back to the workplace.
For him, the MBA is a cheat code. “It’s teaching you common sense, but in a formal, research-based, structured way,” he says. “It pools the last 100 years of intellect in business performance into [one degree].” As well as theoretical learning, Macquarie Business School delivered practical wisdom and introduced Chami to a cohort ready to challenge, inspire and guide one another.
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Macquarie Business School’s Leadership Series event, Governance and the Technological Challenge. Photograph: Chris Barlow
“It was like-minded men and women, all at the cusp of leadership positions, [in] family businesses, multinationals, top 500,” he says. No two students did the same job, so nobody competed. Two decades on, that network is still “worth its weight in gold”, and helping Chami push his business even further.
Chami’s advice for MBA students? Know why you’re there
Chami is blunt about who should enrol in an MBA. “The MBA is not a box-ticking exercise for you to be promoted,” he says. “It’s there to give you a set of skills – surgically sharpened skills – to be able to resolve issues that no one else in your team can.
“If you don’t have the ambition and the drive to make something out of your MBA, don’t do it.”
But if you do? “It inflames your spirit.” And it’s there, Chami says, that human creativity will flourish.
