ESSEC receives Ángel Gurría, Secretary-General of the OECD

Ángel Gurría visited the ESSEC Business School on the Cergy campus on Wednesday. The OECD Secretary-General gave a lecture to 400 first-year students from ESSEC.

"ESSEC students will be inventing the new jobs that do not yet exist. We must give them the tools to face it." Ángel Gurría, Secretary General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) since 2006, met first-year students from the ESSEC Master in management program, as part of the seminar "Understand and Change the World".

For more than an hour, he talked with the audience on various topics, including digital transformation. "We need to help people adapt to their changing jobs, to make them trust institutions again, in order to give meaning to their contribution to society.The OECD aims to become the "club" of best practices in digital transformation and policy".

The OECD Secretary-General also encourages cooperation between the world's various actors: "Multilateralism concerns every sector of society, business and academia. It is about exchanging what we have learned. We, together, will achieve multilateralism that delivers for all. Multilateral cooperation has become the most important tool to making the world a better place. How can we face challenges such as gender equality or climate change, without cooperation?"

Finally, Ángel Gurría urged the students to think, question and propose: "It is up to each of you, students of one of the best business schools in the world, and future leaders, to think about solutions: how to restore confidence in democracy, for example.”