By
Rick Bunch
World
Resources Institute’s business education projects have been
working since 1990 to ensure that environment and sustainability
are fundamental components of business school curricula around
the world. WRI’s BELL (Business-Environment Learning and
Leadership) projects, in North and Latin America and China, develop
and publish business school curricula, provide curriculum resources,
facilitate faculty networking and offer training events and conferences
for business school faculty and staff. The Environmental Enterprise
Corps (EEC) offers business school students experiential learning
opportunities helping green startup firms with their business
development needs. The biennial report, Beyond Grey Pinstripes:
Preparing MBAs for Social and Environmental Stewardship (produced
jointly with the Initiative for Social Innovation through Business
of The Aspen Institute) reports how leading business schools around
the world infuse these issues to their curricula. The report highlights
innovations, helps students find MBA programs that support their
interests, and inspires competition among schools to do better.
Not
surprisingly, we have found that sparking sustained change in
business schools requires a systematic approach. In particular,
we have learned to appreciate the various concerns, constraints
and motivations of the various stakeholders in management education,
and therefore how they might be mobilized to support program changes
in the schools:
•
Professors need to publish research in leading peer-reviewed journals.
Secondarily, they need to receive good teaching ratings, and attract
students to courses they offer;
•
Students seek substantive knowledge, but especially at the MBA
level they are motivated (or constrained) by professional concerns.
They attend business school to advance their careers and command
higher salaries;
•
Deans and administrators want to place their graduates with prestigious
employers who pay top dollar. Placement statistics figure heavily
into national rankings, which help to attract better students,
which helps to attract better employers, all in a virtuous circle;
•
Employers want not only to attract top MBA graduates, but to retain
them longer than one-year – the reported average for MBAs
in their first job post-graduation.
This
portrait is simplified here for the sake of brevity. Deans, for
example, clearly care about the intellectual rigor of their degree
programs, the research output of their faculty, and the stature
of their school within the university and the community. The point
here is that any effort to move a school’s programs toward
sustainability depends on clear-eyed recognition of the various
stakeholders, their interests and their leverage to effect or
resist change.
Despite
wide interest within the sustainability in higher education community
in greening campus operations, WRI has never found much traction
for this approach with graduate business schools. MBA students
spend only parts of two years on campus, rarely form research
associations with professors, typically have well-established
lives and jobs separate from their academic pursuits, and nearly
always live off campus. They take little interest in business
schools as institutions worthy of examination perhaps because
few of them aspire to work in academia, or even the non-profit
sector, after they graduate. From this perspective, offering “crystallized
curriculum” in the form of projects that green campus operations
appeals little to MBAs because they perceive the experience will
not impress the private sector employers they want eventually
to work for. This observation is especially discouraging viewed
in the context of the building boom that U.S. business schools
have enjoyed in recent years. The new business schools are among
the most impressive and expensive on most campuses, making an
unmistakable statement about the school’s prestige and power:
the same “cost-is-no-object” image many corporate headquarters
seek to transmit. A concern with sustainability, scale and efficiency
evidently plays as incompatible with these other, clearly dominant
values.
Professors
The primary constraint on business school professors’ willingness
to address sustainability in their teaching, research and outreach
is ideology. Business people have much more credibility with business
schools as advocates of sustainability than we do, and are increasingly
visible champions for it, so WRI rarely proselytizes to the “unconverted.”
For those professors who have committed themselves to infusing
sustainability into their work, two constraints seem most important:
limited publishing opportunities, and limited student interest.
Successful
academic careers are built on publishing research in A-list, refereed
journals. These journals tend to be fairly conservative and highly
disciplinary in their requirements for submissions. Sustainabil-ity
subjects are inherently interdisciplinary, and are often quickly
disqualified from publication in these journals on scope grounds
alone. Authors often submit such research to other journals, but
it does them little professional good. Recently, this barrier
has been circumvented by the publication of special editions of
some of these journals thematically focused on sustainability
(environmental management, etc.). While special editions provide
publication opportunities, the papers they contain still seem
significantly narrowed in vision by disciplinary boundaries.
Many
professors who participate in the BELL network complain that electives
they have offered examining sustainability subjects go undersubscribed
by students and must often be dropped altogether. Students tend
to take courses that maximize their career placement and advancement
prospects: they know another finance elective will catch an employer’s
attention, but they have much less confidence in the value of
a sustainability elective. Sustainability plays best when infused
into existing elective courses, rather than offered as a stand-alone
subject. This strategy has stealth aspects, but in the end it
provides students a framework for appreciating the value of sustainability
as a fundamental component of any business pursuit. The greatest
success with electives has been enjoyed at schools where sustainability
has been infused throughout the core curriculum. The Kenan-Flagler
Business School at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
last year overhauled its capstone first-year-MBA-core strategy
course to focus on sustainable development in business. Equipped
with a framework for understanding sustainability as a business
driver, this year almost half the second-year MBA class enrolled
in a sustainable development and business elective.
For
the same reason that publication opportunities are limited for
business-and-sustainability research, academic disciplinary associations
have generally offered scant support for their members who take
an interest in sustainability. The BELL network was founded with
the intention of providing these academics the chance to mingle,
network, trade ideas and approaches, and learn from each other.
BELL remains valuable today for its focus on pedagogy, which the
disciplinary associations rarely address. Over time, some of the
associations have granted grudging asylum to sustainability. Within
the Academy of Management, for example, the Organizations in the
Natural Environment (ONE) interest group attracts enthusiastic
and growing participation. ONE has yet, however, to be granted
status as a division of the Academy, and it must periodically
be recertified to continue meeting under the Academy’s umbrella.
At the least, ONE provides support for doctoral students studying
sustainability, as well as conference presentation opportunities,
which also bolster academic CVs.
Students
WRI’s BELL projects historically focused on supply-side strategies
– finding ways to help or persuade business schools to offer
more sustainability content in their curricula. More and more
businesses visibly struggle with environmental and sustainability
challenges, providing the study of these issues a greater cover
of legitimacy. Professors and students also find discussion of
these issues in class to be lively and stimulating. The two main
constraints on student interest appear to be the limited availability
of “fresh” curriculum and uncertain career value of
sustainability knowledge.
Top
business schools rely to a varying but significant extent on the
case teaching method. Owing to the perception that business conditions
are constantly changing, professors and students are loath to
use dated curriculum. This gives case studies a sharply limited
shelf life – generally no more than five years. Keeping a
subject well covered in the curriculum thus requires a steady
flow of new case studies. Case studies generally arise from professor’s
research projects, however, and to the extent that limited publication
opportunities discourage research into sustainability in business,
the flow of new teaching cases is likewise squeezed off. WRI addresses
the curriculum shortage by publishing case studies, some written
by WRI staff but most by academics at schools that do not publish
and distribute cases. Still, there are too few good teaching cases
available.
Aside
from the case curriculum, few management textbooks address sustainability.
Most that do are about ethics, public policy and regulatory topics,
reinforcing the notion that sustainability represents a constraint
on business and opportunity and is not a primary driver of business
strategy. Annexes addressing sustainability have been prepared
for several popular textbooks.
As
discussed above, most MBA students have relatively well defined
career objectives that shape their courses of study. Most companies
are still struggling at a top-executive level with their response
to sustainability, so these responsibilities are not yet deployed
to the entry level and written into job qualifications and descriptions.
Students consequently perceive little short-term value to studying
sustainability. Lack of demand clearly cannot be addressed purely
within academia. Some of the most successful business school programs
have enjoyed limited success closing the gap between academia
and the employers by creating advisory boards. Aside from keeping
the curriculum fresh and relevant, boards for these programs accept
placement of interns and graduates with their organizations as
a primary duty.
Perceived
lack of demand is due in part to poorly managed expectations concerning
placement. Several “early mover” business school programs
in environmental management were terminated because their graduates
ended up either in positions outside the MBA job mainstream –
often with lower pay – or took typical MBA jobs with no superficially
evident environmental responsibilities. Environmental divisions
of companies rarely if ever hire MBAs, nor do environmental MBAs
wish to change that fact. They seek instead to integrate environmental
thinking into standard managerial responsibilities. Deans and
program directors, however, noting lower salaries or job titles
that don’t sound green, conclude that these programs add
little value. A recent trend among schools to label these programs
“sustainable enterprise” addresses the semantic difficulty;
but of course we have yet to see job listings for “sustainability
managers” in but a few outlier firms. A vexing but important
determinant of success, then, is managing the expectations of
school decision makers about the placement prospects of students
who study sustainability.
WRI
recently started a practicum program for MBAs called Environmental
Enterprise Corps. EEC matches professor-supervised student teams
with startup firms that have passed social and environmental screens,
but that need business development assistance of they are to attract
investors. In addition to the intriguing sustainability profiles
of these firms, they offer two additional inducements to students:
international experience (client firms are in Latin America) and
entrepreneurship experience (a red-hot business school topic).
EEC shows students the practical applications of their classroom
discussions about environment and sustainability in business,
and helps overcome the suspicion that no jobs are to be had that
require sustainability knowledge. The determinant of success or
failure with MBA students, then, is the existence of a persuasive
case that sustainability knowledge will improve their career prospects.
A recent two-year WRI study of MBA students in the Net Impact
(formerly Students for Responsible Business) club found that not
a single respondent placed greater importance on finding a job
with sustainability responsibilities after their second year of
business school than before it. Business school culture may have
shifted their values, but one suspects that the dearth of employment
opportunities requiring sustainability knowledge played the major
role in shuffling their job search priorities.
Deans
and other administrators
Deans strive to maximize the resources available to their schools,
in order to attract the best students, top faculty, and most prestigious
employers. Executive programs, research agreements and charitable
gifts are the resource flows they can most easily affect. All
three depend heavily on the school’s prestige, represented
most vividly by its Business Week or US News ranking.
Any opportunity to influence how a school compares to its perceived
peer institutions offers us some leverage. This competitiveness
has made the biennial Beyond Grey Pinstripes reports an
especially effective tool. Schools that have placed highly in
the report’s ratings experience a surge in student interest
and favorable media attention; laggards understand that they are
ignoring an important trend in business, and learn about innovative
approaches they can adopt themselves. The determinant of success
or failure here, then, is the perception that a school’s
achievements or shortcomings with respect to sustainability can
put bread on the table – or take it away. This perception
is sharpening as gifts to business schools on the sustainability
theme are rapidly escalating. Two top-25 environmental/sustainability
programs have landed eight-figure endowments in the past two years,
and at least five top-25 schools are now, or will soon be, recruiting
for endowed chairs in some variation of “sustainable enterprise.”
Employers
CEOs frequently proclaim such nostrums as, “Our people are
our most important asset.” Operationally, the idea of greening
the supply chain has taken a firm hold. Why, then, do companies
ignore the opportunity to green the supply chain for their “most
important asset” by selecting new employees who understand
sustainability?
Many
executives we have spoken with profess hesitation to tell educators
how to do their job. Yet customers frequently communicate product
quality and function expectations to producers, without trying
to tell them how to operate their factories. If businesses are
the most important customers of business schools – literally,
the purchasers via employment of the schools’ chief product,
MBAs – why do they not at least include sustainability specifications
in the job descriptions they post, and evaluate candidates’
sustainability knowledge during the recruitment process? There
are many answers, boiling down to the observation that change
comes slowly. The challenge for those business schools that are
offering a cutting edge, sustainability product, unfortunately,
is that it’s hard to continue making a product nobody wants
to buy.
Change
Agents
Researching WRI’s biennial Beyond Grey Pinstripes
report, we have learned that successful programs in business schools
depend on the efforts of dedicated, secure change agents inside
and outside of the organization. It is important to gain the imprimatur
of the dean, but rarely are deans able to dedicate their attention
to one subject enough to be effective change agents. We have also
observed several programs led by highly dedicated energetic junior
faculty without full support and engagement of the deans or department
chairs. Without top support, these faculty are less likely to
earn tenure, and when they depart the school their program withers
on the vine. Who can be both dedicated to sustainability and secure
enough to invest their career in it? Senior, tenured faculty seem
to be most effective in this role.
Outside
change agents are also indispensable to sustainability efforts.
Businesses and business people lend critical legitimacy to sustainability
in business education, but rarely are they focused enough to drive
change. Organizations such as ULSF, NWF, Second Nature and WRI,
free of the bureaucratic, cultural, political and financial strictures
of academia, have proven to be key elements for change.
Conclusion
We sometimes reduce the complex system of actors and forces in
business education to the simple economic dynamics of supply and
demand. This analogy certainly strikes a resonant chord with business
school people, but like any analogy it can be deceptive. Business
schools are not monolithic: deans, program staff, faculty, students
and others all have different motivations and abilities to act
on them. Nor can business schools accurately be described simply
as the supply side of the market. They are one, complicated link
in an extended education supply chain. Success or failure of our
efforts depends on the fullest appreciation of how that supply
chain works.
Rick
Bunch is Business Education Director for the Sustainable Enterprise
Program at World Resources Institute, 10 G St NE, Suite 800, Washington,
DC 20002 USA; rickb@wri.org;
T: 202/729-7670; F: 202-729-7637; www.wri.org/sep.
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