Executive Education For Responsible Business

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Including 2007-08 Beyond Grey Pinstripes business school ranking

Business education special report 2007

www.ethicalcorp.com

Executive education for responsible business It's a whole new world

Produced in association with the

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Ethical Corporation • Education special report

Contents

Contents ...not an oxymoron

7-9 Fashion St, London E1 6PX UK Subscriptions: +44 (0) 20 7375 7575 Editorial: +44 (0) 20 7375 7561

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Introduction European Academy of Business in Society

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MBAs Developing fully-rounded leaders

Ethical Corporation is printed on Green Coat plus paper, which comprises 80% recycled and 20% Forest Stewardship Council certified source material.

Editor John Russell

Specialisation 20 Boutique campuses Small is beautiful 22

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Ethical Corporation writers Oliver Balch Rajesh Chhabara Nick Jones Lisa Roner Production Editor Ian Welsh Advertising and sales Andrew Bold [email protected] +44 (0) 20 7375 7188 US: 1800 814 3459 (ext. 310)

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This supplement is published by Ethical Corporation. For more information on Ethical Corporation’s monthly magazine, and other regular supplements, go to www.ethicalcorp.com

Europe 8 Masters Focus on specialism 10

Asian students Teaching the tigers

India 13 Ethics in education Playing catch-up The student view 14 Graduate recruitment What bosses look for

Bigger schools Mainstreaming ethics

Executive education 25 Decision-making Learning from experience 27

Board directors Teaching for the top

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Soft skills For diverse and complex problems

30 Bob Stilliard, Ashridge Gaining the right new skills 31

Harvard Business School A student’s review

Student activists Looks good on the CV

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Business schools ranked Beyond Grey Pinstripes 2007-2008

Dean profile Andrew Pettigrew, Bath School of Management

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The last word Business education’s future

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Graduate profile An MBA just the first step

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p25 Lessons in leadership

p32 The latest list

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4 Introduction

Ethical Corporation • Education special report

21st century management

Learning to lead

By Gilbert Lenssen and Peter Lacy, European Academy of Business in Society

Today’s business leaders need skills that cover politics, society and the environment. It is up to business schools to provide these lobalisation continues to fuel unparalleled economic growth, but its opportunities have come with risks attached. Climate change, energy security, pollution, poverty and water scarcity are just some of the urgent challenges facing today’s corporate and political leaders, and their communities. Companies are now expected to share responsibility with governments for tackling issues that previously they would have ignored in their primary pursuit of profit. Confronting global problems from HIV/Aids to human rights has become a way for big firms to repair reputations that have declined sharply as annual revenues have soared. In a recent FT/Harris poll, almost 40% of UK respondents expressed zero admiration for senior executives in charge of major companies. An international majority of those surveyed said that globalisation had not been beneficial for their country. Companies now realise that they need new strategic and operational approaches to manage their role in society. Superior performance in this regard can bring significant competitive advantages and financial reward. Failure to adapt can threaten the survival of the firm.

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Management shortfall Extractive industry firms such as BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto or Exxon say that the shortage of managers able to display sensitivity to local demands in unstable operating environments threatens to permanently undermine large-scale investments. In July a report from McKinsey, based on interviews with almost 400 chief executives, found that more than nine out of ten surveyed said their companies were addressing more environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues than five years ago to improve competitiveness. Research from Goldman Sachs across six sectors has found a strong correlation

Training leads to competitive advantage

between ESG leadership and financial performance. Companies with superior policies outperformed the general stock market by 25%, and their peers in 72% of cases. The companies and academics interviewed in this special report state their conviction that tomorrow’s leaders will need social and political skills if they are to be successful. These skills will be needed just as much, and in some cases even more, than traditional business competencies such as accounting and finance. Future managers and executives will have to integrate new factors, uncertainties and views into their decision-making process. They will need a different set of tools to cope with complex operating environments. Global companies are reviewing their human resources strategies and internal management development programmes to better address current shortfalls. In this context, corporate universities as well as business schools have a growing and vital role. This presents an enormous challenge – and opportunity – for the entire field of management development, both academic institutions and in-company training providers. Companies are desperate for more and better knowledge in the workforce, with business schools its most important supplier. Companies must improve at identifying these needs and communicating them to business schools in particular. Without such exchanges, the content of executive education will never address their key priorities. A 2006 EABIS research report from Ashridge proposed a framework for companies to do this, and do it better. Practical understanding is therefore needed from faculty on these issues. In future business schools will have to look to blend core faculty with reflective practitioners, developing new career paths, knowledge models and teaching content.

The overarching question is: can they ultimately deliver the goods? The forecast is optimistic, if uncertain. At the MBA and masters levels, corporate responsibility is moving consistently into mainstream disciplines through more innovative approaches and courses. In parallel, EABIS has worked with the UN Global Compact to shape and launch the Principles for Responsible Management Education to inspire international change. Moreover, many EABIS member schools now work closely with multinational companies to design tailored executive programmes on ESG issues. Excellence in all of these areas can become a competitive institutional advantage. Carpe diem Associations such as Net Impact have spread rapidly on campuses worldwide, reflecting increased student demand for action. Encouragingly, social entrepreneurship is pushing its way into the curriculum, as young talented business executives look to balance professional success with personal responsibility. More widely, we are seeing corporate leaders cross over into business schools, bringing practical insights and perspectives to complement traditional academic strengths. Business schools are opening themselves up to non-traditional collaborations and partnerships – with business and other stakeholders. Executive education programmes may currently struggle to keep pace with corporate progress. However, academic reform and innovation are on an upward curve, which societal pressures will surely accelerate. This supplement is a timely initiative and reminder that change is indeed taking place in executive education. Whether this change is sufficient, we leave to your individual judgment. We hope that you find this report a stimulating, thought-provoking read. ■

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6 US MBAs

Ethical Corporation • Education special report

Business schools

Weaving ethics into business education Future corporate leaders will need more rounded skills than their predecessors and the world’s top business schools are responding by offering courses in corporate responsibility, says Lisa Roner rom new hires and mid-level managers to the c-suite – or top-level management chiefs – and even board directors, ethics education is garnering an unprecedented level of attention in corporations around the world. Leadership is taking on new meaning. Up and coming executives are being recruited as much for their “soft skills” in teamwork, communication, sustainability, corporate responsibility and ethics as they are for their financial and strategic prowess. In fact, a 2006 survey by the Graduate Management Admission Council found that 40% of employers place a strong emphasis on such soft skills in the selection and hiring process. But a survey by recruitment firm Egon Zehnder reveals only 20% of international corporate executives believe an MBA prepares people for real life management. To meet the growing demand for more wellrounded leaders, business schools are responding with a broad range of new programmes and approaches to train current and future corporate executives. It is the responsibility of MBA programmes to improve the practice of management one student at a time by helping each one maximise his or her potential for future leadership roles, says Sim Sitkin, the head of North Carolina-based Duke University’s Center of Leadership and Ethics (COLE). Students “must see every decision in the broader ethical context”, and it is the obligation of MBA programmes to teach students to incorporate ethics and leadership into their roles in the workplace, he stresses.

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It is an outlook that is quickly becoming the rule rather than the exception at business schools around the globe. Since the Enron scandal, most business schools have beefed up the teaching of ethics and related topics, often under the banner of leadership. Yale has shaken up its programme to include ethics as part of every course, because it says it found a growing disconnect between how business is taught and how careers are developing. In Europe, INSEAD says its goal is to become a “leadership institution” and IMD in Switzerland says it is retooling to focus on leadership qualities and international experience. Integrating curricula Many schools, including the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, are incorporating immersion and simulation techniques in their programmes to give students hands-on experience at making ethical decisions long before they reach a corporate environment. According to recent research – sponsored by the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts, and the Ethics Resource Center in Washington DC – there has been a fivefold increase in the number of stand-alone ethics courses at top-ranked business schools since 1998. Laura Hartman is a professor of business ethics and legal studies at DePaul University, Chicago, and one of the researchers on the project. She says MBA programmes are also quickly migrating from issuesbased, stand-alone courses to a more integrated focus on individual and corporate ethics that

The US: home of the MBA • The Masters of Business Administration (MBA) degree emerged in the US at the start of the last century, in response to demand from companies that wanted precise knowledge of how to run a business. • The US remains the world’s biggest MBA market: over 1200 programmes are on offer at business schools across the country. • But Europe is catching up fast. The number of MBA programmes in Europe grew from 181 in 1999 to 658 in 2006.

Sustainability management is one of the biggest business opportunities to come along in a long time

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Ethical Corporation • Education special report

includes topics such as corporate responsibility and sustainability spread liberally throughout the curriculum. Nearly 55% of schools say they offer such an integrated curriculum. At RSM Erasmus in Holland, a new programme called Living Management Assignment integrates six functional areas – finance, marketing, strategy, operations, human resources and entrepreneurship – with ethics and sustainability, on which 25% of the student’s grade is based. Hartman and her colleagues surveyed the Financial Times’ 50 top-ranked business schools, and of the 44 that responded, more than 84% say they require students to take courses that address one or all of these topics. Eleven of 44 require MBA students to study ethics in a stand-alone course, while 52% of the schools surveyed say they require that ethics be taught in some combination with either corporate responsibility, sustainability or both. The push is being supported by a high level of institutional backing in the form of centres for ethics, corporate responsibility and sustainability alone or in combination, Hartman says. Nearly 66% of the schools surveyed by the group have a centre dedicated to at least one of the three topics. And many of those that do not have a centre, like the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, still have strong programmes with endowed chairs and professorships, she says. Kellie McElhaney, executive director of the Center for Responsible Business at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, believes today’s business schools have the responsibility and are seizing the opportunity to create a

Graduates now have a better ethical understanding

US MBAs

“new type of innovative business leader ”. These graduates are both knowledgeable about traditional MBA subjects and “strategic about the social and environmental issues that are increasingly affecting businesses and their survival, value and ultimate success”. Even small schools are having a big impact. The Presidio School of Management in San Francisco is one of a handful of schools offering sustainable or “green” MBA programmes. Although by mid-2007 it boasted only 56 graduates, enrolment for Presidio’s 2007/08 class was by that stage already around 200. Presidio’s provost, Ron Nahser, says sustainability management is one of the biggest business opportunities to come along in a long time and demand is already high for the school’s students. In the first semester of 2007, more than 100 Presidio students worked on 30 projects for companies. New thinking at the top A new laboratory for sustainable business has also opened at MIT. The programme will use scientific statistics and case studies to teach students about the effects of global warming, pollution and other environmental factors on business. Some schools are even offering dual degrees or concentrations in sustainability, including the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business. Perhaps the most refreshing trend, Hartman says, is the increasing interest among non-ethics faculty in integrating ethical discussions into their courses. The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the leading accrediting body for business schools, she says, is offering sold-out seminars on teaching business ethics. More and more traditional core subject faculty are clamouring to be effective at introducing ethics, corporate responsibility and sustainability topics into their courses. Michael Hoffman, executive director of the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College, and a collaborator of Hartman’s, says the trend to integrate the three themes throughout the curriculum will help them become “habitual” and “part of the thinking of a business executive”. The developments at top-tier schools, says John Fernades, president and chief executive of the AACSB, reflect trends unfolding across the broader landscape of business education, and he predicts that the focus on ethics is “sure to pay future dividends in the corporate world”. ■

What does an MBA involve? MBA courses are a business school’s signature offering. Core modules typically cover: • accounting • marketing • finance • strategy • operations Other modules address the skills required of modern global leaders: • macroeconomics • international politics Extra classes work on the “soft skills” of future managers: • leadership • personal development These help individuals develop judgement and discover personal values to guide their graduate careers.

It is the obligation of MBA programmes to teach students to incorporate ethics and leadership into their roles in the workplace

Useful links: www.aacsb.edu www.gmac.com/gmac www.ethics.org

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8 Europe

Ethical Corporation • Education special report

Other section content: 10 Asian expansion 13 Indian students

Masters programmes

Flexible courses and more focused teaching at Europe’s schools Business schools that put corporate responsibility teaching at the core of their courses are now at a competitive advantage. Oliver Balch explains why hen Kaarina Dubee was looking around for a masters course, she had one priority area in mind. A project leader at Volvo, she wanted to increase her understanding of corporate citizenship strategy development and implementation. Her search led her from her base in Sweden to the University of Bath in the UK. Bath has been running an MSc in responsibility and business practice for a decade. Structured around eight week-long workshops over two years, the course draws on expertise developed across the University’s graduate courses. Kaarina credits the course content with broadening her perspective. Given the curriculum titles, that comes as no surprise. The timetable includes subject areas such as “new economics”, “humanity and enterprise”, “globalisation and the new context of business” and “self and world futures”. She also maintains that the practical bent of the course enabled her to start making concrete applications in her day-to-day job from the outset. Bath calls the approach “action research” – a process of continuous, participative learning aimed at increasing student awareness of their perspectives and behaviour.

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Innovative courses “The MSc applies to the interaction between different challenges because there are so many things that you can’t solve within one frame of mind at the moment,” explains director of studies Judi Marshall. The University of Bath is not the exception it once was. Across Europe, more and more universities and

business schools are developing innovative masters programmes. Traditional management education is being supplemented with specialist courses on sustainability, corporate social responsibility, environmental management and other emerging themes. “Most business schools across Europe are increasing the amount of coverage they give to those areas,” says Jonathan Slack, chief executive of the UK’s Association of Business Schools. Those leading the way tend to come from western and northern Europe, he adds, although there are notable exceptions. Change catalysts So, what is driving the change? The primary factor is undoubtedly the awareness among both recruiting companies and students that social and environmental issues are of mounting importance. “There is a clear commitment in the corporate world to take social responsibility seriously and that in turn triggers greater interest in business programmes that cover it,” Slack says. And business education is responding in kind. The Association of Business Schools, for example, last year drew up criteria for the teaching of corporate responsibility in the UK. The standards are now used to appraise providers of business management education. Expanding the focus to mainland Europe, the push to integrate corporate responsibility into graduate business teaching received a major boost in July. Under the Global Compact’s new Principles for Responsible Management Education, academic

Traditional management education is being supplemented with specialist courses on sustainability, and other emerging themes

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Europe

Rethinking management education in the light of today’s changing business world clearly presents faculty with an intellectual challenge. Moving the perception of business management as a value-less economic science to an inter-disciplinary social science represents an important first step. Practical hurdles also exist if corporate responsibility is to get onto more European masters courses. Finding the resources to develop programmes and the faculty members to teach them is no small undertaking. Even for those business schools with experience in the area, continual modifications are still required to stay on top of what is a dynamic subject area. Parisian business school HEC, for example, has been offering an MSc in sustainable development for several years now. It also integrates aspects of corporate responsibility and ethics into its awardwinning MBA programme. During 2007/08, students on HEC’s MBA will face a core 20-hour module on sustainable business strategy. “The market, both from the corporate side and the participants’ side, is pushing us to develop more awareness and research in these areas,” explains Valerie Gauthier, associate dean of HEC’s MBA programme. “Now it is how fast and how efficiently you are doing it [integrating sustainability] that will make the difference.” Flexible learning for today’s business school graduates

institutions have been given fresh impetus to incorporate “universal values” in curricula and research. The way universities are structuring undergraduate and graduate courses is also improving. Under the Bologna Declaration, European universities and business schools now have the flexibility to offer shorter, more specialised masters graduate courses. The declaration – also known as the Bologna Accords – provides a motivation for curriculum innovation. By harmonising the length of undergraduate and graduate degrees across Europe, students should be granted greater mobility to switch between universities. How to stand out As a result, higher education institutions are beginning to use corporate responsibility and related subjects as a way of differentiating themselves and thereby attracting students. However, it is important not to over-egg the importance of the Bologna Accords. No mention is made of specific subject areas, whether ethicallyrelated or otherwise. Instead the accords should be seen as a “window of opportunity”, according to Peter Lacy, executive director at the European Academy of Business in Society (EABIS). “Because higher education in Europe has been thrown up in the air, there is a chance to rearrange how it falls,” he says.

Experience still counts A final word of caution should also be directed at the balance between pre-experience and experienced graduates – those who have yet to enter the workplace and those who have. To date, most sustainability-related masters courses in Europe have attracted career professionals. The Bologna Accords are now opening the door to recent graduates to continue their studies in specific niche areas before entering the workplace. Supporters of this approach argue that highly qualified pre-experience graduates are capable of learning how to flexibly apply their knowledge once they are in the workplace. The detractors express less confidence. Kai Peters, chief executive of Ashridge Business School in the UK, speaks for many when he expresses his concern that “CSR graduates” could be too young for the job. “For students coming out of university with only corporate social responsibility on their foreheads, [companies] wouldn’t know how to employ them,” he argues. Europe’s turbulent masters scene has yet to settle. When it finally does, the competition will begin. Around 12,000 courses are expected to flood the field of graduate management education alone. Corporations and students are waiting with their clipboards to judge the new courses for their content quality, relevance and, above all, imagination. ■

Snapshot: Bologna Declaration Initially drawn up in 1999, the Bologna Declaration and subsequent communiqués now count 45 European countries among their signatories. The initiative is designed to improve the alignment of higher education systems across Europe, thereby increasing student mobility and rationalising the granting of degrees. The main change relates to the length and structure of masters courses. Instead of the traditional, continental European masters-only system (five years), Bologna introduces the bachelors masters progression (four plus one, or three plus two years). All European students will henceforth graduate firstly with a bachelors degree. Graduates can subsequently choose to continue their studies in the same subject at the same university, change subject or university nationally or internationally, or go directly into employment. All signatories have agreed that these changes will be implemented by 2010. It is estimated that between 1.5 and two million Europeans will graduate annually with bachelors degrees once Bologna has been fully implemented.

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10 Europe

Education offshore

Europe’s new export industry Educating the next generation of leaders in Asia’s booming economies is a priority for Europe’s business schools, says Nick Jones or years they have taught current and future executives to handle the disruptive effects of globalisation on their industries. Now business schools themselves must adapt to long-term global trends that promise to separate winners from losers. Top of the agenda is how to attract prospective students from the vast talent pools of India and China – before rival schools get there first. The market in providing higher education to foreign students is growing fast – and will continue to grow. In a 2004 report the British Council said that demand for UK higher education places could triple by 2020, growing by 6% each year. A study by student recruiting firm IDP has forecast demand for seven million students places in 2025, four times as many as in 2000. Underlying the trend is the demand for highlevel skills created by economic growth in Asian countries with large populations. In China, the need for mid-level and senior managers to guide the expansion of domestic and multinational firms is outstripping supply, leading business leaders to name talent shortage as the key constraint on growth. Talent constraints are biting particularly hard in India, where IT industry body Nasscom has warned of a shortfall of IT workers by 2010. The resulting spike in corporate sector wages has put top-end salaries onto a level more familiar in New York and London, making investment in a European MBA a feasible proposition and causing a surge in applications.

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New melting pots According to Stephan Chambers, head of the MBA programme at Said Business School in Oxford, 80% of those taking the course are from outside the UK. Students divide about equally between Europe, Asia and the Americas, and India is the fastest growing source. “People want to come here because we’re one of the best schools in the business,” he says. “Our student populations mimic those regions of the world that have good universities and booming economies.” The school’s 225 one-year MBA students come from 48 different countries around the world. Of the 2006 intake, 38% took a job in a new country on graduating – many choosing to stay in Europe –

Ethical Corporation • Education special report

while average salaries were 52% above pre-MBA levels. According to OECD statistics, China is the largest source of demand for postgraduate education abroad with 8% of the total, followed by South Korea with 5% and India with 4%. The UK is the second largest supplier of such courses after the US. France, Germany and the Netherlands are strengthening their positions, having been temporarily eclipsed by Englishspeaking countries with modern MBA courses and fewer restrictions on their higher education providers. But European institutions are using a variety of means to catch up. An increasing number of courses are taught in English, while some schools are leading the way in the use of offshore campuses to reach the hottest segments of demand. Among the most established is INSEAD’s Singapore campus, set up seven years ago. Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Dubai and Qatar in the Gulf have also sought impressive European teaching brands as a way to raise the skill level of their economies and

INSEAD’s ground breaking Singapore campus has proved a real success

become regional hubs for higher education. Nigel Roome, who holds a chair in CSR at Solvay Business School, explains that his Brussels-based institute is highly international both in its intake and in its alumni’s post-graduation destinations after they graduate. This creates a student body that brings a wide range of values into the classroom. “This is very nourishing in terms of teaching CSR,” he says. “Appreciation of business in a social context is different in America from in Europe, just

Chinese business leaders name talent shortage as the key constraint on growth

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Birmingham Business School

MSc Corporate Governance and Corporate Responsibility

Being a sustainable company is about more than just bottom line profits. David Jackson, Company Secretary, BP plc

Increasingly, companies are judged on their behaviour within the societies in which they operate. In addition, investor expectations are more demanding than ever before, and the cost to companies that ignore the benefits of good corporate governance is high. The MSc Corporate Governance and Corporate Responsibility offers an international perspective on these two key areas which are of fundamental importance to businesses and society globally. This programme is designed to provide a sound understanding of corporate governance and corporate responsibility from corporate, investor and stakeholder perspectives. This programme considers the key issues in detail and is relevant for a wide variety of careers in business and the investment sector, or for those considering a career in research.

As a student on the programme you will benefit from:  Teaching by leading international experts in the field. They bring their expertise and knowledge to a programme which we believe is leading edge in its coverage and content  The expertise and knowledge of the Centre for Corporate Governance Research, which runs the programme. The centre has strong international links, for example, working with organisations such as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN)

 The use of case studies, events and

guest speakers, allowing you to relate theory to practical situations  Links with companies on a local, national and international level Learn more Tel: +44 (0)121 415 8273 Fax: +44 (0)121 414 2263 Email: [email protected] www.business.bham.ac.uk

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Business Ethics ÈK_\ :f\^\ Xmfnj \k_`ZXc Y\_Xm`fi Xj X XdXib glijl` Xe[ XZbefnc\[^\j X cfe^&Xe[`e Zfdd`kd\ek kf ^cfYXc ZfeZ\iej%É — from the Mendoza College of Business Mission Statement

Featured Conferences and Workshops

• Monthly Newsletter: Value Lines

• Business Education at Catholic Universities: Exploring the Role of Mission-Driven Business Schools. 7th International Conference on Catholic Social Thought and Management Education, to be held at Notre Dame, June 11-13, 2008. Information available at ethicalbusiness.nd.edu.

• Pfizer Faculty Seminar in Ethics

• Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Views on the Creation of Wealth. Interfaith conference on April 23-24, 2007 at Notre Dame. Program and papers available at business.nd.edu/wealthcreation. • Peace Through Commerce: Partnership as the New Paradigm. Conference held in November, 2006. Book forthcoming from the conference, Responsible Corporate Citizenship and the Ideals of the U.N. Global Compact, edited by Oliver F. Williams, Director of the Center for Ethics and Religious Values in Business at Notre Dame.

Annual Events and Activities

Comprehensive Ethics Curriculum & Courses • Required MBA course in Foundations of Ethics since 1967. Ethics courses are also required in the Executive MBA curriculum since inception and undergraduate programs. • Ethics Electives (one required): Accounting Ethics, Ethics in Finance and Banking, Globalization and Ethics, International Business Ethics, Leadership and Ethics, Marketing Ethics, and Spirituality and Business. • Business Ethics Field Project course at both the MBA and undergraduate levels and extensive involvement in Community Service.

Recognitions /Accomplishments

• Cahill Lecture on Ethical Business (one)

• Ranked 5th in World in Preparing MBAs for Social and Environmental Stewardship by Aspen Institute (AI) and World Resources Institute (WRI), 2005

• Hesburgh Award for Sustained Contribution and Leadership in Business Ethics

• Ranked by BusinessWeek and the Wall Street Journal for Excellence in Ethics

• Ethics Week

• Highest 5 Star Rating for Faculty Research by AI and WRI

• Berges Lecture Series in Business Ethics (six)

Notre Dame Institute for Ethical Business Worldwide Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Religious Values in Business 255 Mendoza College of Business • University of Notre Dame • Notre Dame, IN 46556 USA 1- 574-631-6072 • www.ethicalbusiness.nd.edu

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Ethical Corporation • Education special report

Europe/India

as it differs within the nation states of Europe and in the emerging forms of capitalism found in India and China.” With Asian firms making progressively greater inroads on western markets, Roome says that the presence of their next-generation leaders in classes he teaches – such as an MBA option on governance and corporate social responsibility – makes for interesting debate. He says: “As we move from Chinese companies being suppliers of components to being global brands, we will see a shift of orientation from cost and function to brand characteristics, which will potentially include issues of responsibility.” At Said Business School, meanwhile, Stephan Chambers prefers to downplay the role of specialist ethics courses. “Doing good business is about being smart, and being smart is about making sure that you don’t create costs that you have to account for later, whether those are political, social or environmental,” he says. While Said MBA students can choose options in

Indian schools

Ethics and success aren’t mixing In contrast to the trend in the US and Europe, corporate responsibility is still off the agenda for aspiring executives at India’s business schools. Rajesh Chhabara reports urvival in India’s corporate jungle is not based on being nice – a lesson the country’s job-hunting business school graduates often learn at interview. “Our campus recruitment history shows that candidates who sound ethical, upright and principle-oriented during interviews mostly get rejected. Companies consider them unfit for the corporate world,” confides a professor at a top business school in India. That neatly sums up the state of corporate responsibility in the country. Corporate responsibility has yet to find a place in India’s booming management education sector, which has over 1,250 approved schools teaching 125,000 full time students and a further 100,000 on distance learning courses. Six elite schools, the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), are hot favourites of global corporate recruiters. Modelled on US business schools, IIMs continue to focus on increasing shareholder value. They use management books written by American authors and

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CSR and social entrepreneurship, the launch of a mandatory new course on how climate change will affect companies, sectors and countries is more central to the curriculum. “I’m not convinced that teaching CSR should be a big separate initiative,” Chambers says. “We are about teaching people to think rigorously about organisations. We’re not about teaching our students to break rules and accrue costs, but to do the Oxford’s Said Business School has 80% overseas students opposite.” As growth motors ahead in Asia’s largest economies, it will be the students themselves who decide which approach to global challenges is best. ■

learn from western case studies and theories. The system has successfully produced world-class managers, many of them at the helm of global organisations. About 80% of IIM graduates join multinational companies. In recent years, consulting firms and financial institutions – both less known for CSR initiatives – have been the top recruiters offering dizzying salaries. Curricula of top business schools including the six IIMs do not include corporate responsibility as a subject. IIM-Ahmedabad offers management ethics as an elective and often finds no takers. Vidyanand Jha, a professor at IIM-Calcutta, says: “Companies are not looking for CSR skills while hiring fresh MBAs.” This message applies to students in other parts of Asia. A recruiter at a global bank in Singapore who was searching for a CSR head explains: “This is essentially an NGO job within the corporate setting to look after our community work.”

newly formed Indian School of Business averaged around $135,000, while the highest offer stood at a cool $269,000 by an Indian IT company. At IIM-Calcutta, the highest offer of $250,000 was made by a leading investment banker to two students for posts in New York.

Salaries count Ricardo Lim, assistant dean at the Asian Institute of Management, Manila, in the Philippines, says: “I don’t think recruiters come talking about triple bottom line. They are still looking for conventional skills in management, finance and operations.” Students and parents are driven by the brand name and ranking of the school rather than the curriculum offered. A school’s brand is valued by the salary its graduates receive. International salaries offered to graduates of the

Eventual salary is the top priority

With rewards like this available to students without any grounding in corporate responsibility, it is little wonder schools are reluctant to teach the subject. Biju Varkkey, a professor at IIM-Ahmedabad, estimates that it will be another three to four years before Indian business schools start taking an interest in corporate responsibility. ■

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14 The student view

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Other section content: 16 Successful graduates 18 Campaigning counts

Career opportunities

Giving recruiters what they want Demand for social and environmental expertise is growing and evolving. A diverse array of postgraduate courses is helping people find the roles they seek and providing companies with the talent they need, explains Nick Jones ne type of web page gets more hits than almost any of the thousands of sites devoted to corporate responsibility: job notice-boards. The search for new motivation and challenges is bringing an increasing number of job hunters to this competitive sub sector. Acre Recruitment, an agency that focuses on sustainability-related jobs, watches emerging trends in the job market very closely. “In general there are more candidates wanting to get into CSR than jobs available,” says Acre’s director, Tom Leathes. “However there are emerging sectors where the reverse is true, such as ethical supply chains and climate change.” In-house corporate responsibility teams, specialist consultancies and dedicated NGO positions managing corporate partnerships have fuelled Acre’s growth since it was founded in 2003. The job market continues to expand, while also becoming more complex. “Where CSR used to be quite a general sector, it is now becoming much more specialised into its constituent parts,” says Leathes. “The candidates that do best are those with a focus in a certain area.” For business schools and universities, the challenge is to respond with courses that equip students with most sought-after skills, providing differentiated offerings that build on each institution’s strengths. In the UK, Said Business School in Oxford has introduced social enterprise courses to its MBA programme, using dedicated researchers at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship. Henley Management College has started an executive

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education course titled “Leading Sustainably”. Full-time, specialist programmes have increased their intake at institutions such as Nottingham and Warwick. At Birkbeck College, which specialises in evening courses for London professionals, sustained demand has led to a growing number of options covering CSR, the environment and corporate governance. The MA in responsibility and business practice at Bath has just increased its intake to 33 a year, after many years of a 24-student limit, according to course tutor Peter Reason. Popular and relevant Jeremy Moon, director of Nottingham Business School’s International Centre on Corporate Social Responsibility, says the school is committed to providing courses that are relevant to the real world of management. Nottingham offers two dedicated corporate responsibility postgraduate programmes: an MA in CSR and an MBA. Six academics and 12 PhD students do teaching and research. A key part of the programmes is an internship system that gives students actual work experience. Moon believes the breadth of skills that corporate responsibility students acquire is an asset in the job market. He says: “Some who have gone into mainstream functions that do not relate directly to CSR have nonetheless been told that their CSR degree made them attractive.” As an example he highlights a recent masters graduate now working in the marketing department of a multinational food company.

What employers look for Employers have high expectations of corporate responsibility graduates. • Basic business skills are taken for granted. • Leadership ability is much sought after. • Personality traits – integrity, strength of character, charisma – all rank highly. • Cultural awareness and creativity to deal with the triple bottom line are highly relevant for global companies in challenging environments.

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The student view

tered Institute of Marketing] have become standard in that industry, but as yet none of the CSR-related courses have yet reached that level of acceptance,” he says. “If a candidate has achieved fantastic results in a previous CSR role, this is likely to hold more weight than a qualification alone,” he adds. “But the two together provide an extremely attractive background for companies.”

Well-structured course content is vital

But people who are thinking of taking a specialist course should first take a hard look at what they will get out of it, says Leathes. “Marketing qualifications such as CIM [Char-

The right skills Key factors set the best candidates apart: a successful track record in industry, strong commercial skills, mastery of any technical knowledge for the job in hand, and being a good communicator. But, as the directors of CSR courses are keen to point out, many individuals have found that postgraduate study tips the balance in their favour. The good news for corporate responsibility graduates is that as business becomes more sophisticated in managing its social and environmental impacts, companies will need candidates with greater technical expertise. Climate change managers, for example, are now in high demand, commanding salaries around $180,000. No doubt these sums will soon be higher. Now that’s something worth studying for. ■

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Many individuals have found that postgraduate study tips the balance in their favour

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16 The student view

Ethical Corporation • Education special report

Graduate profile

Putting values into practice For the co-founders of EcoAct, studying for an MBA inspired them to start their own business – and made them realise the benefits of ethical management values. John Russell reports hen Gerald Maradan enrolled on an MBA programme at HEC Paris business school in September 2004 he knew he wanted to start his own business. But the idea of sustainable development had never occurred to him. Three years later, Maradan, 33, and fellow HEC graduate Thierry Fornas, 38, are busy running EcoAct. This Paris-based start-up oversees social and environmental programmes for companies including GE, Coca-Cola and EDF. EcoAct began as an MBA project submitted for a school competition. Teams of students had six months to make detailed business plans for new ventures. Maradan and Fornas had a simple idea: to broker partnerships between companies and nongovernmental organisations, enabling them to meet goals set out in corporate sustainability policies. Their idea may have failed to win the competition, but HEC professors backed the pair. The school gave them a room on its Paris campus to use as an office for a year after they graduated. Fellow international classmates were enlisted to work for the company around the world, setting up projects.

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Spreading the message Today, EcoAct runs projects that include carbon offsetting in Argentina, clean technology development in Burkina Faso and reforestation work in France. In early 2007, the company opened an office in Brazil, headed by another HEC graduate, Eduardo de Freitas. Maradan and Fornas are currently looking at opening a branch in India, to be run by a further classmate.

Maradan is convinced he would not now be running his own company were it not for attending HEC. The business skills learnt and contacts made on the course were invaluable. He says: “Without doing an MBA I don’t know how I could’ve found good people to create the company with me.” Confidence and success But he says an MBA is about more than just networking or learning business basics like finance and marketing. For Maradan, the course gave him the confidence to become a successful business leader. Both EcoAct founders can remember moments on the HEC course that were key to persuading them to go into business. For Maradan, it was attending sessions on the school’s Visions of Leadership programme. Each week a chief executive is invited to HEC to tell MBA students the secrets of their success. Each is asked to focus on the un-teachable aspects of leadership such as values, relationships and judgement. Maradan remembers meeting Didier Pineau-Valencienne, the former chief executive of electronics firm Schneider, who said that “big managers are not exceptional people” and that anyone with enough courage and will power could start their own firm. Fornas’s moment of insight came on the school’s elite leadership programme – The Executive Committee on Campus – a student version of the original TEC, a US programme started 50 years ago. The programme involves monthly meetings for chief executives to discuss leadership. Twelve select participants on the HEC programme attend six group

An HEC MBA energised Maradan and Fornas

“It felt that we were really at the beginning of something new”

meetings and six one-on-one meetings. Each is held at the Ritz Paris. TEC on Campus chairman Gary Brinderson, chief executive of his self-named construction firm, oversees the discussion. Maradan remembers: “For Thierry, that course was really important. It was there he discovered entrepreneurship could be an option for him.” Personal development Although Maradan had always known he wanted to start a business, it was a hi-tech company he wanted to found, not an ethical firm like EcoAct. A weeklong seminar on sustainable development in mid-2005 changed his mind, he says. Representatives from companies and consultancies made a series of presentations to students on how being ethical could be turned into commercial opportunities. Looking back, Maradan says: “It felt that we were really at the beginning of something new. I had a feeling the hi-tech business, the business I knew very well, was not booming anymore.” The seminar, he says, showed that sustainable development could be that new business. Ultimately, says Maradan, the real value of an MBA is the chance it offers managers to escape the daily office grind and reconsider their career options. For the founders of EcoAct, their MBA break was one that was extremely well timed. ■

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18 The student view

Ethical Corporation • Education special report

Campus activism

Protesting improves your prospects Campus students are agitating for business to clean up its act. No surprise there, then – except these days it’s management students who are leading the calls. Lisa Roner explains why et Impact, the San-Francisco-headquartered business student organisation, is on a mission to change the world. Its bright-spark members are busy building a network of new leaders committed to using the power of business to address social and environmental challenges. The group is certainly being credited with having an impact on individual campuses, their communities and broader society. Many business school deans, when asked about trends at their institutions, highlight student interest as one of the key drivers of curriculum changes and course developments, says Laura Hartman, a professor of business ethics and legal studies at DePaul University, North Carolina. Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, for instance, has redesigned its curriculum to emphasise issues linked to the environment and corporate responsibility, in large part based on student input, much of it from Net Impact members Hartman says many deans also mention student clubs – and Net Impact specifically – as a sponsor or driver of activities and special events related to ethics, corporate responsibility and sustainability.

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Widespread impact Seventy-two per cent of the Financial Times’ top 50 global business schools have active Net Impact chapters, Hartman says. With more than 120 chapters around the world and partnerships with a variety of profit and non-profit organisations, the groups are involved in a wide range of activities. Most recently, Net Impact chapters across the US have taken a strong interest in a grassroots climate change campaign called Step It Up that is calling for the US Congress to take action for

It pays to choose the right cause

an 80% cut in carbon emissions by 2050. Net Impact members are passionate about social and environmental issues and say they should be important considerations for business schools, students’ career goals and the private sector in general. In a survey by Net Impact of more than 2,000 current MBA students at 87 different business schools, 90% say business leaders should factor social and environmental effects into their business decisions and 60% believe doing so can be profitable. Eighty-one per cent of those surveyed think companies should work toward the betterment of society, but only 18% believe most companies already are. As Michael Stepanek, the MBA programme director at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina, observes: “When you take intelligent, ambitious, team-oriented students and combine these abilities with a heightened sense of social consciousness, you are left with a future business leader capable of influencing significant and real change.” ■

Useful links: www.netimpact.org http://stepitup2007.org

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Ethical Corporation • Education special report

Dean profile

Andrew Pettigrew, Bath School of Management

Management education’s big tent approach As head of Bath School of Management, Andrew Pettigrew wants to build a broad church for the study of responsible business. John Russell peers inside or Andrew Pettigrew, dean of University of Bath School of Management, the study of business in society is a passion and a necessity. After 40 years in a distinguished career that has included spells at Yale, Harvard and London Business School, Pettigrew is clear on the big issue facing research teams today. “If I was starting today at the beginning of my career, business in society would be the theme that I would pick up,” he says. “It’s the most forward-looking, fascinating intellectual area with enormous policy and practical implications. And it’s not going to go away.” Pettigrew joined Bath as dean in 2003 from Warwick Business School, where he headed the Centre of Corporate Strategy and Change. Through his career he has studied how organisations have adapted to change by reforming their own characters, structure and strategy – something clearly relevant to companies today as they react to challenges such as climate change. He prefers to talk of business in society rather than corporate responsibility, a term Pettigrew feels is too narrow to address the many changes affecting how modern companies do business. Five words frame his thinking on the subject – power, legitimacy, responsibility, governance and regulation. Bath’s dean wants to expand academic research programmes to include questions of corporate power and legitimacy, which he regrets are “extraordinarily” rarely discussed in business schools. A company like BP, for example, is equivalent to the 18th richest nation in the world in economic terms. But the puzzle of what role it should play in capacity building in Angola remains untouched by academics.

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Ambitious to deepen the study of how companies adapt to changing environments, Pettigrew feels he has gone to the right place. Bath is one of the top 30 European business schools, according to the Financial Times. More important is its reputation for pioneering work on business in society, thanks to long-serving faculty member Judi Marshall who started teaching the subject in the 1990s. Practical lessons 2007 has seen the school celebrate the tenth anniversary of its awardwinning masters course, the MSc in responsibility and business practice. The part-time, modular course is designed for students working in large companies, government departments and consultancies. Participants are encouraged to transfer lessons from the classroom to their workplaces. “A lot of the learning comes from intervening, from action, in their own organisation,” observes Pettigrew. Successful business schools must combine rigorous academic training with work-based learning, says Pettigrew. At undergraduate level, all students work for a year in industry. Most take placements in City of London investment banks while others work for multinationals including Danone and Unilever. Many students go abroad to work in cities including Shanghai, Mumbai, Paris and New York. “We’re really trying to pick great people with a global mindset,” he explains. “Companies are asking for graduates who are socially and politically aware,” he adds. Like all European business schools, Bath is already a global organisation. Around 40% of

It’s business in society not CR, says Pettigrew

Successful business schools must combine rigorous academic training with work-based learning

Bath MSc in responsibility and business practice • Although not dubbed an executive education course, this programme is aimed at managers currently working in business or the public sector. • 24 students a year. • Part-time study over two years. • The course is based on a series of eight intensive residential workshops of five days each.

masters and 60% of MBA students come from outside the UK. Comparative research is one way to develop resources for teaching students about international business. The aim, explains Pettigrew, is “to show the students, if they didn’t know it already, that context matters”. One current research project examines Guang Xi networks in China and how western companies must adapt to that country’s rules of business conduct. Pettigrew wants Bath to be a “broad church” for inter-disciplinary study. “We tend to be driven here more by themes than just disciplines,” he says. Business in society and international business are two of the school’s main focal points. Bath aims to expose students to questions of responsible business throughout their course of study. How companies can manage climate change, for example, is examined in the light of organisational behaviour, looking at what cultural obstacles make it difficult for companies to reduce emissions at offices or plants. And, just as future business leaders will be expected to work all over the globe, so they will need a business school willing to think beyond traditional disciplines. Such open-mindedness has created a rich vein for the study of business in society. Pettigrew says: “The people here are much more willing to cross boundaries… it’s in the bloodstream here.” ■

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Ethical Corporation • Education special report

Other section content: 22 Mainstream CSR

Ethical specialists

Small schools stand out As the market for MBAs gets ever more crowded, sustainability and other progressive business ideas are helping smaller business schools emerge from the crowd. Oliver Balch investigates hether it is product marketing or core finance, MBA students at Daniels College of Business, at the University of Denver in the US, are taught to look at things differently from the norm. When they return to the world of work, profit maximisation is expected to be just one on a list of their new priorities. A quarter of the two-year MBA course is directed towards “values-based” issues, says marketing professor and former dean Bruce Hutton. Daniels College first redesigned its curriculum in the early 1990s, when there was a move from 25 standard subjects to seven integrated courses, with titles such as Values in Action and The Essence of Enterprise. “We wanted to put economic prosperity in the context of social equity and environmental integrity,” Hutton explains. The decision paid off. Over the last 15 years companies and students have come to see the importance of balancing social and environmental goals with economic objectives. In turn, Daniels College has become known for its specialism in areas such as business ethics, innovation and globalisation

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Creative careers More and more small business schools are looking to follow the same path. Recent years have seen an explosion in MBA providers promising to equip their students in sustainability, social innovation and similar emerging themes. As a marketing tool, the focus on non-traditional subjects makes sense. Not only does it help them differentiate themselves from large business schools, but it also taps into the growing interest among MBA students for creative, values-based careers.

Some small schools are going even further, however, offering MBAs that are focused entirely on sustainability-related issues. Malboro College is one of the latest to jump on the bandwagon. The Vermont-based graduate centre is promoting a new, accredited MBA in Managing for Sustainability. “An increasing number of graduates are looking to change their careers into the sustainability area,” says George Kao, admissions director at the Presidio School of Management, a pioneer in the sustainability-only MBA. Presidio currently has more than 200 students, four-fifths of whom work in the for-profit sector. To further differentiate itself, the San Francisco-based school has a well-developed summer programme designed to offer its students in-house experience on sustainability issues. Flexibility and motivation Specialist MBA courses tend to attract professionals that are working or wanting to work in sustainability-related jobs. Sach Baumer is a case in point. An environmental consulting engineer by training, he enrolled on the Presidio MBA with a view to “making a difference” on issues such as pollution control and waste reuse. Smaller business schools often have more organisational flexibility and greater market motivation to adopt sustainability than their larger counterparts. In this respect, many are rightly earning a reputation for excellence and innovation in the teaching of social and environment management. Students, however, should be conscious of their own marketability. There is a world of difference

Companies and students have come to see the importance of balancing social and environmental goals with economic objectives

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Ethical Corporation • Education special report

Specialisation

between graduating with management skills that integrate stakeholder thinking, for example, and hitting the milk round with a masters course in pure

sustainability or corporate responsibility. The latter might land you a niche job but it is highly unlikely to get you into the chief executive’s chair. ■

CASE STUDY School: Washington State University, Vancouver. Location: Vancouver, Canada MBA course: Stakeholder-Focused Leadership for Sustained Business Success

Vancouver: sea, mountains and an ethical business school

At best, most MBA students graduate with a vague sense of what stakeholder theory means. Not so at Washington State University. Thanks to a recent curriculum turnaround at the Vancouver-based graduate school, students are trained to think about the importance of stakeholder expectations in each and every one of their modules. The recent decision to structure its MBA curriculum around key stakeholders reflects what is happening in the business world, according to WSU management professor Jerry Goodstein. But it was also motivated by a desire to set the university’s MBA apart. “We sensed that the competition for MBA students was going to increase so we wanted to think of a way to differentiate ourselves,” Goodstein admits. Initial feedback has been positive. The university is promoting the course heavily to business leaders and alumni, both of whom see business merit in its “executive level” approach. Potential students are also excited by what they see as a “different” programme. In addition, WSU’s course is winning plaudits from MBA specialists such as the Aspen Institute and Net Impact, helping to build on its reputation and profile. Going forward, Goodstein feels the market can only grow as companies increasingly search out MBA graduates that understand how stakeholders impact long-term business success. “It is our belief that in time students will also plug into what companies are looking for,” he says. www.vancouver.wsu.edu

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22 Specialisation

Ethical Corporation • Education special report

Ethics centres

Keeping ethics mainstream, not cut adrift With increasing resources being invested in corporate responsibility, business schools need to be careful that the subject is a central teaching focus, and not ghettoised, says Oliver Balch s with all good stories, the tale behind the development of the Centre for Sustainable Global Enterprise at Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management has a short and a long version. The short version centres on Samuel Johnson, former chief executive of the family-owned SC Johnson. Upset that the business school bearing his name had come out poorly in a ranking on sustainability, he decided to endow a centre and a chaired professorship “to ramp things up”, as faculty member Mark Millstein puts it. The longer story, on the other hand, dates back several decades. It relates to the growing awareness in business academia of the limitations inherent to pure agency theory. As externalities such as climate change and business ethics increasingly colour the decision-making landscape, so must business schools determine how to equip tomorrow’s business leaders. The answer for many has been to set up a specialist centre. Starting with the Ashridge Centre for Business and Society in the UK and finishing with the Yale Centre for Business and Environment in the US, the Aspen Institute has a list of 351 such institutes around the world.

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Isolation risks As well as being a good source of potential funding, such centres generate high-level research, raise awareness among faculty and introduce external experts with fresh perspectives onto campus. But specialist centres have their problems too. The chief danger, critics maintain, is their potential to “ghettoise” social and environmental issues rather than integrating them into mainstream management education. Business ethics provides the classic example. A recognised discipline in its own right for at least three decades, business ethicists now boast an impressive range of research centres and academic journals. Yet the subject continues to operate on the margins of most MBA courses. “The risk [for specialist centres] is placing corporate social responsibility and sustainability issues into a silo and making them distinct from the other business functions,” argues Dean Krehmeyer, executive director

Specialists focus on issues like environmental change

of the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics at the University of Virginia. The leaders of such centres are not blind to these risks. Much comes down to the physical nature of the centres. Many are housed in designated buildings with nominated employees and a tailored research programme. Others are more like virtual networks, grouping together faculty from across campus that have an interest in social, environmental and ethical issues. Cornell’s Centre for Sustainable Global Enterprise is a mixture of the two. With a skeleton staff of three full-time researchers, it draws on other experts from the business school and the wider university. The centre’s internal network, for example, includes faculty members from Cornell’s schools for art and architecture, hotel management, industrial labour relations, agriculture and life sciences, engineering and human ecology. “We motivate them to ask good research questions in their own areas that relate to the innovation agenda for sustainability,” Mark Millstein says. Building these cross-disciplinary research links into the teaching programme is a second key step. While some business schools have adopted pure sustainability-related MBAs, most have resisted the temptation to teach social and environmental management in isolation. “The way I approach this is not as an issue of corporate social responsibility, but about smart business,” says Doug Hoffman, professor in sustainable enterprise at the Erb Institute. The Erb Institute feeds into the mainstream MBA course at Michigan University’s Ross School of Business. Students graduate from the three-year course with the opportunity of obtaining both an MBA and an MSc. Hoffman argues that the institute’s focus on

Business ethics continues to operate on the margins of most MBA courses

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Specialisation

environmental issues helps prepare students for future business challenges that traditional MBA subjects do not cover. “It is not a different value statement,” he says. “It is a different lens to add onto your other lenses so as to keep your eye on the ball of what is important to business.” Integrating social and environmental issues into core MBA disciplines such as strategy, finance, accounting and marketing is not easy. But it is essential for the subject’s lasting credibility. And specialist centres are helping to make that happen, not least in the area of social entrepreneurship. The University of California’s Davis Centre for Entrepreneurship and Stanford University’s Centre for Social Innovation, for example, have done much to advance business thinking around the market opportunities of sustainability. Two-way learning Not that the traffic is all one way. Specialist centres focusing on disciplines such as accountancy, finance, social psychology and marketing have done much to advance academic understanding of social and environmental impacts on business. “Corporate responsibility issues are getting more traction because they are being linked in with faculty research on issues such as behavioural economics and occupational psychology,” says Mary Gentile, an independent consultant to several leading business schools. Specialist centres on social and environmental business issues still have at least two important hurdles to climb, however. The first relates to disciplinary boundaries. As faculty and student interest in these non-traditional aspects of business strategy and behaviour continue to develop, greater clarity will be needed.

Integrated cross-disciplinary courses are smart business

Cross-campus expertise at Cornell

At present, “sustainability” and “corporate responsibility” are often used as convenient catchalls for a range of different disciplinary areas. “Subjects such as the environment, ethics, green supply chains and social enterprise … may seem like they all fall under the CSR umbrella, but they are all interesting topics worthy of a separate conversation,” argues Rich Leimsider, senior programme associate at the Aspen Institute. Proving the link with the future human resource needs of businesses represents a second important step. Business schools have long been accused of churning out “robots”, graduates that lack initiative and creative thinking. Focusing on the social and environmental agenda not only prepares students for future business challenges, but also trains them to use their imagination and to use their business skills flexibly. So, for those afraid of specialist centres leading to disciplinary ghettoisation, there is hope. It is to be found in the structure of corporate and academic life. Few “CSR jobs”, as such, exist in corporations and fewer still in business schools. Career interest, if nothing else, should keep specialists from making themselves too comfortable in their ivory towers. ■

A focus on environmental issues helps prepare students for future business challenges

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Ethical Corporation • Education special report

Executive education

Other section content: 27 29 30 31

Boardroom basics Broad church Better leaders Harvard reviewed

Integrating ethics

Learning through doing – even at the top Role-play, simulation and action learning are the latest buzzwords in executive education, as schools give students a taste of tough decision-making. Lisa Roner investigates niversity executive education programmes are rapidly changing to meet the needs of today’s companies and executives. As business seeks a greater return on its investment and executives look for more streamlined learning experiences, business schools are responding with innovative new approaches integrating ethics into their executive education courses. Craig Smith, a senior fellow in marketing and ethics at London Business School, says that the pressures on companies, especially large multinationals, to be socially and environmentally responsible are here to stay. Although he believes corporate responsibility used to be in the “public affairs ghetto”, he says that is changing, with businesses giving it more attention all of the time. And as businesses place more emphasis on the soft skills of leadership, executive education providers are looking for effective and efficient ways of integrating business in society issues into both open enrolment and tailored programmes.

U

Beyond the classroom Bob Stilliard, the chair of Unicon, the International University Consortium for Executive Education, and the director of executive education at Ashridge Business School in the UK, says one key trend is the increasing demand for customisation of and involvement in learning experiences. Corporate clients expect a much broader range of learning methodologies, stretching beyond the classroom, and a high degree of relevance, Stilliard says. Chris Musselwhite, chief executive and founder of the leadership development consultancy

Discovery Learning, agrees. He says many universities are adding business simulations to their executive education programmes in response. At the University of San Francisco’s School of Business and Management, classroom simulations are designed to give working managers the problem-solving skills and experience necessary to “effectively manoeuvre in today’s complex business world”. By using interdisciplinary teaching team approaches, the school’s faculty can role model the kinds of discussions and interactions that occur in corporate boardrooms, allowing students to think like senior managers. In fact, simulation approaches to ethics education that allow students to learn by doing are now being broadly applied throughout traditional MBA and executive education courses. One cutting edge approach being developed by the Aspen Institute and the Yale School of Management involves students in “what if ” scenarios to give them first hand experience to address “value dilemmas”. According to Mary Gentile, Aspen’s researcher director for the “giving voice to values” curriculum development initiative, the approach uses scripts and action plans to give students experience at voicing their values effectively and acting on them. The programme, which has been piloted in a variety of MBA and executive education settings, allows students to test and become comfortable with their own values “voice” before encountering ethical challenges in the workplace. Gentile says the approach is not about whether to act on your values, but about how to do so.

What is executive education? • A short-course, corporate responsibility executive education programme typically costs $4,000. • An executive MBA programme costs over $30,000. • Participants are typically senior managers, aged between 35 and 40. • Short-courses last anywhere from a couple of days to a few weeks. • Executive masters programmes last a year. Executive MBAs two years. • Most programmes are bespoke, or tailored to the needs of participants. A small number of general management programmes are available.

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26 Executive education

Mitchell Neubert, Chavanne chair of Christian ethics in business at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business in Texas says exposing students to ethical models and questions and deliberating ethical dilemmas through role-playing is highly effective in teaching students to understand and appreciate ethics. By concentrating on developing strong leadership skills among current and future managers, ethical business practices are more likely to become part of company-wide culture, says David Blake, chairman of the Ethical Business Leadership Task Force for the business honorary group Beta Gamma Sigma and a professor of business at the University of California, Irvine. Games that offer executive education students real-time lessons in ethics are another “simulation” tool being employed by business schools. Computer-based games plunge students head first into thorny business situations and provide a sophisticated model of play. The Laboratory of Sustainable Business at MIT’s Sloan School of Management is using a simulation game – Fish Banks Ltd – to teach students about the effects of global warming, pollution and other environmental factors on business. According to James Chisolm, co-founder of simulation design company ExperiencePoint, the real value of the games is that they provide a shared experience and common language to discuss issues like ethics. Global leadership Leadership, particularly in a global context, and diversity, according to Stilliard, are key areas of interest for many executive education students. HEC School of Management in France is launching a unique leadership programme in the global context through an executive education partnership with cotton producers in Senegal. Students, especially executive MBA students concentrating on sustainable business, will work at the local level in different villages to understand how to adapt operational models for future business development to local contexts and cultures. According to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, many companies are looking to boost their executives’ knowledge of international politics, culture and business. To meet the demand, many schools, including Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, based in Illinois, have launched executive MBA programmes in locations like Hong Kong, Frankfurt and Tel Aviv. In 2006, in fact, 62% of Executive MBA Council member programmes required an international trip. Craig Smith says every subject, from economics to operations, needs to deal to some degree with social and environmental impacts. Corporate responsibility, he says, is the missing piece of the puzzle in a lot of courses.

Ethical Corporation • Education special report

Computer-based simulation exercises give students realistic experience

London Business School has had a required business ethics and corporate responsibility course for its full-time MBA students for ten years, but added it to the executive MBA in 2003, Smith says. The challenge, however, in integrating ethics and social responsibility more completely into business education is the lack of case studies for basic courses like finance, organisational behaviour and strategy, Smith says. But a European Academy of Business in Society project, for which Smith is the academic leader, is working with European business schools to develop as many as a dozen case studies that will fit core business classes. Companies want schools to cover corporate responsibility more thoroughly, Smith says, and their support is shown by sponsorship of EABIS from the likes of IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, Microsoft and Shell. “They need MBA students who appreciate how corporate responsibility and ethics figure into all parts of the business,” he says. Effectively integrating ethics into executive education is not about preaching right and wrong, Smith says, but is a matter of helping students understand how ethical issues arise in business and giving them the tools necessary to see the big picture. Karen Morley, associate dean of executive education at Melbourne Business School’s Mt Eliza Centre for executive education says companies want programmes that build learning into action. And so, innovative business schools around the world are taking strong steps in the right direction when it comes to integrating ethics into executive education. ■

Exposing students to ethical models and questions, and deliberating ethical dilemmas through roleplaying is highly effective

Useful links: www.uniconexed.org www.betagammasigma.org www.eabis.org www.emba.org

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Top-level programmes

CEOs in the classroom Even chief executives are taking time out to go back to college, as interest in executive education booms across the board. Lisa Roner reports espite a downturn during the widespread economic slump that followed the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, and the elimination of more than one million jobs worldwide this decade by large corporations, demand for executive education is on the upswing. In a survey by the International University Consortium for Executive Education of 43 university-based executive education programmes, 84% of respondents report revenue gains in 2006, with 43% logging increases of at least 10%. Of those surveyed, 78% report growth in customised courses in 2006, while 70% say their open enrolment programmes grew. Iese in Spain reports that although customised programmes are becoming increasingly popular, there is still strong growth in its open enrolment programmes, especially overseas. The school now teaches its renowned advanced management programme in Germany, Brazil and Poland and other open enrolment programmes in Africa, China and South America. Executive MBA programmes are seeing an increase in applications even though fewer companies are footing the bill for their employees. According to the Executive MBA Council, 32% of students paid their own way in 2006, convinced that an MBA will advance their careers.

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Teaching soft skills Non-degree executive education programmes are still popular, however. Companies face increasingly complex and competitive global business markets that require highly trained and effective leaders, says Stephen Burnett, associate dean for executive education at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Illinois. Most business schools report increased interest among companies in soft skills, including ethics and integrity prowess. Michael Hoffman, executive director of the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College in Massachusetts, says the growth in business ethics education over the past ten years has been driven by tougher regulations and scrutiny in the press. After the collapse of Enron, Hoffman says, higher education realised it had not done enough to integrate ethics, sustainability and corporate responsibility into the business curriculum. And companies around the world are feeling the

Executive education

pressure to improve management skills and leadership development to avoid being the next front page ethics scandal. And many companies are starting at the top by enrolling their directors in executive education programmes to brush up on their skills.

Most business schools report increased interest among companies in soft skills, including ethics and integrity prowess

Director education In the wake of corporate scandals and SarbanesOxley, stakeholders are demanding more accountability from corporate boards. Business schools are reforming existing programmes and launching new ones to meet the needs of their newest executive education students. Institutional Shareholder Services is a provider of proxy voting and corporate governance guidance for more than 35,000 companies. It says that among 5,400 US companies, the number sending board members to educational programmes had increased from just 7% in 2004 to 24% by October 2006. Maureen McNichols, director of the Stanford Directors’ Forum, says about 55 corporate directors attend its ISS-accredited course annually to learn about chief executive selection and succession, litigation risks, financial reporting and executive compensation. McNichols says thanks to increasing demand the course is being offered twice annually, and began with with the 2007-08 academic year. Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsyl- Pay attention, captains of industry vania says it is launching a new course for first-time corporate directors that will cover everything from how to read a balance sheet to ethical obligations. The school is also offering similar programmes to directors in China and India. Continuous learning has become a vital part of many company’s retention strategies, says Beth Stoops, head of corporate learning at Thunderbird. Graeme Gherashe, director of executive programmes at the Australian Graduate School of Management, agrees and says employers want to up-skill, develop and retain their most talented and motivated people. Leadership and sustainability rank among the top concerns of AGSM’s business clients, Gherashe says. The demand has driven the development of new programmes like Stanford’s Business Strategies for Environmental Sustainability, aimed at sustainability practitioners. According to the school, the course will explore what it means to turn sustainable business practices into competitive advantage.

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28 Executive education

Duke Corporate Education’s marketing director Gordon Armstrong says large multinational corporations are also turning to business schools for education and training to run operations in developing countries. The oil and mining sector in particular, he says, needs to manage complex social, economic and cultural factors with increased dexterity and local sensitivity to protect operations and investments. Sustainable business practices, says William Barnett, faculty director of the course at Stanford, must be based on “rational activity that includes not only a profit motive, but also concerns for the environmental impact of what we do”. Thinking and acting The educational model offered by business schools, Armstrong says, “brings out the discussion” and helps companies build in-house capability and expertise to find their own solutions to complex ethical and social challenges. The sustainable business practices course is an approach to training future leaders to think and act rationally. It is a challenge that is catching the attention of a variety of businesses. The top buyers of customised executive education programmes reflect the

Ethical Corporation • Education special report

complexity and level of scrutiny of their business operations and include the industrial and manufacturing sector (27%), finance and banking (14%) and mining/oil/chemicals/pharmaceuticals (12%). The global focus of such sectors is driving demand for schools with an internationally diverse faculty and a global outlook. Peter Degnan, executive director of Wharton’s executive education programmes, says there is significant growth in the need for leadership training, particularly in developing countries, and a better understanding of western business practices. Della Bradshaw, business education editor at the Financial Times, says executive education providers, including the London School of Business, have seen growing demand for programmes that include socio-politics and cultural awareness. The school’s global mix of students has also been a magnet for international participants, says Nirmalya Kumar, faculty director for its executive education programmes. And the interest in executive education programmes focused on ethics and corporate responsibility will continue to grow, predicts Craig Smith, a marketing and ethics professor at London Business School. ■

Educated execs take a lot away from the right programme

Useful links: www.uniconexed.org www.emba.org www.issproxy.com

Executive education for CR, sustainability and community affairs managers Short, practical programmes to develop essential knowledge and skills for success. Integrating Corporate Responsibility This practical 3 day residential programme for CR and sustainability managers develops skills and knowledge for integrating CR and driving change within organisations. Managing Corporate Community Investment This practical 3 day residential programme for community affairs managers develops skills and knowledge for effectively managing corporate community investment programmes. In both programmes you will be supported by experienced Ashridge faculty, practitioners from leading companies and a diverse peer group while you work on issues you are currently facing in your organisation. For more information about our expertise in executive development, research and consultancy, please visit www.ashridge.org.uk/acbas or call Matthew Gitsham on +44 (0)1442 841479. Ashridge is a signatory to the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education.

Registered as Ashridge (Bonar Law Memorial) Trust Charity number 311096

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Future leaders

Develop an internationalist mentality Tomorrow’s business leaders will have to work in diverse cultures and handle complex global problems. Business schools can prepare them and teach the soft skills they will need, says Lisa Roner s business goes global, there is a growing need to build the international capabilities of key employees and to sharpen their understanding of different parts of the world. Business schools, therefore, face a greater need to expose their students to new markets, countries and cultures. Boundaries between countries are not as specific or relevant as they once were, says Gary Carini, associate dean for graduate business programmes at the Hankamer School of Business, Baylor University, Texas. If those “conversations” are not brought into the classroom, he says, a real disservice is done to students. Companies increasingly want more than simple management refresher courses, as they seek to boost executives’ knowledge of the international politics, culture and business context in which they must operate, says Stephen Bosworth, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, part of Tufts University, Massachusetts.

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Nurturing soft skills Tony Buono, coordinator of the Bentley Alliance for Ethics and Social Responsibility says it is difficult to talk about business without now putting it in an international context. The same is increasingly true of business ethics and corporate responsibility, he says. Many companies are seeking to upgrade executives’ soft skills to equip them to approach business smartly. The globalisation of business means companies must address the needs and requirements of an increasingly diverse group of clients, shareholders and employees. And that’s where so-called soft skills like leadership, being a team player, empathy and communication become critical. Business schools are responding with new and updated programmes that include an increased focus on ethics. Some are even launching entire programmes dedicated to the soft skills required by globalisation. “Excellent leadership, coupled with moral good sense and core values, is central to incorporating ethical behaviour throughout the corporation, which should be our goal,” says David Blake, chairman of the Ethical Business Leadership Task

Executive education

Force for the business honorary society Beta Gamma Sigma and a professor at the University of California, Irvine. Blake says schools must establish the tone, provide the tools and teach a business culture where ethical behaviour is insisted upon and practiced at every level within an organisation. Only then, he says, will ethics be ingrained into the corporate fabric of the total marketplace. Improving ethical IQ Exposing students to ethical models and questions, deliberating over ethical dilemmas and interacting with faculty and practitioners who model ethical leadership can raise a student’s “ethical IQ”, says Mitchell Neubert, the Chavanne chair of Christian ethics in business at Baylor. At the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, students are exposed during their initial orientation to “leadership rotations” that include examinations of globalisation, diversity, integrity and social responsibility. Susan Ashford, the Michael and Susan Jandernoa professor of organisational behaviour and human resource management at Michigan, says that it is important symbolically to set boundaries of issues that will be covered.

The next leaders need the right new skills

Another important aspect of Ross’s programmes is introducing students to the “global opportunity” represented by their own peers in class. “The class is probably the most global community they’ve ever been in up to this point in their lives,” Ashford says. Learning to seize the opportunities that are represented by their peer community, she says, is an important step toward becoming a global leader. One role playing exercise the students participate in asks them to come together at a mock global summit for non-profits and attempt to put together

Some business schools are launching entire programmes dedicated to the soft skills required by globalisation

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30 Executive education

Ethical Corporation • Education special report

a new effort to drive good works. To launch their project, students must meet in a cocktail-like setting for 10 minutes to find resources such as who speaks French, who is an engineer, and who is an expert on China. The process pushes students to recognise and value their own global resources and complexity, Ashford says. Varying experience A diverse mix in the academic staff can also be a real plus by attracting a more diverse student population and better preparing students for a diverse society and workplace, suggests the KPMG Foundation’s president, Bernard Milano. Greater diversity, he stresses, improves the quality of education by preparing students to deal with the comprehensive set of issues waiting for them in the business environment. An international mindset is also taught to

Bob Stilliard, Ashridge Business School

Re-defining skills for business leaders Better research into what makes a successful leader is good news for managers who want training, Bob Stilliard, the head of executive programmes at Ashridge Business School, tells Lisa Roner ob Stilliard is chair of the International University Consortium for Executive Education and director of executive education at Ashridge Business School in the UK. So, he has a vested interest in understanding just what companies need and want from their investments in executive education. Stilliard says the ethics, sustainability and corporate responsibility aspects of executive education are currently moving from needing a “push” by education providers to spark interest towards being “pulled” or requested by clients. Even with the growing awareness and mainstreaming of responsible business topics, it has been rare until very recently to find companies or individual executives actively seeking out education in these areas, he says. Issues like BP’s refinery woes in Texas bring an ethics and responsibility focus into sessions on strategy. But he says Ashridge is beginning to see companies recognising that conducting business in a responsible and sustainable way makes good economic sense. “Research and, to a certain extent, practice is now

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students at Ross via the school’s “multidisciplinary action projects”. The programme is integrated into the core curriculum and provides an opportunity for teams of four to six students to earn credit while working full-time – domestically or internationally – with companies and non-profit organisations. Many of the projects require students to travel extensively and provide opportunities for “global action learning projects” as part of their coursework. Ashford says it is a “pretty extraordinary global mindset building experience”. Business schools, she says, have a dual charge of preparing students to be ethical in their lives that must start with being ethical in the academic setting. It relies on developing strong course structure and “really pushing the values that we stand for and stand by in the school programme”. Building these soft skill values will better prepare today’s students to become tomorrow’s executives, as businesses grow increasingly global. ■

It is important to respect local circumstances while adapting standard business approaches to the reality of developing countries

Useful links: www.betagammasigma.org www.kpmgfoundation.org

driving us towards being responsive to an industry actually calling for us to design educational experiences that tie corporate responsibility and ethics into programmes,” Stilliard says. In collaboration with the European Academy of Business in Society, Ashridge set out to understand the hurdles of translating concerns for ethics, sustainability and corporate responsibility into practice. The project sought to identify leadership qualities that were important for the translation.

Soft wiring Stilliard says that after interviews with more than 100 executives, the team identified the core abilities needed for such leadership. The first, he says, is the ability to think systemically – to be able to understand all of the inter-relationships across organisations. Another is to be able to embrace diversity and manage risk in an intuitive way. Embracing diversity, Stilliard says, is particularly important because leaders who are translating these concepts into action need to be able to develop processes that make it easy for ideas to be crossfertilised. Also important, he says, is to have leaders that are able to understand the impact of local decisions and how they relate to the global picture. He also stresses the importance of being very open in leadership style. “Having very meaningful dialogue with people, engaging in an appreciative way and seeking out and valuing the views of others are really important,” Stilliard says. “Lastly, effective leaders in this area must have a high degree of emotional awareness – to understand the link between behaviour, thoughts and emotions, rather than a purely rational business perspective.”

Open leadership style is important, says Stilliard

This kind of “soft wiring” really comes, he says, through developing attitudes and behaviours that largely come through education. Today, Ashridge teaches these principles primarily through customised programmes in the context of strategic leadership. But Stilliard senses a groundswell of research and other inputs “that appeal to the rational”. In time he expects such work to reorient the standard business education agenda on a more responsible footing. ■

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Executive education

Student testimonial

Intensity and inspiration on a course for pioneers An executive education programme at Harvard gave Richard Hamilton an experience he will never forget – and invaluable insights to take back to the office n October 2005, I had the privilege of participating in the first dedicated corporate responsibility programme at Harvard Business School. The programme promised three days intensive training “providing business leaders with knowledge and practical tools and frameworks for integrating social responsibility as part of their corporate strategy”. Upon arrival at Harvard there was a palpable sense of excitement on the part of both participants and the faculty. It soon became clear that there was a reason for this. The faculty had, we were told, been thinking about these issues for over two decades, and only recently had they come to feel that they – collectively – had a distinctive narrative around the corporate responsibility agenda. Their narrative – or my take on it – was that responsible business is interlinked with corporate strategy, and companies that understand the changes in stakeholder expectations will come out on top. The whole premise was focused on the challenges faced by business leaders and the fact that senior decision makers find themselves with conflicting demands on their attention, time and resources more than ever before. As a result, CSR has become crucial to good business practice. Being Harvard, the education experience was shaped by the school’s cross-functional approach to general management and in particular the case study method. I should confess that even now I am not wholly convinced by the case study method. I cannot help but think there is a quite a lot of post-event rationalisation. But it certainly forces you to absorb,

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digest and analyse a great deal of information. And because we were actually at Harvard, we were invariably taught by the very same academic that had written the case study and had personal knowledge of the problems and solutions presented. We could actually ask Rosabeth Moss Kanter what really went on at IBM, or Marc Epstein what was really behind decisions taken by Bank of America. Hard work There were literally hundreds of pages of pre-reading, but it was critical to do the preparation in order to maximise the value of the three days. With hindsight, the course was really at least twice as long as that, when you consider the pre-reading and preparation involved. The other interesting dimension was the “peer group consultation”. We began each day by convening in small groups at 7.30am with one of us outlining a particular challenge we were facing in our working lives. I picked the issue of how I was going to set about identifying the key value-at-stake issues to include in a forthcoming corporate responsibility report given the plethora of issues facing us at the time, and effectively had a masterclass with peers to work through the issue. Reflecting on the course 18 months later, there were three things that made the experience distinctive. Firstly, the quality of the faculty. Harvard spared no expense and deployed their best and brightest to speak to us. Michael Porter, Jim Austin and Rosabeth Moss Kanter were all generous with their time.

Harvard deploys its brightest minds on business programmes

Companies that understand the changes in stakeholder expectations will come out on top

Richard Hamilton studied on the “Corporate Social Responsibility: Strategies to Create Business and Social Value” programme at Harvard Business School from 23-26 October 2005. After completing the programme, he was appointed a director of corporate citizenship at KPMG International in October 2006. Hamilton joined KPMG after three years as assistant director for corporate responsibility at Barclays.

And the academics were supported by the presence of top-flight business leaders from Nike and Timberland. Secondly, the participants – this was a truly global gathering. Having been on other programmes at leading international business schools, it was clear that every participant was evidently engaged and was there for a reason. Structured support Thirdly, the quality of the support. The support team was exceptional, and made every one of us feel part of the university for those three days. We were not made to feel like “executive education fodder”, there to bolster the revenue. We lived on the business school campus and were given all the facilities and technology afforded to the MBA students, and free rein to explore the campus and the entire university. There is also a lasting benefit. I am still in regular touch with people I met, from Morgan Stanley to the Royal Bank of Scotland via the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University itself. And when I was working on corporate strategy a few months later, I actually went back to Harvard to work it through with some of the faculty, who were generous with their time and who gave me some invaluable insights. Kash Rangan, the distinguished marketing professor who held the three days together, called us pioneers. I rather think we were. ■

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Beyond Grey Pinstripes 2007-08 – the top 100 business schools

social and environmental issues into their courses and assesses across four criteria:

he latest Beyond Grey Pinstripes ranking, published in October 2007 by the Aspen Institute Center for Business Education, picks out the top 100 schools among the hundreds of MBA programs across six continents invited to participate in the survey. The ranking seeks out schools that integrate

• Content (25%): reflects the degree to which courses illustrate the value of integrating social and environmental considerations into business decisions.

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Overall Rank School 1 Stanford University 2 The University of Michigan 3 York University 4 University of California, Berkeley 5 University of Notre Dame 6 Columbia University 7 Cornell University 8 Duquesne University 9 Yale University 10 Instituto de Empresa 11 New York University 12 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 13 The George Washington University 14 ESADE Business School 15 Erasmus University Rotterdam 16 University of Calgary 17 Tecnológico de Monterrey -Campus Monterrey18 The University of New Mexico 19 Brandeis University 20 University of Colorado at Boulder 21 University of Western Ontario 22 Portland State University 23 University of British Columbia 24 University of Virginia 25 Dartmouth College 26 Duke University 27 Carnegie Mellon University 28 The University of Nottingham 29 University of California, Davis 30 Wake Forest University 31 Babson College 32 Simmons College 33 University of Wisconsin-Madison 34 University of South Florida St. Petersburg 35 University of Jyväskylä 36 University of San Diego 37 San Francisco State University 38 Emory University 39 Dalhousie University 40 Monterey Institute of International Studies 41 Copenhagen Business School 42 Asian Institute of Management 43 INSEAD 44 Thunderbird, The Garvin School of International Management 45 McGill University 46 Boston College 47 University of Denver 48 Illinois Institute of Technology 49 Vanderbilt University 50 Pepperdine University

• Student Opportunity (25%): measures the number of courses with social and environmental content. • Student Exposure (25%): indicates the percentage of course time dedicated to considering social and environmental issues.

• Research (25%): is indicative of the number of relevant articles published in leading peer-reviewed management journals.

Opportunity 1 10 2 4 5 13 6 21 3 8 9 19 6 10 17 38 16 32 38 23 27 49 32 38 15 23 32 43 29 13 23 28 38 56 38 47 29 29 12 26 54 21 45 60 36 63 56 45 43 20

Exposure 11 27 6 32 15 13 24 1 18 5 20 55 29 16 7 17 10 4 2 14 52 33 43 79 48 74 8 68 46 41 69 12 50 3 31 22 44 40 82 35 58 21 47 51 26 59 37 38 66 23

Content 2 4 17 1 17 7 11 27 5 7 17 3 14 5 33 17 27 52 14 33 27 9 33 23 23 33 58 58 33 27 9 44 14 58 17 27 17 44 23 13 44 33 44 33 58 66 23 11 52 52

Research 3 1 5 5 9 16 20 29 69 52 16 4 22 52 13 13 29 20 69 25 9 25 13 5 35 9 35 2 24 52 43 69 35 52 52 52 52 35 52 81 22 81 35 29 52 9 69 81 25 81

Country United States United States Canada United States United States United States United States United States United States Spain United States United States United States Spain Netherlands Canada Mexico United States United States United States Canada United States Canada United States United States United States United States United Kingdom United States United States United States United States United States United States Finland United States United States United States Canada United States Denmark Philippines France United States Canada United States United States United States United States United States

2007 and 2005 compared – Grey Pinstripes results analysis The number of elective courses per school that feature some social/ environmental content has increased by nearly 50%. 2005: 12 courses per school 2007: 17 courses per school The number of elective courses per school that are largely dedicated to social/environmental issues has increased by 20%. 2005: 5 courses per school 2006: 6 courses per school Only 5% of the faculty at these schools published academic research on social or environmental topics in leading journals. 401 authors 8491 total faculty

The number of schools participating in the ranking has increased 22%. 2005: 91 schools in 14 countries 2007: 111 schools in 18 countries

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Course ranking

The proportion of schools requiring content in core courses regarding general social or environmental content (including business, nonprofit, or personal ethics) has improved in some business disciplines, but not others.

Accounting Economics Finance Management Marketing Operations management Organisational behaviour Strategy

2005 25% 27% 22% 40% 27% 30% 44% 27%

2007 41% 37% 29% 51% 41% 29% 45% 45%

Overall Rank School 51 University of South Carolina 52 IMD - International Institute for Management Development 53 University of Alberta 54 Boston University 55 Bentley College 56 Cranfield School of Management 57 Case Western Reserve University 58 Willamette University 59 Concordia University 60 University of Bath 61 University of Geneva 62 Loyola University Chicago 63 University of Oxford 64 HEC School of Management - Paris 65 Wilfrid Laurier University 66 University of Navarra 67 Rice University 68 North Carolina State University 69 Georgia Institute of Technology 70 University of Stellenbosch 71 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 72 University of Pittsburgh 73 Georgetown University 74 Tulane University 75 IESA (Instituto de Estudios Sup. De Administracion) 76 Washington State University 77 Seton Hall University 78 The University of Vermont 79 Fundacao Getulio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro 80 Rhodes University 81 Iowa State University 82 Baruch College-The City University of New York 83 The University of Arizona 84 Ashridge 85 Lamar University 86 The University of Texas at Dallas 87 Western Washington University 88 National University of Singapore 89 Oregon State University 90 AUDENCIA Nantes 91 Curtin University of Technology 92 Washington University in St. Louis 93 University of California, Los Angeles 94 Michigan Technological University 95 Universidad de Los Andes 96 University of Cape Town 97 University of Florida 98 Durham University 99 EADA - Escuela de Alta Dirección y Administración 100 University of San Francisco

The proportion of schools requiring content in core courses on how mainstream business can address social or environmental issues remains low.

2005 2% 2% 0% 14% 2% 5% 1% 1%

Accounting Economics Finance Management Marketing Operations Management Organizational Behavior Strategy

Opportunity 49 49 63 60 52 72 36 18 47 72 35 75 60 68 56 56 54 52 68 68 67 78 74 68 63 75 82 75 95 85 66 82 85 100 78 95 85 80 91 85 85 82 80 95 91 91 100 85 91 95

Exposure 56 9 75 65 80 42 19 28 39 45 25 53 71 91 60 54 100 36 64 49 99 77 95 83 61 86 30 63 34 73 72 81 92 57 84 103 62 93 87 70 78 89 105 76 85 104 88 110 108 106

Content 33 52 58 33 66 52 58 66 81 93 66 27 33 44 81 81 44 93 66 66 44 81 33 66 58 66 81 58 66 44 93 93 66 81 66 81 93 93 66 93 81 66 81 81 81 52 81 93 66 66

Research 43 81 16 35 16 35 81 81 43 8 81 69 69 29 43 52 43 43 43 69 43 25 52 52 81 52 81 81 81 81 52 29 52 69 81 35 69 43 81 69 81 81 69 81 81 81 81 29 81 81

2007 5% 9% 1% 9% 9% 3% 1% 5%

Country United States Switzerland Canada United States United States United Kingdom United States United States Canada United Kingdom Switzerland United States United Kingdom France Canada Spain United States United States United States South Africa United States United States United States United States Venezuela United States United States United States Brazil South Africa United States United States United States United Kingdom United States United States United States Singapore United States France Australia United States United States United States Columbia South Africa United States United Kingdom Spain United States

The percentage of schools in our survey that REQUIRE students to take a course dedicated to business and society issues has increased dramatically over time: 2007: 63% 2005: 54% 2003: 45% 2001: 34%

The most popular place to find courses with business and society content is NOT the CSR/ethics department. The top disciplines, in order, teaching about social/ environmental issues are: • management • marketing • strategy • finance • CSR/business ethics

For more information go to www.beyondgreypinstripes.org

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Evolution and revolution

Adapting to a new corporate world Business schools now have a huge opportunity to provide the tailored sustainability programmes that the corporate world will increasingly need, argue Polly Courtice and Wayne Visser he seeds of a future vision for business education on corporate responsibility and sustainability can perhaps be found in current weaknesses in the way these topics are taught in business schools. There are four broad areas where improvement is urgently required.

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• Appreciating how significantly the role of business in society has changed over the past century. • Challenging the desirability and sustainability of the prevailing shareholder-driven business paradigm. • Reaching across the knowledge silos and encouraging an interdisciplinary approach to tackling the world’s most pressing challenges. • Recognising the importance of engaging not just the minds, but also the hearts (and some would say the souls) of business leaders. The flagship educational product of business schools – the MBA – was created as a direct response to the prevailing Taylorism and Fordism of the early 20th century. This gives clear and important insights into the way in which management education was conceived – and is still promoted by some – namely as the science of business administration. As the multinational era dawned in the second half of the 20th century, the increasing scale and complexity of business operations was matched in business schools by increasing functional specialisation and the introduction of new disciplines focused on markets, customers and competitors. By the 1980s, business education

had shifted from teaching the science of management to teaching the science of making money. The explosion of information technology and the emergence of serious social and environmental problems in the 1990s marked yet another shift in business, this time towards a more global perspective. In fact, both business and business educational institutions are still grappling with how best to operate in this more complex, interconnected world. The most common response has been to simply add functions like IT, health and safety, environment and public relations. Develop real leadership However, this reflects a serious failure to appreciate fully the interdependencies of the challenges facing business and society, from climate change and poverty to biodiversity loss and corruption. It also represents a failure on the part of companies and business schools to recognise how fundamentally expectations of the role of business in society have changed. The result is that many companies find themselves making public commitments to take action on social, ethical and environmental issues, ahead of their actual capacity to deliver on them. There is a great opportunity for universities (rather than only business schools) to return to their early 20th century role of developing effective leadership by providing diverse theoretical and applied knowledge to fuel innovation in business models and social progress. Specifically, the providers of business education will need to: • Deepen the understanding of leaders of the complex and

Complex challenges for business leaders

urgent global challenges facing business and society. Expose them more deliberately and creatively to the depth and range of knowledge that exists in its diverse faculties and subject areas, be it anthropology and philosophy or climate science and demographic studies.

Business educational institutions are still grappling with how best to operate in a complex, interconnected world

• Improve the ability of executives to think far more systemically and to understand the connectivity between business and the wider social and ecological context in which they operate. Use a variety of strategic thinking tools – scenario planning, life-cycle analysis and product and policy road mapping to help them. • Heighten the emotional intelligence of executives through more use of experiential learning, action research and multiperspective dialogues on complex moral and ethical dilemmas. • Challenge the prevailing world views and business models of executives by providing opportunities for interaction with individuals, organisations and situations outside of their dominant fields of experience.

Polly Courtice is director and Wayne Visser is research director at the University of Cambridge Programme for Industry.

There are a growing number of progressive companies and forwardthinking educational institutions that have already begun to forge the way. The more effectively we can learn from the failures of the past, the more likely we are to deliver learning successes in the future. ■

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Nottingham University Business School International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility

Leading CSR Research & Teaching

Study for a PhD, MA or MBA in Corporate Social Responsibility Master contemporary issues in CSR, Business Ethics, Sustainability, Accountability and Governance at the world renowned International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility. • Be part of a leading centre for CSR research • Join programmes that are research led and practically orientated • Experience our innovative approach to CSR education

The ICCSR is based at Nottingham University Business School. • The only UK business school in the Aspen Institute's most recent 'Beyond Grey Pinstripes' ranking. • A top ten UK business School: 7th in the 2007 Times Good University Guide. • Among the few UK business schools ranked in the 2007 Financial Times global top 100 MBA. • Ranked in the world's top 100 by the Economist Intelligence Unit (Which MBA?) 2006. • Britain's 'University of the Year 2006/07' in the Times Higher Awards. Scholarships and bursaries are available for all programmes.

Tel: +44 (0)115 846 7426 E-mail: [email protected] www.nottingham.ac.uk/business/iccsr

Apply online: pgapps.nottingham.ac.uk

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