BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
and it was all on EDI, not a word on climate change. There is such a broad range of issues that there is a danger of spreading yourself very thin over these and achieving nothing on all of them. ‘I think it’s a challenge of what the School can do and then what can be included in our programmes. If we do something on the climate emergency, are we doing it at the cost of EDI or the cost of something else? Patti Brown, Director, Full-Time Post-Experience Programmes and Executive Education, ESSEC Business School ‘You can talk about sustainability goals, but unless people can see how that can happen in the everyday, it’s pointless. At the School level, we have a new programme called ‘Together’ but we still find things like plastic cups on campus, or single-use plastic. ‘You can talk about it but how many people are actually doing it? Until they see how it affects their little world or their little life, then unfortunately most of the age groups just don’t care. That’s my biggest challenge and my thought on this – that everyone will begin to care about things when it affects their daily lives.’ Jonatan Pinkse, Professor of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Executive Director of the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Alliance Manchester Business School ‘For me, I think a lot is about how you frame it – with companies, for example, the business case has been very successful in selling sustainability. You need to do a similar thing with students, so if they don’t really know what sustainability or climate change is, the moment you connect it to something they do know and are interested in, then it works much better. ‘For example, entrepreneurship is sexy, and they all love it. You can easily do social and sustainable entrepreneurship. In my mainstream entrepreneurship class, I used to have at least 10% who were truly interested in social entrepreneurship and would always pick their own
projects on that topic, then they would get the fun of it and they would understand the power of it. If it becomes a little bit like what we had with ethics courses a couple of years ago, where you had to do it or you were an immoral person, by definition, people don’t like it. Therefore, for me, it’s really about the packaging. It’s amazing how little information students use to make their choices – they sometimes just go for the title of the course. You have to make sure that it sounds like something they want to do. I used to teach a class called ‘Creativity, design and entrepreneurship’ – how can that not be fun? ‘As a Business School, we are a business ourselves because we work in a market and this means that there has to be demand. We have a lot of sustainability courses, but they don’t always get enough students, so our leadership asks why we would make them bigger when there is no sufficient demand. That’s partly missing the point because companies could say the same thing, i.e.,: “We have green products, but no one is buying them.” ‘There needs to be regulation that forces sustainability in companies. Likewise, at Business Schools, we need to argue that these topics need to be there because we consider that to be the responsible choice. But I don’t see that happening, and when I make such claims, people start smiling because they say I am just preaching for my own topic. It is very difficult to make that claim in a neutral way. Of course, a lot of us are in our bubble and we think that everyone thinks about this all the time but guess what – they don’t. Many people don’t really care.’
28
David Veredas, Professor of Financial Markets, Vlerick Business School
‘Sustainability must be everywhere in the School but if we need to focus, then we should start with the curriculum. This is because sustainability is, by definition, long term, and it’s in the curriculum where we have the long-lasting effects, as our business is training future leaders. ‘Should sustainability be embedded in all courses (for example, one introductory course at the beginning of the year and then embed sustainability in all courses), or,
MODERATOR David Woods-Hale , Director of Marketing and Communications, AMBA & BGA PANELLISTS Patti Brown , Director, Full-Time Post- Experience Programmes and Executive Education, ESSEC Business School, France Jennifer Goodman , Associate Professor, Audencia Business School, France
Louis Hébert , Director of MBA and EMBA programmes, HEC Montréal, Canada Óscar Eduardo Medina Arango , MBA Director, Universidad EAFIT, Colombia Hanna-Leena Pesonen , Dean, Jyväskylä University School of Business and Economics, Finland Jonatan Pinkse , Professor of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Executive Director of the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Alliance
Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, UK Stephanie Villemagne , Associate Dean, IE Business School, Spain David Veredas , Professor of Financial Markets, Vlerick Business School, Belgium Frank Wijen , Associate Professor of Strategic Management, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Netherlands
Made with FlippingBook - Share PDF online