BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
from the Carbon Literacy Project in Manchester. We have plans to translate the training materials into Chinese so that the Sustainable Future Talents can begin to provide this training to Chinese Business Schools and universities. Perhaps, in future, we will be able to use our membership in the China Academic Committee for Responsible Management Education, China’s PRME Chapter, to franchise this group to other universities. Business students care about sustainability and climate change. How important do you think sustainability is, and in what ways have Business Schools adapted this into their programmes? Younger generations have indeed singled out the climate emergency as their main priority. Greta Thunberg, Ayakha Melithafa and Rosario Garavito, among others, are incredibly strong and visionary leaders. They’re correct that sustainability in the broader sense is the key to saving our planet. IBSS was honoured to sit among illustrious nominees for Best CSR and Sustainability Initiative at the AMBA & BGA Excellence Awards 2022 – nominees who are dedicating time, energy, and resources to sustainability. Since its inception as a Business School, IBSS has been a signatory of the UN-supported PRME, which now totals almost 1,000 member institutions. In October 2021, we hosted the PRME International Research Conference, Responsible Management Education 8 (RME8) with representatives from Business Schools around the world sharing their ideas for educating the next generations of business leaders, who need to understand the ‘mission-critical’ nature of sustainability. At IBSS, we want to make certain that our stakeholders understand that our push for ERS is not just ‘greenwashing’. We aim to ‘walk the talk’ through our actions, policies and procedures. For example, in December 2021, we gifted reusable thermos bottles to all IBSS faculty and staff to decrease the need for single-use plastic water bottles, which had unfortunately become ubiquitous at internal meetings. We know that behaviour change takes time and nudging, so the administrative staff are putting reminders to ‘bring your own bottle’ in meeting invitations.
consider all of the stakeholders, putting people and planet above profit. Being mindful of stakeholders’ varied interests means inviting them, in all their diverse forms, to engage – and making them feel valued and welcome to collaborate on more innovative and inclusive solutions. I look to leaders in sustainability, such as Wendy Purcell [Harvard University], Chris Marquis [Judge Business School, University of Cambridge], Petra Molthan-Hill, Dinah Bennett OBE [formerly of Durham University Business School] and Sanjeev Khagram [Director General and Dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management], to provide guidance from academia in the west. In Chinese Business Schools, we have leaders in ERS such as Professors WANG Zhongmin, HUANG Haifeng, ZHU Dajian, QIAN Xiaojun, ZHOU Zucheng, LU Huailiang, GUO Yi, and our own CAO Xuanwei. For corporate leadership, Paul Polman, Melinda Gates and MacKenzie Scott are in the vanguard. Ann Cairns’ work with the 30% Club is inspired and so needed. Closer to home, in the Suzhou and Shanghai area, we have amazing leaders such as NI Huan of Green Light-Year, WANG Jun of Learn-Will Cultural Exchange Centre, Charlene Liu and Jill Tang of Ladies who Tech, and Nadav and Marina Ben Simon from the Inclusion Factory. Given the growing climate emergency, do you think businesses – and by extension, Business Schools – have a role to play in helping communities to respond to, and recover from, natural disasters? Business Schools have a responsibility to prepare the business leaders of the future by exposing them to the latest theories and practice in the classroom, as well as in situ , if possible, thereby raising awareness and bringing about a values change. For example, just recently, when Suzhou experienced its first surge of Covid cases, I volunteered to facilitate communication at a testing site that had a high proportion of expatriate families. This was my way of modelling empathetic behaviour for our ‘At IBSS, we want to make certain that our stakeholders understand that our push for ERS is not just “greenwashing”’
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What do you think sustainable leadership looks like in the ‘new normal’?
From the School’s founding, the IBSS leadership team realised that ERS should be included in our educational offerings. In 2019, a new Dean, Jorg Bley, arrived, and set out to include responsible and sustainable business education as one of the five strategic pillars of IBSS. Bley is one of the increasing number of business leaders who are calling for people to wake up and realise that consecutive quarterly increases in profits will mean nothing if we don’t have a planet in the future. I think the move towards B Corporations and purpose-driven businesses, with their emphasis on solving societal problems, is the direction in which we should all be moving. We simply must
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