BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
SUSTAINABILITY
supplied through national infrastructure; for Unilever to achieve its own goal of halving carbon footprint across the product lifecycle, it needs governments to act to boost renewables and phase out fossil fuel power generation. So, Unilever executives have a leadership role in helping to encourage that to happen. It is because more and more business leaders are embracing this new kind of leadership role that we see them turning up at COP26 and other UN summits, pushing governments to be more ambitious, and criticising them when they are not. Implications for business schools But whether an organisation ends up with senior executives willing to embrace this new kind of leadership role has tended to happen more by chance than design. Over and over again, we hear business leaders say that “nothing in my career or my training prepared me for this”. With the pressures now pushing organisations to embrace the sustainability agenda, there is a need to be more deliberate in consciously nurturing these kinds of outlooks and skills through management education. How can you be proactive in developing the mindsets and skills most valuable in today’s leadership context? We asked business leaders for their perspectives on why it is that some of them have grasped the need to lead in this kind of way, while many of their contemporaries are still operating from an out-of-date leadership blueprint. While everyone’s story was unique, the clear theme was that certain key experiences had been crucial in influencing and shifting perspectives. For some, it was formative experiences around upbringing, university and business school study. For others, it was influential mentors or first-hand experiences such as engaging with people living in poverty, personal challenges (for example, the impact of climate change) or first-hand experiences of the changing interests of key stakeholders (or engaging in networks that focused on these issues). These stories have some clear implications for business schools. First, ethics, responsibility and sustainability themes need to be integrated into all management courses. It’s no good if the sustainability course is being undermined by the strategy, marketing and finance courses. There needs to be a joined-up approach to the integration of these topics across the curriculum. That means, for example, talking about stakeholder theory and shared value in strategy and 'problematising' consumption. It means talking about how to influence pro-sustainable behaviour change in marketing – discussing cradle-to-cradle design and the circular economy in operations and innovation; human rights due diligence and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in supply chain management; the weaknesses of GDP growth as a policy goal and the alternatives being developed instead in managerial economics; integrated reporting in accounting; funding of the UN SDGs in finance; addressing conscious and unconscious bias, and fostering diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging in leadership. There also needs to be a dedicated course somewhere in the curriculum where management students learn about the nature of our global challenges: the climate and ecosystems crises; the ongoing toxic legacies of colonialism and slavery; contemporary human rights challenges – and where they get the chance to talk about political theory and discuss our shifting assumptions about the role of governments and intergovernmental organisations such as the UN and NGOs alongside
businesses and the financial system in leading the system transitions we need to see. But beyond the conventional cognitive curriculum, there are several other parts of the management education experience to consider. Where are the opportunities to bring in project-based experiential learning – to give students the chance to bring it all together and integrate it? For example, by inviting businesses and NGOs into the classroom to set students to work on real challenges. What about leadership simulations, with the chance to develop and practise the skills to engage with multiple different stakeholder groups, and lead partnerships across organisational ecosystems to achieve systems transitions? Where is the proactive facilitation of extra-curricular opportunities for management students to learn – including professional networks and hands-on first-hand experiences? These kinds of advances to the management education curriculum have implications for the skills of the faculty. How far do you need to be seeking faculty with the skills and interests to lead this kind of work when hiring? How can you encourage and support their own learning? Can you identify the faculty that are already leading on this agenda and champion their work and encourage the sharing of their resources with colleagues? And, of course, how can you role model this new leadership through fronting this kind of system change in your own institutions and campuses and supply chains, and more widely across the management education sector? Read about Hult International Business School’s work to embed ethics, responsibility and sustainability in its UN Principles of Responsible Management Education Sharing Information on Progress Report https://www.hult.edu/en/about Matt Gitsham is professor of sustainable development and director of the Centre for Business and Sustainability at Hult International Business School (Ashridge). He has led research projects on business and sustainable development over two decades. These include exploring CEO perspectives on the implications of sustainability for business leadership; CEO lobbying for more ambitious public policy on sustainable development; the role of business in shaping the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); how companies are embedding the SDGs (in partnership with Business Fights Poverty) and corporate leadership on Modern Slavery (in partnership with the Ethical Trading Initiative). He has worked closely with networks including the UN Global Compact and Business in the Community and companies such as Unilever, IBM, HSBC, GSK, De Beers, Cemex, and Pearson. He leads courses on business and global society on the Hult MBA and global human rights on the Hult undergraduate programme, and is a doctoral supervisor for the Hult Ashridge Doctorate in Organisational Change
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