BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
and container ships, is one example. The cost of this is not paid for by either the producers or the consumers of specific products and services, but is paid for by the rest of society, in the form of ill health and treatment for example. We are all made worse off by pollution, but are not compensated by the market for this damage. This is one of the main reasons why, in democracies at least, governments intervene to attempt to rebalance using, for example, carbon offsetting programmes, regulations around the percentage of components in production that must be recyclable, and so on. But while this intervention from government is helpful, if not critical to safeguard people and planet, what if businesses and Business Schools took on more responsibility for this rebalancing? What would this mean for Business School curricula? What would it mean for the kind of leadership executive programmes should promote? Here are some thoughts that we believe could radically transform Business School curricula and create the leaders we need to create the world we all want to see and live in. What is ‘good’? A few years ago, we were struck by the absence of philosophical thinking in shaping and informing our modern-day management and organisational practice. We had this image of a two-legged stool, an unbalanced situation – something was missing. As we thought about it, we realised our organisational thinking is derived from two very impressive bodies of knowledge: economics and psychology. Economics asks the question, ‘how can we make efficient use of scarce resources?’ Psychology asks the question,
‘These are the questions that define the paradoxes and dilemmas of leadership’
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