More than just a buzz word in today’s business school environment, social responsibility is assuming a significant share of students’ time and focus both inside and outside the classroom. Reports from the corporate world say this is just as it should be, because there, too, doing the right thing is no longer just a nice idea – it’s a business imperative.
On a recent Saturday in Evanston, more than 100 Kellogg students, staff and family members came together as part of KelloggCares, an bi-annual day of local community service benefiting 18 nonprofit organizations around the Northwestern campus. Organized by the student-run Business With a Heart Fund, KelloggCares is now in its 3rd year. With sponsorship from ExxonMobile, this year’s event paired up volunteers eager to lend a helping hand with an even larger list of organizations in need of help, ranging from the Evanston Day Nursery to the Levy Senior Center to the local YMCA.
Kellogg Dean Dipak Jain praised the participants for putting their values to work to impact the community. “A key part of the Kellogg School’s mission is creating leaders who use their management skills to benefit society,” he said.
No Longer Just an Extracurricular Activity
B-school students giving back to the community is really nothing new. A BusinessWeek article from 2005 cited the then-growing trend, pointing to the fact that the number of chapters of Net Impact, an international organization dedicated to building a community of leaders who use business to improve the world, had doubled in the past five years on college campuses and were particularly prevelant at top-ranked schools. Today, many schools are taking it one step further – by teaching social responsibility in the classroom.
Beyond Grey Pinstripes (BGP), a bi-annual report released last month by the Aspen Institute Center for Business Education, ranks business schools according to their efforts to integrate issues concerning social and environmental responsibility into the curriculum. Of the 112 schools that submitted information to survey this year, 69 percent require students to take a course dedicated to business and society issues – up from 34 percent in 2001. Since the last survey in 2005, the number of electives per school dedicated to social or environmental content has grown by 20 percent.
Interestingly, these elective offerings aren’t all lumped into the schools’ CSR/ethics departments. In fact, the top disciplines, in order, teaching about social and environmental issues, are accounting, marketing, strategy, and finance, followed by CSR/ethics.
Though shifts are evident, change is still occurring at a slower pace on some fronts, according to the survey. The proportion of schools requiring content in core classes about how mainstream business can address social or environmental issues remains low, hovering between 5 and 9 percent across the disciplines.
Stanford Tops the List
The Stanford Graduate School of Business came in as number one in the 2007 BGP rankings, snagging the top spot for the second time in a row. (Kellogg, which did not rank among the top 30 schools in the 2005 survey, did not submit information for this year’s survey.)
With 121 classes featuring content related to social or environmental concerns, the Palo Alto business school led all other surveyed schools in terms of the sheer number of course offerings. It also boasted an impressively high number of related speakers and seminars offered to students (69 compared to between 10 and 15 at most of the other highest-ranking schools).
More Than a Nice Thing to Do
“Companies still thinking about the environment as a social responsibility rather than a business imperative are living in the dark ages,” Roberts told the crowd, going on to describe how a new era of global threats is changing the work of the WWF and its more than 6 million members.
WWF has outgrown its initial mission to simply save animals and must now address the economics, science, and politics of conservation around the world, Roberts said. “We will fail if we don’t change the behavior of business and how it touches the places we care about,” he added.
To this end, WWF is partnering with Wal-Mart, Google, Coca-Cola, Ikea, and others to work with governments and indigenous communities to address environmental challenges and sustainable growth needs. These are key partnerships, Roberts says, given that large corporations control 70 percent of the choices consumers make.
But as in all good partnerships, there are mutual benefits to be had. “The smartest, most strategically focused companies are calculating climate change and resource risks into their operations,” Roberts said. “True visionaries know that if their business practices aren’t sustainable long term, their businesses aren’t either.”
Perhaps fodder for the next new course on environmental issues that Stanford offers? Or perhaps Stanford’s current offerings – and its recent grads – are already helping lead the way toward changes at the world’s corporations?
Not to be outdone by its rival across the bay, Berkeley’s Haas School (No. 4 in the BGP rankings) recently launched the Center for Energy and Environmental Innovation, a new cross-disciplinary center founded by Haas MBA students seeking to increase opportunities for student innovation in the energy sector. We’ll have more to say on that in an upcoming post…
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