Pathways of Influence for Sustainability in Business Schools

Leveraging External Influences to Catalyze Internal Change

The John Molson School of Business is the largest business school in Canada, with around 9,000 students enrolled in undergraduate, graduate, and PhD programs. When I joined the school as dean, there were no full-time faculty members doing research on sustainability, and one of the largest bodies of business school faculty (more than 350 full-time and part-time) in Canada was largely indifferent to sustainability in business education. Clearly, in such a context, it would have been an uphill task to develop a vision of integrating sustainability into the core curriculum of the various programs. Among the internal stakeholders, a small number of undergraduate and graduate business students were very keen to include sustainability courses in the school. At the university level, there was a group of students from other departments and colleges who had formed a group called “Sustainable Concordia” and had persuaded the central administration of the university to allow them to conduct an assessment and audit of energy use and paper use at the university. This group over time was institutionalized as a permanent unit in the university. Outside of the business school, there were faculty members in areas such as engineering working on solar and wind technologies; in sciences working on clean water or environmental chemistry or ecosystem analysis; in economics, political science, and public policy working on environmental regulations and policy (one of the authors of the IPCC report was at Concordia); and in fine arts with a focus on ecological design. Thus, there was a scattering of interest in sustainability across the university but almost none at the business school. Since change is not possible without faculty champions and ownership, my task was to generate resources to hire new faculty and support for sustainability research and programs.

Since the only constituents interested in sustainability at the business school were a small group of students, I extended my support to them via funding of an annual student-run sustainability conference with themes such as green buildings, the food lifecycle, and clean water. I helped arranged speakers and panelists for the conferences. These conferences played a major role in getting an increasing number of students interested in sustainability topics. The MBA curriculum was changed to add a service-learning project with a social mission. Many of these projects required internships with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and microfinance organizations working in multi-stakeholder base of the pyramid contexts. However, this was a double-edged sword. The students increasingly wanted to know why the school did not offer a specialization or stream in sustainability or at least some courses in this domain.

Another change that I implemented immediately was to begin the process of change toward more environmentally friendly operations of the large school. The communications and media team was asked to switch to post-consumer recycled paper for printed materials such as business cards and reduce paper use by switching to USBs instead of printed brochures and maximize the use of the web as a communication tool instead of printed materials. During this process, several faculty members protested that the new business cards looked shabby and damaged our image. Some felt embarrassed to trot out these cards as compared to the crisp white bleached card stock that their colleagues from other schools handed out. Gradually most people got used to the new materials and began to like their look. In every aspect of running the school, we began to walk the talk. When we built a new 37,000 square meter (400,000 square foot) building, it was LEED certified and installed experimental solar cell technology developed by an engineering professor. The solar cells embedded in the south wall, were more efficient and cheaper than traditional solar panels, and generated between 15% and 25% of the building’s energy needs. The new technology also generated a great deal of media exposure about the school’s focus on sustainable operations.

During the process of developing internal support for sustainability, I worked from the first day to build external support as I met alumni and donors. Just as I prepared for these meetings by reading their bios, they prepared for theirs by reading my bio. Whenever I talked about my vision and strategic goals for the school, the alumni and donors inevitably asked me about my research and teaching in sustainable business and wanted to understand the value it would add to business education and to business. At the same time, I continued to talk at various business community events and forums on the importance of sustainability to the future competitiveness of business. Shortly, alumni and corporate partners began to step up to fund initiatives around sustainable business education such as research chairs, case competitions, and conferences. A major gift from an alumnus enabled me to set up the game-changing David O’Brien Centre for Sustainable Enterprise. The Centre included funding for a director and a professorship that allowed me to hire a faculty champion, Paul Shrivastava. The funding included doctoral and masters’ fellowships that enabled the recruitment of high-quality graduate students. The funding for research professorships from donors allowed the hiring of a critical mass of junior faculty members. A critical mass of research and teaching began to build up at the school until sustainable business became one of the five formal strategic signature areas of the business school.

I continued to talk in various public forums about sustainable business reinforced by the new faculty members and supplemented by the initiatives and activities of the Centre. With a critical mass of faculty, programs, and initiatives, the change process became self-reinforcing. With multiple actions that connected external funding and support to internal support by students, I was able to bring sustainability courses, research, and initiatives into a very large business school. However, during my term as a dean, sustainability was not integrated into the core curriculum but rather was a specialized area of study and research.

I consider this as remarkable progress because during my tenure as the dean of the business school, and for several years before I joined Concordia, faculty members from across campus engaged in a process to develop a cross-disciplinary sustainability major at the university level that would be available to all university students. In spite of a decade of discussions and meetings (in which I was involved), very little progress could be made. In contrast, the business school was able to reach out across campus with speakers who spanned business and nonbusiness disciplines, various university-level activities and conferences with a sustainability focus, and research grants to foster collaboration on sustainability research between business and nonbusiness faculty members and graduate students. With a critical mass of scholars conducting excellent research and with several courses and several initiatives, it is hoped that sustainability will be an integral part of business education and operations at the John Molson School of Business. However, since it is not embedded into the core curriculum due to lack of widespread faculty interest or support, it is possible for a new dean to reverse the process. In several schools, I have observed new deans eliminating well-established concentrations unless they are fundamentally integrated. The approach below highlights more foundational integration of sustainability education.

From the Inside Out: Reinventing the Core

The School of Business Administration at the University of Vermont is a much smaller school with around 1,000 students in a traditional and much older U.S. university established in 1791. The pathway of influence at this school was strikingly different. Before I joined as dean, the school offered traditional business concentrations and most of the prominent and wealthy alumni (and hence potential donors) were in financial services (mainly Wall Street) or in private equity and venture capital. They wanted the school to focus increasingly on educating students for the financial services industry. A large number of alumni are located in New York and Boston, and during my frequent visits to talk about my vision, it was quite evident that external financial support for sustainability would require a great deal of education of the alumni, many of whom perceived sustainability the domain of liberal left-wing tree huggers opposed to business. In fact, attempts by a previous dean to build a “green business school” had met with tremendous opposition from the alumni, donors, and the business community.

The school offered nine concentrations without a critical mass of faculty or courses in any of these concentrations. The faculty body included a small number of faculty members in different disciplines with research interests in sustainability. The undergraduate and graduate programs at the school had not been substantially revised since 1974, and while there were some very good courses, the curriculum was stale, outdated, and not attractive for students. I appointed two ad hoc committees to undertake a major revision of the undergraduate and graduate curriculums after benchmarking against the most innovative programs, doing a market analysis that included feedback from employers, alumni, and the business community; feedback from students and faculty; and an analysis of the resources and capabilities at the school, at the university, and in the state of Vermont.

The committees spent hundreds of hours collecting data, analyzing markets and resources, and obtaining feedback. The undergraduate curriculum committee emerged with a recommendation to the faculty that the school focus on three strategic themes: sustainable business, entrepreneurship, and global business. The graduate curriculum committee emerged with a recommendation to the faculty that the school focus on sustainable entrepreneurship. Both curriculum review recommendations were extremely detailed with courses, initial course outlines, and schedules, and interfaces with other colleges within the university and institutions outside the university. The University of Vermont has strengths in environmental studies and sciences, and the state of Vermont has a critical mass of companies with a strong social and environmental mission. The curriculum was based on an integration of the three themes including sustainability into the core curriculum, that is, the core courses would include content and cases focusing on these strategic themes. Both recommendations received a unanimously positive vote from the faculty even though the changes are substantive and will require fundamental change in courses. It gives me confidence that given the freedom to analyze markets, trends, and stakeholder feedback, the faculty members are likely to come to the conclusion that sustainability is critical to the future of business education.

In this situation, the vision for sustainability in education emerged internally within the faculty body facilitated and supported by the dean. The challenge now was that while there were faculty members in different disciplines with some limited interface with sustainability, and the school had the capacity to deliver the new curriculum, there was need for an academic leader who could help the school build reputation as a knowledge leader in this domain.

I now had to go out and sell the faculty’s vision and agenda for the future to alumni and donors, many opposed to the concept of sustainability. I also had to sell the curriculum to school counselors and advisors who guided high school students on appropriate degrees and majors, and to the business community. For example, I had to explain to our alumni on Wall Street how important it was for them to understand carbon markets of the future and the supply chain–wide risks inherent in climate change and other sustainability challenges in valuation of companies. I had to educate venture capitalists about the tremendous opportunities in clean tech venture. I had to overcome the generally prevailing view among many alumni that sustainability was about converting the business school students into left-wing liberal tree huggers who had no financial discipline and disdained the profit mission of business. While some potential donors remained skeptic, others came on board and funded three endowed chairs in the three strategic themes—sustainable business, entrepreneurship, and global business—to allow us to build leadership in these areas. The student applications have gone up in numbers, the academic quality of students is rising, and the admission yields are up. In my opinion, this is a much stronger pathway that embeds and integrates sustainability into the core of the business school curriculum based on widespread faculty support rather than based on a few faculty champions.

Conclusion

There is no formula or a standard process that deans can follow toward building a more sustainable business school. It is clear that change has to be implemented and owned by faculty. However, I believe that the process of embedding sustainability cannot be gradual or cannot wait until the dean’s second term. If a dean has a passion for sustainability, the process must begin at the beginning of the term when all stakeholders expect change. A dean should begin by quickly identifying and listing all external and internal stakeholders of the school and understanding their agendas for the school and the depth of their support, indifference, and/or opposition to sustainability. If stakeholders need to be educated, understand what are the sustainability challenges that could affect each of the stakeholders? For example, educating Wall Street investment bankers about the risks of climate change and carbon prices to their business generated interest and sparked support. Champions within any stakeholder group—faculty, students, alumni, and donors—should be supported and linked with the agendas of other stakeholders.

Deans also need to analyze the university and institutional context. This includes market needs and trends, employer needs, competing schools, the university’s competences, and state funding and support. As the two cases show, if the school does not have faculty members who are academic leaders in sustainability, major change requires funding to hire faculty, to support research, to initiate courses and programs, and to support student initiatives. In instances where there are sustainability faculty champions and widespread faculty support, external funding helps support new hires, research, and student initiatives to build the school’s reputation in sustainable education.

In the first case presented above, external interest and funding was easier to obtain via persuasive arguments, but faculty support was not forthcoming and new champions had to be brought in from the outside. Thus, change began with students and ended with new faculty members and programs, which then carried the process of change forward. In the second case, change was much more foundational and began with the core faculty and an overhaul of the curriculum that was externally funded and resulted in distinctive programs that would attract a unique mix of students. However, obtaining external support in the second case was much harder since most prominent alumni and donors were in the financial services industry on Wall Street and unfamiliar with sustainability. This also may be a reflection of the differences in the Canadian and U.S. contexts, with the Canadian corporate sector more attuned to a sustainable future for business.

While some resources can be leveraged from other units in the university, other institutions, and federal and state grants, ultimately external donors have to be persuaded to put weight behind the process of change. I firmly believe that if a dean has a compelling vision for a sustainable business school and sustainable business, obstacles can be overcome with dialogue, education, and passion for a sustainable world. In different contexts, other stakeholders may be influential in the change process. These may include NGOs, industry associations, and student associations such as Net Impact, among others. However, in my experience, these constituencies have played either no role or a minor role in driving change at the institutions I have been at. In the two cases presented above, NGOs expected the business school to provide resources for their activities without providing any support. Industry associations have very limited funds and can help with student projects but do not usually provide endowments that can generate major change. Student chapters such as Net Impact were created only after substantial numbers of students were enrolled in the new curriculum, several years into the process of change.

Faculty members should not passively wait for the dean to initiate the process of change. Faculty members with a passion for sustainability can bring to the attention of the dean the potential of internal (students) and external (alumni, employers, donors) stakeholders who could become supporters of sustainability education. Deans who are not passionate about sustainability can be educated and can change if they receive similar signals from multiple stakeholders. AACSB, the accreditation body for business schools, started a sustainability conference a few years ago. Many deans who attend these conferences have limited understanding of sustainability education but are receptive to being educated by faculty members who can take initiative and can become champions.