2016 EFMD Conference for Deans & Directors General: Corvinus University of Budapest,
Jan 25-26 2016, Theme: "Business Schools: Purpose in Context”
Plenary III - Business School Impact on Society - Jan 26th 2016
Aim: Understanding the long-term impact business schools have on society, through
graduates and research amongst others. Understanding as well what society expects from
business schools. Are business schools shaping students the right way?
Opening remarks: Prof David Grayson CBE, Director, The Doughty Centre for Corporate
Responsibility, Cranfield University School of Management, UK
I first came to Budapest in January 1978 as a student, to participate in an East-West youth and
student conference; and then several times for similar meetings over the following four years.
Then I came on several occasions beginning in April 1990 to co-chair the Prince of Wales AngloHungarian Enterprise Commission, which prepared a series of recommendations for HRH The
Prince of Wales and international business leaders like George Soros, on how to promote
enterprise and small businesses in the newly democratic Hungary. These included a youth
business loan fund and the conversion of a former Red Army Barracks in Kecskemet, into a small
business incubator. We even made a BBC TV film with Prince Charles visiting the inventor of the
Rubik’s Cube: Ernő Rubik in his studios in Budapest.
It is a great privilege, thanks to the EFMD and Corvinus University, to return again to this beautiful
city, after more than twenty years.
I share my association with Budapest to emphasise that the context in which we are operating, is
always changing: my periodic personal visits over almost 40 years reflect wider economic, political
and social evolution which we have lived through:
- from Cold War and separate, planned and market economy systems
- through the early years of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation
- to today: the beginning of what The Financial Times editor Lionel Barber a few days described
as Globalisation 2.01; a European Union troubled by fragmentation, social exclusion and
economic sclerosis; and a world which may - just may - be starting to confront the constraints of
planetary boundaries with the 2015 promulgation of the Sustainable Development Goals, the UN
Finance Initiative Report on Creating a Sustainable Financial System2 and of course, the
successful conclusion of the Paris COP21 Climate Change negotiations.
Thomas Friedman and Pankaj Ghemawat may argue about the depth and breadth of globalisation,
but most business schools today would regard globalisation as a given of the business context.
Indeed, the EQUIS accreditation places great emphasis on internationalisation. Similarly, schools
today would take as a given, going digital, networked connectivity and increasingly the
consequences of Big Data.
I would argue it should now be just as axiomatic that in their research, teaching and consulting,
faculty automatically think about sustainability as fundamental to the business environment, just as
nowadays they think about globalisation or networked connectivity as givens of the business
context.
1
Lionel Barber Globalisation 2.0 — an optimistic outlook - Financial Times, January 14, 2016
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/3dffc316-bad3-11e5-b151-8e15c9a029fb.html#axzz3xiG9c8KP
2
The Financial system we need 2015 http://web.unep.org/inquiry/publications
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As Prof Hamid Bouchikhi from ESSEC argued in a Financial Times Management Education
Soapbox last January: “Business schools must promote responsible leadership, responsible
governance, responsible employment and responsible investment. They must also educate
responsible entrepreneurs.”3
I know some think this is somehow “getting religion!” I think it is just dealing with the new business
realities: what organisations have to do if they aspire at least, to be abke to continue into the
indefinite future.
The sustainability guru and one of our Cranfield visiting professors John Elkington has argued that
we are now at the beginning of the Breakthrough Decade: “What happens in the next 40 years is
critical for all humanity for centuries to come. What happens in the next 10 years sets the range of
what’s possible.”4
If this is the context in the title of your conference: "Business Schools: Purpose in Context,” will we
in business schools facilitate or frustrate this Breakthrough Decade?
There are over 13,000 business schools in the world today, according to one of the leading
accreditation bodies. In the next decade, the US schools alone will produce more than another
million MBAs. Globally, some estimate three million new MBAs in the next ten years. Many more
will acquire some specialist business masters’ qualification. The leading international schools like
my own, also have thriving executive education programmes – providing both customized, incompany and open programmes for middle to senior managers – often including board-level
workshops and experiential learning. My own institution seeks to measure the Carbon Brainprint
we have5.
Many business school faculty consult with companies – either on their own account, or on behalf of
their schools. Through books, articles in popular management journals like Harvard Business
Review and Management Today, speeches to trade associations and other management
conferences, leading business school academics reach many more people than just those who
study at the institutions where those academics are based. For good or ill, business schools and
the prevailing ideologies taught across the world’s schools, have a profound impact on managers
and on the practice of management.
I don’t imagine for a millisecond, that any business school dean, any faculty member, any business
school advisory council member wants that influence to be malign.
Unsurprisingly, I would like to see business schools being in the vanguard of work to build
sustainable enterprises and sustainable development.
Optimists can point to considerable progress: the creation of EABIS (now ABIS), the UN Principles
of Responsible Management Education (PRME), the Global Responsible Leadership Initiative. It is
particularly impressive to see just how thoroughly Ethics, Responsibility, Sustainability (ERS) is
now embedded through the updated EQUIS accreditation standards6. Growing student interest is
reflected in the new international student sustainability competitions that have been launched in
recent years such as the Nespresso MBA Sustainability Challenge7 and the annual Hult Prize.8
3
Bouchikhi H., Business schools need to emphasise responsibility, Financial Times Soapbox Jan
2nd 2015 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/c08546f2-73ef-11e4-82a6-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3xhDxwIJI
4
http://volans.com/2014/05/get-ready-for-the-breakthrough-decade/
5
https://carbonbrainprint.wordpress.com/
6
https://www.efmd.org/images/stories/efmd/EQUIS/2015/EQUIS_Standards_and_Criteria.pdf
pages 13-14,24,29,33,40,47,56,62,68-70
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http://sustainabilitymbachallenge.com/the-challenge/
2
Pessimists might point to the relatively small number of the 13,000+ business schools across the
world that are members of ABIS, GRLI or PRME; and to the continuing dominance of maximising
shareholder-value theory. To be clear. I am perfectly comfortable with shareholder-value – as long
as we talk about optimising shareholder value over the medium to long-term; and as long as we
recognise that optimising shareholder value over the medium to long-term is a consequence of a
well-run business – not its purpose.
Various academics and practitioners - including Ron Ainsbury from Rotterdam Business School
and I have developed models of Corporate Responsibility Maturity for businesses9. We might
consider a Stages of Maturity Model for business schools too10.
STAGES OF MATURITY IN
EMBEDDING
Stage 1 Denier
Stage 2 Complier
Stage 3 Manager: risk-mitigator
Stage 4 Strategist: opportunity maximiser
Stage 5 Global leader: champion
ETHICS, RESPONSIBILITY
SUSTAINABILITY BUSINESS
SCHOOLS
Treat it as just a fad. Companies are not
specifying when recruiting MBAs or
designing customized executive
education
Will do what accreditation bodies require
– except that accreditation and even
some of the Business School rankings
are set to become more demanding
about sustainability & CR
Have specific courses, student clubs,
specialist faculty and initiatives for the
school as an organization; joining
networks
Built into school mission and purpose;
integrated through research, teaching
and practice; each management
discipline defining what sustainability &
CR mean for their discipline
Strategist plus global centre of expertise;
running joint research and teaching with
other schools; contributing to capacitybuilding through general and dedicated
networks; sharing learning in how to
embed in business schools.
Just as we encourage companies’ boards and senior management teams to ask themselves three
questions, so business schools might ask:
•
•
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9
Where on the stages of maturity are we today?
Where do we aspire to be in future?
http://www.hultprize.org/en/compete/2016-prize/2016-case-study/
Ainsbury R & Grayson D, Business critical Understanding a Company’s Current and
Desired Stages of Corporate Responsibility Maturity (2014)
http://www.som.cranfield.ac.uk/som/dinamiccontent/media/Doughty/SOMAT%201505%202014%20final.pdf
10
Grayson D., Keep the academic community engaged, Ethical Corporation Dec 2012
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•
And what will we need to do, in order to get from today to where we want to be (and
crucially, who will be accountable for different elements of the action plan?)
Like each company which has to map its own journey, business schools will do so based on their
culture; faculty perspectives and foci; student, alumni and business partner interests; and wider
university resources (where appropriate). Business schools are no more homogenous that
businesses are; and, therefore, there are no silver bullet, one-size-fits-all solutions.
As I am by background a campaigner, let me end with three practical suggestions for how
collectively, we might move this forward.
First, EFMD might contribute to the development of such a Schools Maturity Model by undertaking
an assessment of how EQUIS submissions under the revised EQUIS accreditation standards have
addressed the ERS requirements - notably in the “pulling together” chapter 9 section. Such an
EFMD analysis and commentary / observations of how schools are integrating ERS in research,
teaching, advisory services and their own operations as organisations could be a valuable
resource to help other schools.
Accreditation criteria are an important lever for speeding up progress to embed Ethics,
Responsibility, Sustainability in business schools. Encouragement from students, alumni and
business partners can be a powerful force for change too.
Secondly, you may have spotted that last week in Davos, Paul Polman the CEO of Unilever
announced the formation of The Global Commission on Business and Sustainable Development11,
with the objective of making the business case for business engagement, profitably, with the
Sustainable Development Goals. We Mean Business is a coalition of organizations working with
thousands of the world’s most influential businesses and investors. It came together to strengthen
the voice of progressive, pro sustainability businesses in the run-up to the Paris COP21 talks. It is
a coalition of Corporate Responsibility coalitions such as the World Business Council for
Sustainable Development (WBCSD), Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), and the Carbon
Disclosure Project. (CDP).12 I believe it would be a logical development of the work of both the new
Global Commission on Business and Sustainable Development and We Mean Business to
advocate directly and through encouraging their member companies to advocate for business
schools to develop and deploy meaningful curriculum around sustainable development and
managing the transition to a low carbon economy by mid-century. This has implications for the
teaching of finance, economics, strategy, innovation, marketing and so much more.
I would like to see EFMD, ABIS, UNPRME, GLRI collectively propose a management education
project to The Global Commission on Business and Sustainable Development and We mean
business. And as a “starter for ten,” here are six things that leaders of The Global Commission on
Business and Sustainable Development and We Mean Business and other Corporate
Responsibility coalitions could lobby their companies to do. Companies that care can help
ENGAGE business schools on Ethics, Responsibility, Sustainability in the following ways:
Expand your company knowledge networks to include business schools: Open doors to business
schools to research and write teaching cases about their challenges in embedding CR and
sustainability and how they are going about this. The world’s largest mobile phone business China
Mobile is doing just this.
11
https://www.unilever.com/news/news-and-features/2016/New-global-commission-puts-businessat-heart-of-sustainable-development.html
12
http://www.wemeanbusinesscoalition.org/about
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Network with other companies to offer mentoring and research opportunities to business school
faculty members – especially to bright younger faculty, wanting to make their academic names with
relevant and rigorous research around Ethics, Responsibility and sustainability.
Guide business school careers services and MBA/MSc course directors to ensure graduate
recruits have a good understanding of how to manage ESG factors in business (both as risk
mitigation and opportunity maximization). And make sure corporate recruiters reinforce this.
Activate business school alumni in your company who can reach out to their educational
institutions to prioritise the teaching of sustainability;
Ground your company's top talent and development programmes in sustainability principles and
metrics. Specify this is part of what companies are commissioning.
Encourage your top leaders to speak to, and engage in dialogue with, business school faculty and
students about ESG performance.
Thirdly, to each of you as deans and directors. Most business schools provide funds for their
faculty to attend academic conferences each year, to present their research and to keep up-to-date
with the latest academic thinking. Perhaps over the next five years, faculty members should be
encouraged to divert sufficient of their conference budget to attend and to learn from at least one,
student-organised CR and sustainability conference like Net Impact in the USA, or IESE’s Doing
good and doing well in Barcelona, or the Being Globally Responsible Conference organized at the
China Europe International Business School in Shanghai each year.
Making sure we are preparing students so they can lead ethically, responsibly, sustainably is
crucial if business schools are going to “shape students the right way,” be relevant and adding
genuine value in the future. I believe as a result, we will collectively have much more positive
impact.
David.Grayson@cranfield.ac.uk
www.doughtycentre.info
Twitter: @DoughtyDavidG
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