Monday, November 16, 2009
Social, environmental and ethical content elevates Darden MBA program
Two UVa business-school professors have been named Faculty Pioneers by the Aspen Institute.
Katie Konefal, sitting toward the back of the classroom in the University of Virginia’s Darden Business School, was worrying about employee morale.
“OK, so I’m BP and I’m going to invest $100 million in cleaning up this facility,” responded Mike Lenox, the professor. “What’s the payback in terms of my employee morale? Can you calculate that?”
Konefal, a second-year graduate student from Virginia Beach, fidgeted as hands shot up from 50 of her personal competitors in “Business and Sustainability,” Darden’s new showcase course in corporate social responsibility. “Well, you, ah, you can get better productivity at least.”
Another student butted in: “You’ve got to consider the turnover cost — the cost of retraining new people because others are leaving.”
This case method discussion centering on whether British Petroleum should continue its decade-long drive to be the world’s cleanest oil company is the epitome of Darden’s unprecedented jump of 13 places in the Aspen Institute’s Beyond Gray Pinstripes ranking this year. The biennial ranking looks at business school leadership in the areas of corporate responsibility, ethics and sustainability.
Lenox, like four other speakers in the seven-week course, isn’t the professor of record in the multi-dimensional class devised by Darden professor Richard Brownlee and his undergraduate counterpart Mark White. Noting that sustainability thinking is not restricted to the typical academic tunnels of engineering, architecture, politics or law, the two business professors are exposing budding MBAs to insights from across the intellectual spectrum.
Lenox, a long-term researcher into renewable energy and environmental activism and head of Darden’s $80 million Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, is an especially appealing discussion leader: A month before Darden climbed from 24th to 11th in the Aspen Institute ratings, he was named a Faculty Pioneer by Aspen, one of four professors worldwide so honored.
The awards recognize teachers who incorporate social and environmental concepts into their classrooms and research.
Another 2009 Faculty Pioneer is Darden’s Greg Fairchild, whose research addresses societal and economic questions in overlooked business areas, such as the hollows of the Appalachians.
Never before in the Aspen Institute’s existence have two professors from the same business school been named Faculty Pioneers in the same year.
But neither that, nor an array of outside-of-class corporate social responsibility events and speeches that have arisen at Darden since the hiring of Erika Herz as manager of sustainability two years ago, has much to do with Darden’s explosion in the rankings.
It’s primarily about what happens when the future MBAs sit down behind their laptops and argue with each other and their professors across the spectrum of business school courses, said Justin Goldbach, the Aspen Institute’s manager of the Center for Business Education.
“Darden really excelled in two areas,” Goldbach said in an e-mail. “The first area is the number of courses offered on campus that explicitly address how mainstream, for-profit business can be an engine for positive social and environmental change. The second is in faculty research. Darden ranked fifth in the world for the number of articles published on social, environmental and ethical issues in peer-reviewed business journals.”
But Darden also ranked fifth in faculty research two years ago, when Beyond Gray Pinstripes had 110 B-schools vying to make the global list, compared to 149 this year. Darden climbed in each of Beyond Gray Pinstripes’ three other areas, especially in “Relevant courses on for-profit impact” and “Student exposure” in the classroom.
Since the 2007 ratings, Darden has added three corporate social responsibility courses including Brownlee’s flagship course with White and a Global Business Experience in Sweden that focuses on sustainability.
“I’m gratified that over the past few years the concept of incorporating sustainability thinking into business decisions and practices has moved from being synonymous with regulatory compliance and added cost to viewing sustainability as strategic in nature,” said Brownlee, a 20-year advocate of business sustainability.
“The next industrial revolution must replace the old ‘take-make-waste’ mentality with one that respects and learns from natural systems.”
Brownlee believes Darden’s tipping point was the hiring of Herz and then a year later Lenox.
Herz calls herself “a nodal point” for tying together all of Darden’s corporate social responsibility activities, and she and Lenox took the lead in founding the 10-school Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability.
“We’ve got kind of a critical mass on corporate social responsibility,” said Lenox, who moved from Duke University in 2008. “What’s nice about Darden is that it’s not just me. The fact that we have two [Pioneer Awards] this year and three overall provides a great interrelationship which shows students that we’re going to continue even if an individual faculty member leaves. The whole is much greater than the sum of the parts and the parts are pretty good themselves.”
Though there are no numbers yet to determine if Darden’s changes are affecting donations or admissions, Darden is fast becoming a place that attracts sustainability speakers like Peter Senge, author of “The Necessary Revolution,” and “radical industrialist” Ray Anderson, founder and CEO of Interface. Having discovered the emphasis on sustainability, the Virginia Garden Club held its Building Sustainable Communities forum in the university’s Abbott Center earlier this month.
“What’s been surprising to me is how many students are now using sustainability as a criterion, maybe not the criterion, but a criterion for their decisions,” Herz said. “It’s healthy to think that that’s a very large factor. They need to see a sustainable point of view and they need the obvious actions like the Garden Club’s forum, our sustainability goals, our GreenPodcast and the Darden Farmer’s Market.”
That is exactly the point, according to the Aspen Institute, which uses the term “social impact management.”
“Our concern,” Goldbach said, “is that social, environmental and ethical content penetrate the MBA experience. We hope that with this knowledge, the next generation of mainstream, for-profit business leaders will be well prepared to innovate at the intersection of corporate profits and positive social impacts.”
“OK, so I’m BP and I’m going to invest $100 million in cleaning up this facility,” responded Mike Lenox, the professor. “What’s the payback in terms of my employee morale? Can you calculate that?”
Konefal, a second-year graduate student from Virginia Beach, fidgeted as hands shot up from 50 of her personal competitors in “Business and Sustainability,” Darden’s new showcase course in corporate social responsibility. “Well, you, ah, you can get better productivity at least.”
Another student butted in: “You’ve got to consider the turnover cost — the cost of retraining new people because others are leaving.”
This case method discussion centering on whether British Petroleum should continue its decade-long drive to be the world’s cleanest oil company is the epitome of Darden’s unprecedented jump of 13 places in the Aspen Institute’s Beyond Gray Pinstripes ranking this year. The biennial ranking looks at business school leadership in the areas of corporate responsibility, ethics and sustainability.
Lenox, like four other speakers in the seven-week course, isn’t the professor of record in the multi-dimensional class devised by Darden professor Richard Brownlee and his undergraduate counterpart Mark White. Noting that sustainability thinking is not restricted to the typical academic tunnels of engineering, architecture, politics or law, the two business professors are exposing budding MBAs to insights from across the intellectual spectrum.
Lenox, a long-term researcher into renewable energy and environmental activism and head of Darden’s $80 million Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, is an especially appealing discussion leader: A month before Darden climbed from 24th to 11th in the Aspen Institute ratings, he was named a Faculty Pioneer by Aspen, one of four professors worldwide so honored.
The awards recognize teachers who incorporate social and environmental concepts into their classrooms and research.
Another 2009 Faculty Pioneer is Darden’s Greg Fairchild, whose research addresses societal and economic questions in overlooked business areas, such as the hollows of the Appalachians.
Never before in the Aspen Institute’s existence have two professors from the same business school been named Faculty Pioneers in the same year.
But neither that, nor an array of outside-of-class corporate social responsibility events and speeches that have arisen at Darden since the hiring of Erika Herz as manager of sustainability two years ago, has much to do with Darden’s explosion in the rankings.
It’s primarily about what happens when the future MBAs sit down behind their laptops and argue with each other and their professors across the spectrum of business school courses, said Justin Goldbach, the Aspen Institute’s manager of the Center for Business Education.
“Darden really excelled in two areas,” Goldbach said in an e-mail. “The first area is the number of courses offered on campus that explicitly address how mainstream, for-profit business can be an engine for positive social and environmental change. The second is in faculty research. Darden ranked fifth in the world for the number of articles published on social, environmental and ethical issues in peer-reviewed business journals.”
But Darden also ranked fifth in faculty research two years ago, when Beyond Gray Pinstripes had 110 B-schools vying to make the global list, compared to 149 this year. Darden climbed in each of Beyond Gray Pinstripes’ three other areas, especially in “Relevant courses on for-profit impact” and “Student exposure” in the classroom.
Since the 2007 ratings, Darden has added three corporate social responsibility courses including Brownlee’s flagship course with White and a Global Business Experience in Sweden that focuses on sustainability.
“I’m gratified that over the past few years the concept of incorporating sustainability thinking into business decisions and practices has moved from being synonymous with regulatory compliance and added cost to viewing sustainability as strategic in nature,” said Brownlee, a 20-year advocate of business sustainability.
“The next industrial revolution must replace the old ‘take-make-waste’ mentality with one that respects and learns from natural systems.”
Brownlee believes Darden’s tipping point was the hiring of Herz and then a year later Lenox.
Herz calls herself “a nodal point” for tying together all of Darden’s corporate social responsibility activities, and she and Lenox took the lead in founding the 10-school Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability.
“We’ve got kind of a critical mass on corporate social responsibility,” said Lenox, who moved from Duke University in 2008. “What’s nice about Darden is that it’s not just me. The fact that we have two [Pioneer Awards] this year and three overall provides a great interrelationship which shows students that we’re going to continue even if an individual faculty member leaves. The whole is much greater than the sum of the parts and the parts are pretty good themselves.”
Though there are no numbers yet to determine if Darden’s changes are affecting donations or admissions, Darden is fast becoming a place that attracts sustainability speakers like Peter Senge, author of “The Necessary Revolution,” and “radical industrialist” Ray Anderson, founder and CEO of Interface. Having discovered the emphasis on sustainability, the Virginia Garden Club held its Building Sustainable Communities forum in the university’s Abbott Center earlier this month.
“What’s been surprising to me is how many students are now using sustainability as a criterion, maybe not the criterion, but a criterion for their decisions,” Herz said. “It’s healthy to think that that’s a very large factor. They need to see a sustainable point of view and they need the obvious actions like the Garden Club’s forum, our sustainability goals, our GreenPodcast and the Darden Farmer’s Market.”
That is exactly the point, according to the Aspen Institute, which uses the term “social impact management.”
“Our concern,” Goldbach said, “is that social, environmental and ethical content penetrate the MBA experience. We hope that with this knowledge, the next generation of mainstream, for-profit business leaders will be well prepared to innovate at the intersection of corporate profits and positive social impacts.”
