By Mike Rosenberg
Increasingly consumers are asking more from brands, with millennials, in particular, saving their dollars for those with responsible business practices (according to some estimates, 73% of millennials say they are willing to pay more for sustainable brands.) Luckily, it seems many of tomorrow´s future business leaders feel the same way.
As someone who teaches on the MBA along with other programs for business executives, I am seeing more and more students interested in combining business goals with a desire to make a positive social impact. With many of the world´s top companies being led by MBAs, this is a significant development that could have a big impact on our ability to truly tackle the big environmental and social issues of our day.
For example, for the last 15 years, IESE students have been organizing a conference called Doing Good Doing Well, in which they invite speakers from around the world to talk about issues related to environmental sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and other subjects which fall within the idea of responsible business.
While myself and other members of the faculty and staff try to help where we can, the conference has been organized by students who put their heart and soul into the event. They choose the topics, recruit the speakers and the sponsors, often moderate the panels and basically manage the entire event.
At one conference a journalist asked me why I enjoyed teaching, and I answered that seeing the students take ownership of such an extraordinary event like DGDW and being able to be part of their personal growth is really what teaching is all about. This has happened every year as different students have taken the conference in slightly different directions and then gone on to do amazing things in the world. Indeed, what is truly transformative about these type of student initiatives is to see how women and men in their late twenties and thirties embrace the challenge of being successful in business while at the same time acting in a responsible way.
This year, the theme of the conference is the 17 Sustainable Development Goals approved by the United Nations, which have been criticized by some for being unrealistic. These goals, which are the successors to the 8 Millennium Goals (which, in theory, were supposed to be achieved in 2015), are further divided into 169 specific targets, many of which are supposed to be achieved by 2030.
While the goals are clearly desirable, the reality is that it is very difficult to see a clear path towards achieving targets such as the eradication of hunger and poverty or the end to gender bias around the world within the next 12-13 years, if ever. This year’s conference then will tackle some of the important, thorny questions about how to approach these goals, with a look at how the goals are really being put into practice, as well as what role the investment community, social enterprises and new technology (among others) can play in helping us achieve them.
The importance of combining a clear-eyed business viewpoint with the sustainable development goals cannot be overstated if we are to really make progress with the world´s big important issues.
In this vein, one exercise I do with students in my classes, many of whom are part of the organization of the conference, is to get them to think through which of the sustainable development goals, in their view, were the most important and which should be tackled first.
At issue is which goals are prerequisites to achieving the others, and how the different goals would play out over different time scales and across different parts of the planet with different cultural norms and levels of economic development.
A positive future
This trend of business leaders thinking strategically about sustainability and social issues is starting to pay off. The co-chair of the first conference back in 2004 was, for example, Emma Coles, who later became the Vice President of Responsible Retailing for the Ahold Group, one of the world’s largest supermarket retailers (with brands such as Albert Hejin in Holland and Giant and Stop & Shop in the U.S.) Emma and countless others have found a path in life where they can really make a difference and provide leadership in a world which sorely needs it. Perhaps their generation will be able to actually make the Sustainable Development Goals a reality by combining their passion and energy with the business fundamentals they have learned in school.
What they have is a sense of possibility combined with faith in themselves, new technology and business models that just might prove sufficient to overcome some of the enormous challenges the world is facing.
By Prof. Mike Rosenberg, Professor of Strategic Management at IESE Business School
