2012 Summary of Best Practices in Responsible Management Education (Part 2)

This is the second part of a two part series reviewing the best practices in responsible management for 2012. It was written by Giselle Weybrecht the author of The Sustainable MBA: The Manager’s Guide to Green Business. The book aims to educate the next generation of business leaders about sustainability issues, whether these be students or business executives. Prior to this she worked for many years with the United Nations internationally in sustainable development. Today she works with government, universities, NGOs, business and with social entrepreneurs in sustainability around the world. She is committed to ensuring that the next generation of business leaders fully understand sustainability by working with business schools and businesses to embed these issues into their programmes. She is a dynamic and sought after speaker in sustainability issues and also writes on sustainability and business issues for a variety of publications including the Economist and Forbes.

2012 has been an interesting year for sustainability and management education and through Primetime I have tried to share some of the incredible work that PRME signatories are doing to mainstream responsible leadership and management education around the world. Primetime has become quite a repository of examples and in the final few blogs of the year I wanted to summarize the range of resources and experiences that have been featured.

Getting faculty engaged

Faculty are key when it comes to bringing about change in sustainability on campus. Several blogs focused on how to get faculty on board with sustainability (9 April) as well as a range of examples from signatories featured in the Inspirational Guide (23 August). Faculty including those from Maastricht University (22 October – Outside the Classroom New ways to feature sustainability in business courses) and Kozminski University (16 January), have initiated a range of innovative courses around sustainability. Several have also initiated Certificates in Sustainable Business, taking a variety of different and innovative approaches (26 April).

We also focused on a range of methods for teaching sustainability, in particular the increasing number of tools available online for faculty to use in their courses, including lectures (19 March), discussion spaces (23 January) as well as online games developed by NGOs (27 February), the business sector (5 March) and universities (15 March).

Finally we focused on bringing out some of the favourite business and sustainability examples of faculty from around the world, including examples from the Dominican Republic, Tanzania and Slovenia (3 July), the USA and Australia (29 October), Poland, UK and the Netherlands (13 February), and Canada, UK and New Zealand (30 August).

Sustainable Campus

Quite a few schools are doing some excellent work around creating more sustainable campuses including looking at providing more sustainable food options (7 May – Sustainable Food on Campus Part 1 and Part 2) and encouraging bike use on campus (6 February – Creating more sustainable campuses: Bikes). Universities have come up with innovative ways to make their campus more sustainable including Aston with their Go Green Awards (21 August – Go Green Awards), Olin’s Sustainability Case Competition (17 September – Using a case competition to make campus more sustainable), the Student Green Energy Fund at University of South Florida (December -) and Viterbo’s Metrics of Sustainability course (3 September – Engaging your students in making your and other organisations more sustainable). We also looked at a variety of ways in which students are becoming more engaged in these discussions whether it be through conferences (9 January – Responsible Leadership in China), Board Fellows Programmes (2 January - Board Fellows Programmes) or through a range of contests (19 November – Contests for Business Students in Sustainability). As signatories are getting engaged in more and more activities across campus they are also exploring how to better communicate these activities and other sustainability programmes both across campus and with other stakeholders (30 July – Communicating your work with stakeholders).

Exploring specific themes

Quite a few schools are doing some excellent work around specific topics and, in particular around Rio+20, many of them were featured here. In May, we had a focus on Water, both on campus and in the curriculum (21 May – Creating a more sustainable campus: Water Part 1 and Part 2). We have also had blogs on the topic of Microfinance (20 February - Teaching Students about Microfinance) and social entrepreneurship (5 November – Innovations in Social Entrepreneurship Courses Part 1 and Part 2).

We finished off the year with a three part series focused on the UN International Year of Cooperatives, which took part throughout 2012, with an overview of the year (26 November – Introduction), a range of examples of cooperatives around the world (10 December – Business examples) and finally some examples of schools providing teaching and programmes around the topic (24 December – Business School Response). In 2013, this focus will continue with a look at how to incorporate cooperatives into business education programmes.

2013

In 2013 we will continue to provide a range of best practices around mainstreaming sustainability and responsible leadership into management education globally. Some new features for 2013 will include a dean’s corner and a continued focus on how to incorporate the 6 Principles of PRME into your work.
Primetime is all about featuring the work that you are doing at your schools in the area of management education and sustainability/responsible leadership. If you have an interesting example that you would like to share with the community or if there is a particular theme that you would like to see explored, please do email me at gweybrecht@thesustainablemba.com.

Source: Primetime

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2012 Summary of Best Practices in Responsible Management Education (Part 1)