Download The Green MBA Podcast 7.0 MB 20:34 Min

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Welcome to MBA Podcaster, the only broadcast source for cutting edge information and advice on the MBA application process. I’m Janet Nakano. A recent study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that more than 40% of the world’s oceans are “heavily impacted” by human activities such as over fishing and pollution. The summer of 2007 was a year of record breaking loss of arctic sea ice. The growing awareness of pollution, global warming and rising sea levels is creating a stir in business education. Green courses have been added to curriculums and sustainable development programs are rising in popularity. Join us as we explore how schools are reacting to the environmental crisis, the new opportunities created by the green movement and how MBAs are leading the way for change on campuses.

This show was co-produced with Hawaii Pacific University’s Masters of Arts in Global Leadership and Sustainable Development Program, located in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The environment has a dominant presence in the news these days from dwindling rainforests, pollution and climate change. And rightfully so says Art Whatley, he’s a Professor of Organizational Change and Program Chair for the Global Leadership and Sustainable Development Program at Hawaii Pacific University. “We are consuming resources at such a prodigious rate that it would take six Earth’s to sustain our way of life. And the planet as a whole is consuming 1.3 Earth’s, in other words all of humanity is consuming more resources than the planet is capable of producing depending on who you read, people are pointing out 10 years, 15 years before we see a perfect storm of sorts of environmental crisis erupting around the world. And global warming of course we can begin to moderate the effects but global warming is definitely happening, we cannot stop it at this point. We point the finger at China and India and other developing countries as being the major cause of the pollution but on the other-hand just recently China has pointed the finger back at the United States and said and I think what we saw that you’re 5% of the world’s population consuming, 25% of the world’s resources, creating 25-30% of the CO2 going into the atmosphere and you’ve been a source of pollution and environmental degradation for over 100 years as you’ve industrialized much longer than we have. So the Chinese have a very valid point. So it’s quite controversial you know our on one hand we in the developed world like to put forth a model for the developing world to follow and that is a model of consumerism and unlimited growth and the Chinese are trying to do that (mistakenly it might have) and India are as well. So 40% of humanity is trying to become like the United States and Western Europe and it is not possible.”

The state of the environment is profoundly impacting public consciousness as well as education says Nicola Accut, Director of Curriculum Development and Faculty Coordination at the Presidio School of Management. “”We’ve seen sustainability move from the fringe to the mainstream and I’m sure your listeners have all seen the avalanche of media coverage in the last couple of years from Al Gore’s movie to shows like Oprah and Martha Stewart having “green” shows and Time magazine’s cover on Global Warming. At the Presidio we’re enrolling around 50 students a semester from every sector of business, government and civil society. And when we started in 2003 the Presidio was really a pioneer in this field and at the time there were only two other programs in the country that offered a MBA that is integrated into the curriculum. But now in 2008 there are at least a dozen of the specialized programs offering a MBA in sustainability. But what we’re seeing also is traditional MBA programs adding courses in sustainability.”

The rise in environmentally focused courses at business schools is due in part to the efforts of members of Net Impact, a network of professionals and MBAs striving for environmental change. Liz Maw is Net Impact’s Executive Director; she says their members organize educational events on campuses as well as action oriented initiatives. “For example, we run a campus greeting initiative where we’re supporting students to try to use their business skills to make their university campuses more sustainable. And we’ve seen students do everything from make a business case to their printing operations office of their business school to double side print instead of one side print on the school printers or in addition to make a case for green building which can be more expensive in the short term but over the longer term can save the university money. Another initiative that students work on and that we work on with them is curriculum change. We’ve seen a ton of progress in the past several years with new courses being offered that include social and environmental issues and some schools are trying to integrate social and environmental topics into the core required curriculum but there is still a lot more to do and students are a key stake holder and a key voice for change.”

Yale offers a joint degree program combining a MBA from the School of Management with a Masters from the school of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Bryan Garcia is Yale’s Program Director for the Center for Business and the Environment; he says he’s seen more students taking green courses over the past few years. But even students who aren’t necessarily interested in the environment still learn about it indirectly, “We’ve actually got a new curriculum that provides the opportunity for students to engage in up-to-date case studies and we’ve had a case study that students at the business school worked on that focused a wind turbine company. And the focus of the case was where does it locate its manufacturing facilities given this list of eight different countries. Now the exciting thing about the case is of course you’re talking about the technology that is good for global climate change in terms of reducing green house gas emissions but what excited me about observing that case was the fact that here you have students talking about the business case of the company, the issue of the environment is secondary, does it make good business sense for us to locate our company in country x versus country y? You know the environment doesn’t always have to be the leading issue, the leading issue for businesses is obviously the bottom line and shareholders so if we can make successful businesses in the environmental markets then the environment should benefit from that as well as our shareholders.”

Irwin Hudelist is President of Hagadone Printing Company and is a recent graduate of Hawaii Pacific University’s Master in Global Leadership and Sustainable Development Program. Hudelist is a driving force behind the company’s commitment to being environmentally responsible. He’s implemented a number of green initiatives and says being green actually increased his bottom-line. “I’m not a really tree hugger, I’m a more business kind of guy and it’s got to make financial sense and when you start out with sustainability efforts, the first simple thing of course is paper recycling, it’s obvious. You can change your work flow and get the people involved I mean the word theme so abused and is rarely used in our country but if you truly implement themes in an organization and you get this idea of sustainability down to the grass roots it’s amazing what happens in an organization. I’ll give you an example in our printing industry, the average error rate in the printing industry is 3.5%. We here know without management, without talking down we are right now at 0.7% without changing anything and this is what I would like the whole sustainability aspect, it’s not just environment, it’s not just recycling, it’s the whole between the social effect of the organization and the environmental effect.”

Some of Hagadone Printing Company’s other green efforts include eliminating toxic chemicals and materials in the printing process. The company has implemented a paper bag program where they’ll recycle your unwanted paper and even pick it up for you. Again Hudelist, “The true price of a product harvested not with environmental consciousness is actually much more expensive in the long run because we don’t pay for reforestation, we don’t pay for landslides because people just chop off trees without thinking, this is not in the cost of the final product, it will be down the road so somebody has to pick up the bill. But there is a very fast growing group of people out there who really understand and really care. We just became as the Forrest StewarshipCouncil, it’s a beautiful program because we buy the paper from paper companies which buy the pulp from renewable resources, it means if you print with me whatever it is a magazine or whatever you want to print, on your invoice you actually get a number on your invoice and this number you can actually enter into a database on the internet and you would know exactly where your trees come from for this paper. This allows us to be very careful where we buy all of our paper from. Because you know the Amazon and the deforestation in Indonesia this is the majority of this is pulp production because certain paper mill or certain paper manufacturers buy as cheap as they can and we don’t want to participate.”

Like Hagadone Printing, large corporations are also paying attention to environmental issues and benefiting financially from it. Again, Art Whatley, "Historically, the relationship between environmentalist for example and corporate leaders has been an adversarial relationship, they are conflict based relationship with a lot of finger pointing going on, on both sides. That is changing to become a relationship more characterized by partnership where corporations are using concepts out of the sustainable development movement to change the business practices.”

The rise in jobs in corporate social responsibility or CSR is evidence that companies are interested in their environmental impact. Liz Maw says according to one of their studies CSR postings increased by 37% each year over the past few years. “We’ve seen an interest in more and more of our corporate partners to try to educate all students on corporate and environmental issues because they want all of their employees to work with these topics. As you can imagine if you work in CSR in a company you’re unable to really make a difference unless you’ve got lots of allies in operations, in marketing, in management and finance so the answer is not just to have one department but to have everyone in these topics and that is what we’ve seen from the corporate partners that we work with.”

Not only are we seeing CSR positions on the rise but the green industry is creating new opportunities in a variety of fields. Nicola Accut, “A recent publication of Forbes magazine put the green industry at around $265 billion employing over 1.6 million people and that was in 2005 and we’ve seen a growth rate of about 5% annually in this sector. So really what we’re seeing is this consummation of new opportunities and new careers really being created. Some of the hot areas include sectors like climate change risk management and carbon trading. In fact, the carbon trading market doubled to 28 million from 2005 to 2006 and we have several graduates on the Presidio Program who are working in this sector for example, student, Jason Smith is now the Vice President of Climate Check which is a greenhouse gas management and consulting group. That’s one really hot area in terms of business growth. Another one that I would point to is green building and development and it’s interesting to note that, that industry is worth over 12 billion and 10 years ago it was almost unquantifiable, it pretty much didn’t exist. And the third is energy conservation, energy efficiency product and renewable energy markets. So those are three but there are numerous from financial services to organic produce and green consumer products, the environmental service sector, social entrepreneurship, tourism, event management. At the same time, as sort of an environmental twist or sustainability twists on all of the professions like law and journalism. In fact, we have one of our student from the Presidio who transitioned from a career as a host for MTV Asia to now hosting the green lifestyle program on the Sun Dance channel and becoming the environmental correspondent for NBC News. Just last week at the Presidio we hosted Firm Night for 30 companies looking to hire green MBAs and Wal-Mart for example, flew out their recruiters from Bentonville, Arkansas to San Francisco to look at MBAs in this area. And other companies that attended our Firm Night were large companies like the GAP and Williams Sonoma and Sun Microsystems and in fact this issue of recruiting led two of our recent graduates to actually launch a recruiting firm focused on sustainability, they’re really helping bridge that market between needs that companies have and placing the right people in the right position.”

Graduates from the Master’s program at Hawaii Pacific University have gone on to work on green committees at places like the Pebble Beach Company. Others work in fair trade coffee, sustainability research at NGOs or continued on to a PhD in sustainable development. This growing trend of organizations seem opportunities in the green space may present a challenge says Bryan Garcia. The question is will there be enough qualified candidates to fill the demand? “These programs in business and the environment are growing. We are one of several and there are a variety of others that are now recognized and are developing programs to support students in this area. But I think for the near future we will probably see a supply/demand balance in terms of the number of students graduating here and the need for companies to hire employees. Specifically in the sector of start-up companies, one of the things that we see here is pretty significant growth for the start-up sectors and the green-technology sector as an example. Whether they are wind development companies, solar companies. We see tremendous growth and what that is asking for then is what’s the work force going to look like as you begin to ramp up your early stage investments into more commercial operations business leads. When we look at corporations one of the interesting trends that we have seen here recently has actually been request for summer interns that actually have this business environment background to them.”

Hagadone Printing Company is one organization that offers an internship through Hawaii Pacific University’s sustainability program Erwin Hudelist says he hired the current full-time sustainability coordinator from the internship program, “She is doing lots of research about our own vendors because we want to make sure that those people we work with are also environmentally conscious and serious people. We have an outfit in China and before we work with anyone in China, we actually fly there and make sure that they are semi clean and this is how we base our decision with whom to work with. The example: we just purchased a new printing press, it’s a digital press, it’s basically a newer kind of reproduction and before we bought this press she did lots of research to find out if all those materials we use the equipment are environmentally conscious, if they are recyclable or not, how is the energy use, are there any PFCs and based upon the findings we make a decision and pick a certain vendor to buy this piece of equipment. This organizational change effort is a very serious part of the business and in order to be serious about it you have to be really concentrated on this issue alone. The task of implementing anything sustainable in forms of systems is very simple. We don’t get anymore bottled water in the company, I mean we have water filters put into all of our water fountains and we don’t have any Styrofoam cups or whatever it is, all of those little things take coordination because you can so easily install and implement anything but it falls apart very fast if you don’t control it and that is what her efforts are all about.”

Though there have been improvements made on the environmental front over the past few years, still Art Whatley says there needs to be a radical shift in the economical model that is currently unsustainable. “We can measure what nature has producing for human consumption; we can even put a dollar value for example: we have estimates that nature provides the human community about $35 trillion worth of goods and services every year. We rapidly consume. But the problem now is that we have began to eat into natural capital so we’re not only consuming the interests that nature provides us but we’re eating into the capital as well which means that for next year the nature services will be less, and the year after that less even more. Another way of looking at it is that science is telling us the major life support systems on the planet, fresh water, crop plants where we raise our food, range lands where we grow our animal products, forest and the ocean resources, reefs, main gulfs, swamps and fisheries, all of those life support systems are in decline. So we cannot continue their sort of economic activity that we humans have engaged in for much longer.”

Learn more about Hawaii Pacific University’s Master of Arts in Global Leadership and Sustainable Development Program at HPU.edu/MAGL.

For more information, advice and to register for your weekly MBA Podcast visit MBAPodcaster.com. I’m Janet Nakano for MBA Podcaster. Join us next time on another topic to help you on the MBA application process and life beyond. Thanks for joining us