by George P. Nassos
After 32 years in the corporate world, which ended over 25 years ago, I went into academia as the Director of the MS in Environmental Management & Sustainability program at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Stuart School of Business. It was a few years later when I concluded that sustainability should not be a separate curriculum, but rather be embedded in all the courses of the other business curricula. I tried to convince the director of the MBA program, but it was too early in the understanding of sustainability strategies. Consequently, the business school professors did not want to make changes to their syllabi.
Since that time the major environmental issues of our planet have deteriorated further, and environmental sustainability has become even more important. Global warming, now known as climate change, has increased and exceeding the 1.5°C. increase limit is inevitable. The overconsumption of our natural resources continues to increase, and globally we are consuming the equivalent of 1.7 earths of resources such as food, wood, cotton, and other agricultural products. The quantity and quality of freshwater continues to decline with fracking as an example of the misuse of this valuable resource. And, of course, contributing to all of these environmental issues is the rapid growth of the population. In less than 100 years, we have more than quadrupled the global population, going from two billion to over eight billion. For these reasons, sustainability is much more critical in preserving our planet while the business organizations continue to provide their products and services.
Around the beginning of the 21st century, companies started to create positions for sustainability managers either by hiring someone who completed a sustainability program or promoting someone within to fill the position. Quite often, the person promoted into the position was not sufficiently knowledgeable to hold such a position, but the company fulfilled the requirements of its stakeholders to have such a position in the company.
Today, having a sustainability director or Chief Sustainability Officer can be asking too much from the person if s/he does not have a staff for support. A recent study of around 2,200 sustainability professionals found that one-third of the respondents were dissatisfied with the resources accessible to them. There were so few resources available to them that many cases resulted in burnout. The problem is that there are not enough fellow employees that are knowledgeable in sustainability. The obvious way to resolve this issue is for their fellow employees to learn something about sustainability. Companies should offer sustainability training to their employees so they can all work together to make the company truly sustainable while at the same time avoiding greenwashing.
This problem could easily be avoided if the schools, business schools and other colleges, embedded sustainability in the appropriate curricula. In a business school offering a major in marketing, for example, sustainability should be included in the various marketing courses teaching the students the benefits of sustainability for the purpose of marketing the product. An operations management course should include sustainability in order to learn how to make a company’s operations sustainable in terms of material use efficiency and energy consumption. The finance courses would include something that has become very popular, that of ESG investing. ESG, the latest term referring to sustainable development, has led to ESG investing as those companies operating truly sustainably outperform those that haven’t found sustainability yet. Accounting students need to understand sustainability as there are many new SEC reporting requirements for companies operating sustainably.
I highly recommend that business schools eliminate their MS programs in Sustainability Management and embed sustainability in all their other curricula. This way all their graduates will understand the benefits of sustainability and how to implement them. However, the business schools should still offer a certificate program in sustainability for former students that never learned the subject. As an alternative to obtaining a sustainability certificate, companies should offer in-house training in sustainability for those employees that didn’t learn this very important strategy in school. Companies will then have a major portion of their employees knowledgeable about sustainability, and they can all work together to improve their company and the global environment as much as possible.
When considering the results of the recent presidential election, environmental sustainability, CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), or ESG (Environment, Social, Governance), whatever you want to call it, may be more important than ever in the U.S. Donald Trump has pledged to terminate some Environmental Protection Agency rules targeting power plant pollution, end certain rules encouraging electric vehicle sales, ease liquid natural gas export permitting, increase oil drilling, and other environmental issues. Sustainability strategies should be integrated into the operations of businesses of all sizes as soon as possible so we can protect our environment regardless of the Trump administration’s new policies.