Building a B-School Sustainability Strategy

• By benchmarking their ESG efforts against other institutions and organizations, business schools can help ensure that their sustainability initiatives are competitive and impactful.
• ESG should be embedded at all levels of a school's strategy, from teaching and research to campus operations and external relations.
• Once a strategy is in place, business schools need to continuously measure their sustainability efforts to improve effectiveness and increase long-term impact.

Transcript

Julie Perrin-Halot: [00:15] It’s important that business schools balance their missions with the needs of their stakeholders around sustainability. Especially today, business schools are becoming increasingly focused on positive societal impact.

[00:28] It’s important that notion now be visibly, explicitly present within the mission of the business school. So, if business schools are doing the work to really look at their stakeholders and their needs to ensure that their mission is reflective of that, I think that we’ll find a good balance that way.

[00:49] It works on two levels. We have internal stakeholders who need to be fully engaged in these questions.

Business schools are beginning also to create more purpose-driven external stakeholder committees.

[00:55] And often we see that schools are starting to create internal committees that have a variety of different stakeholders working together, using a sort of collective intelligence to talk about these questions, find ideas, create objectives, and even create measurement, looking at how they want to have an impact. Often, that will combine administrators, professional service people, faculty, students, and top management.

[01:26] At the same time, I think that schools are beginning also to create more purpose-driven external stakeholder committees that they can use, such as mission committees, that come in and use experts around the subject, both from their communities, from the academic world, from the corporate world.

[01:46] And then they use those people also as a way to look at the kinds of objectives that they’re carrying, the kinds of directions that they’re heading in, and the way that they’re embedding sustainability into their different activities.

[01:59] I think one of the first things to consider when beginning an ESG journey and beginning to embed that in strategy and activities is that, one, there’s a lot going on in the space, and it’s important to reach out and benchmark what other schools are doing, to benchmark what other organizations are doing.

[02:19] I also think that schools sometimes forget to turn to their own researchers and look at what kinds of things are being done in the research field.

It’s important to reach out and benchmark what other schools are doing, to benchmark what other organizations are doing.

[02:29] Then I think that one of the important things, too, is to look at how ESG fits into a top-level institutional strategy and then cascades down into the different strategies for areas of activities, whether that be teaching and learning, research and innovation, the way we behave as a campus, the management of our waste, the management of our energy consumption, our carbon footprint, the way we do food service on our campuses, mobility, etc.

[03:00] The fourth area that they really need to look at and develop a strategy around is external relations. How is the school having an impact and influence on its ecosystem and its external stakeholders, the companies it works with, or the other institutions it works with?

[03:21] Like most things, and especially something that we do a lot in accreditation, which is measuring the effectiveness of what we do and continuing to remain in a continuous improvement mindset, it’s very important always to set up a system of measuring impact.

[03:42] It’s really about pinpointing where we believe our institution can have an impact and then finding the ways to measure that and then increase it over time.