The Sustainable MBA: The Manager's Guide to Green Business

Citation

Jack, G. (2012), "The Sustainable MBA: The Manager's Guide to Green Business", Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal, Vol. 3 No. 1, pp. 99-101. https://doi.org/10.1108/20408021211223589

“The Sustainable MBA” is a very welcome addition to the ever‐growing discourse on the opportunities and challenges for business, governments and society of understanding and creating sustainable futures. It is well noted that sustainability is a contested, often ill‐specified term that covers a number of interconnected social, environmental and economic issues. Giselle Weybrecht's text foregrounds environmental issues, and is aimed at practising managers currently undertaking MBAs and, by implication, those who teach them. The goal of the text is to offer managers not just a (business) case for attending to sustainability issues, but practical advice for embedding sustainability within their organisations and for greening their jobs.

The author is singularly well‐qualified to provide such recommendations. Weybrecht spent a number of years working for the United Nations in the domain of sustainable development as part of the United Nations World Water Assessment Programme. Her passion for sustainable development, and the role of the business sector in creating it, led her to an MBA at London Business School where she began the research for this book. In addition to considerable secondary data collection, the book is based on over 100 interviews with thought leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, academics, NGOs and international organisations inter alia with a stake in sustainability. The endorsements of this text from corporate and academic leaders, as well as the UN Under‐Secretary General and Executive Director UN Environment Programme, attest to its cross‐sectoral appeal, cutting‐edge substance and sound research base.

The text is structured into four key parts. Part one introduces the book and key aspects of debates about what is meant by sustainability and the actual and potential role of business in creating more environmentally sustainable operations. Weybrecht makes a business case for greening organisations, gives examples of leading companies and best business practice in this domain and offers advice that aims to get organisations started on the journey.

Part two constitutes the lion's share of this text and is organised into the core topics that one might expect to find on a conventional MBA program. In suggesting why sustainability is important to students of these core topics – accounting, economics, entrepreneurship, ethics and corporate governance, finance, marketing, operations, organisational behaviour, strategy – Weybrecht delivers her vision of a “Sustainable MBA”. That is to say, a curriculum framework in which sustainability is embedded across all its constituent components, not just restricted to one or two subjects, e.g. in ethics or CSR, as is sometimes the case. Part three moves the reader from the core business school topics back into the working world, and offers description and discussion of tools for monitoring and improving environmental performance, and for greening offices and buildings. The final section offers readers practical advice on what each of us can do, however small in the first instance, to start our personal, professional and organisational journals towards a sustainable future.

The strengths of this book are many. It is very well organised, clearly written and speaks directly and effectively to the concerns of practising managers. It is packed not just with practical advice and operational frameworks, but also gives managers a compelling rationale, should they need one, for recognising that sustainability should be part of core business practice rather than simply an additional activity responding to external stakeholder pressure. Three aspects of the content of the core chapters in part two are noteworthy. First, the manner in which the author consistently addresses the individual reader directly and enables him/her to understand what they can do within their everyday organisational context and sphere of influence about sustainability. Second, the core topic chapters are packed with further information sources, either through textboxes in the main body, or through the “Want More?” sections at the end. Considerable effort has been put into providing students with comprehensive, contemporary and accurate information about important texts, websites or institutions/organisations that can assist them in looking further into environmental issues. Third, the “Trends and New Ideas” sections at the end of each core topic not only plot a horizon for future sustainability issues, they also begin to offer some critical food for thought about potential futures.

From the perspective of MBA teachers, the structure of the book into key topics means that the material can be embedded effectively into curriculum design and content, and facilitates a cross‐disciplinary understanding of sustainability issues. For instance, accountants not only see how their discipline and professional practice relates to environmental issues, they can also read about the specific challenges for economists, marketers, human resource managers, chief financial officers, and corporate governance officers, etc. Furthermore, although the book is aimed at students and staff of business schools, it is accessible enough that those from other disciplines, e.g. climate change science, journalism and media studies with stakes in sustainability education, could come to understand how they might articulate their work with business school concerns.

I would imagine that most teachers will draw selectively from the specific chapters in the book that relate to their particular subject areas. However, it would certainly be possible, perhaps desirable, for MBA program leaders and their teaching team to set this as a textbook for a core MBA subject delivered at the beginning of the program. This text should be of particular interest, then, to schools with “Green” MBAs, or those which either explicitly or implicitly place sustainability at the heart of the curriculum. It is therefore an interesting read for signatories to the UN's Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) who are required to make sustainability not only a curriculum item, but also a feature of their own operations.

Perhaps the only weakness of the text – and this is purely a facet of the decision to structure the book according to core topics – lies in the lack of integration and thus a holistic account of the interconnection of core business functions in delivering sustainability. The danger in chopping up sustainability into discrete topics, and for teachers that might use the chapters selectively and independently from one another, is that students may fail to develop an integrated and strategic view of sustainability. There are certainly instances in each chapter where the author points to the interdependence of the core topics, but I feel this important feature of managing sustainability could have been more central to the developing narrative. Moreover, there are also a number of places in the text where teachers could take the opportunity to extend Weybrecht's green focus by connecting it to parallel discussions – about, say, corporate social responsibility, business ethics and corporate citizenship behaviour – and parallel concepts, notably including social sustainability. In the latter regard, it will be vital for students of management and organisation to understand the importance of different knowledge systems, conflicts of interest and societal power dynamics in the framing of sustainability as a problem/challenge as well as a solution/opportunity for future generations. In other words, identifying who comes to define and stake a claim in the sustainability domain is vital for understanding its nature and social consequences.

About the reviewer

Professor Gavin Jack received his BA (Hons) and PhD degrees in management from Heriot‐Watt University, UK. He is currently Professor of Management at La Trobe University. His research interests span international, cross‐cultural and diversity management and marketing, as well as critical and postcolonial analyses of organisational life. Gavin Jack can be contacted at: g.jack@latrobe.edu.au