Brent Snider is Teaching Professor, Operations and Supply Chain Management at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary.
Rosanna Cole is a Lecturer in Sustainable
Supply Chain Management, University of Surrey.
The global business environment has become increasingly turbulent, with international alliances and trading blocs fragmenting, extreme political candidates gaining popularity, climate change intensifying, all as the growth of developing economies declines and civil instability grows in many regions.
We recently surveyed more than 200 undergrad and graduate (exec MBAs) business students in Alberta about their views on business, sustainability and this turbulence. We found that students have now gone beyond connecting how business actions impact a corporation’s sustainability performance to how those very same actions increase or decrease environmental and societal turbulence.
With turbulence from uncertainty intensifying, business education is feeling societal pressure to better inspire responsible management. Students viewed the globalization of supply chains as directly contributing to the current global turbulence. And, conversely, they believed that sustainable supply chains could help reduce that turbulence by bringing about positive change on both environmental and social fronts.
Both groups of students made a connection between specific actions of global supply chains and how those actions can increase or decrease global environmental and societal turbulence. As one executive MBA student in our survey summarized it: “Business has more capacity to affect change than all the NGOs put together.” Both undergrad and grad students also strongly believed that sustainability considerations should be embedded in business education.
Sustainability content in business education was found to significantly increase global awareness and empathy for both groups, despite different life and work experiences. So it’s equally valued by both MBA students and undergraduates.
Furthermore, with robotics and artificial intelligence predicted to increase societal turbulence by bringing about significant labor market changes, corporations and B schools would be wise to expand and embed sustainability — or face the risk of even more public outcry in the very near future.
Here is the link to the study: https://theconversation.com/how-current-and-future-business-executives-link-sustainability-and-global-strife-114569
