In the past decade, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become such an important aspect of doing business that a growing, but still nascent, group of business schools and executive development firms are incorporating it into their curriculum. Late last year, a global survey of 112 business schools by the Colorado-based Aspen Institute Center for Business Education found the proportion of MBA courses which require students to take a course focused on 'business and society' issues had increased significantly over the past six years, from 34per cent in 2001 to 63per cent last year. Dubbed 'Beyond Grey Pinstripes', the biennial survey looks at how MBA programmes are incorporating social and environmental topics into their core and elective classes, in addition to academic research. Of the schools surveyed, 35 offer a special concentration in social and environmental issues. But Chandran Nair, chief executive at the Hong Kong-based Global Institute for Tomorrow (GIFT), said that much progress could still be made in how business schools teach sustainability issues. 'There are a couple of US business schools who are taking things like EMBAs to Africa and studying local enterprises and giving advice, but no one is doing the cycle that we are trying to do in terms of taking them through the entire learning process,' he said. Mr Nair's institute in Hong Kong runs what it calls the Global Young Leaders Programme, which is essentially an MBA-styled 21/2 week course designed to introduce participants to things about the world they otherwise would not have known about. 'It is essentially executive learning, but with a link to development issues in the developing world or any sort of needy situation,' he said, adding that executives needed to understand a myriad of issues relating to the community and the environment, and how they interact with the corporations they manage. These types of courses are not designed to teach managers how to simply fulfil CSR expectations, but how to use their knowledge of these issues to create opportunities for their business. 'What we believe is that the best future opportunities for companies are going to be in serving those who are not being served at the moment, rather than trying to sell cars to people who already have three of them, or more ice-cream to people who consume too much already,' Mr Nair said. GIFT's course consists of three modules. Students begin by taking one-week's worth of training courses on a range of topics from business ethics, governance, CSR, diversity, and the role of government and civil society. They are then taken to a remote location where they must work with a community or local NGO to design a business plan that would improve people's lives based on themes such as poverty, public health, sustainable enterprise development, youth education and natural resources conservation. In the third and final part of their course, students take the business plan they have developed, and pitch it to investors as a viable investment opportunity that would generate reasonable returns. The institute has held the course five times, with around 20 students graduating each time. Students are typically executives in their late 20s to 30s. The fee for the course is around US$12,500 per person. Another company based in Hong Kong mixing traditional executive education with CSR is the local office of Evans & Peck, an Australian management consulting company. The firm partners with different charities around Asia to conduct team building programmes for corporations under the term 'Reality Team Building'. Typically, projects last from an afternoon to a weekend and involve company executives helping out at a charity or community organisation. Their work may involve making building repairs and decorating, constructing playgrounds, running carnivals for children at an orphanage, or other tasks that the targeted charity needs. 'Can I guarantee that this is the best way to do things? I can't. I would love to say I could. But I would say it is highly effective, affects people and creates a large amount of buy-in,' said Alistair Lamont, executive consultant with Evans & Peck. For the past 18 months, the company has also conducted training courses with CSR elements under the term 'corporate social development'. They range from a one-off 24-hour team building event, or multiple three-day 'learning events' held over the course of a year. Typically, the company matches a charity somewhere in the world with their clients' CSR goals, provides logistical support and designs the programme. On the day of the team-building exercise, the executives, who can number as few as 30, are gathered and are told what they need to achieve. During the exercise, executives are encouraged to reflect on how effective they are working as a team to accomplish their goals. At the end of the exercise, facilitators also debrief the executives to reinforce the lessons they should have learned. Besides the more classic CSR activities, such as helping an orphanage paint a house or handing out blankets, the company also allows companies to help charities embark on continuing projects that help them generate revenue, such as designing and building a new product for future sale. Mr Lamont said he believed that a major advantage of incorporating CSR into training and development is that it creates momentum for people to practise what they have learned. It is only through this practice that behaviour could be changed. 'Let's say I wanted to take you as a manager and build you into a coach. I might send you to a coaching course, and you might learn to be a coach, [but] you may or may not practise that [in the workplace]. 'But how about if I take two or three kids who might be going through high school who are from underprivileged backgrounds, and you are to coach them for the next three months. You have to turn up and utilise these skills with them, and then take it back into the work environment and practise it. You have already bought into them,' he said. At one team building event held in Phuket last year for media firm Mindshare, around 35 top executives were tasked with building a safe playground for around 100 children for the Love Your Neighbour Foundation in Bang Tao - a community which was hard hit by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The executives had to landscape the area, purchase playground furniture and assemble it in the 38 degrees Celsius heat. However, it does not come cheap. At Evans & Peck, because it involves more planning and organisation to conduct, a typical 24-hour team building exercise held in Hong Kong for 160 employees can cost up to HK$300,000. This is compared to between HK$60,000 and HK$120,000 for a standard team building exercise, Mr Lamont said. Top MBAs integrating environmental and social issues Stanford (US) Michigan (US) York (Canada) UC Berkeley (US) Notre Dame (US) Columbia (US) Cornell (US) Duquesne (US) Yale (US) IE Business School (Spain) Source: Beyond Grey Pinstripes Top 100
