It’s [NOT] Easy Being GREEN
Green-Collar Workforce Gains Legitimacy and Momentum
by Pam Losefsky
Dan Lieberman remembers being that really annoying student at McCombs in the
late 1990s—the one in the back of the room who was always raising his hand,
whining, “But what about the environment?”
He’d come to business school with the goal of finding a job in environmental
management. While the school offered a concentration in natural resources
management, most business students at the time were not interested in
environmental issues or their impact on contemporary business.
Defending himself, Lieberman, MBA ’98, says, “Maybe I was labeled a tree hugger,
but I just felt the onus was on me to raise these issues so they could be
discussed.”
In 1999, when Bruce Wilcoxon, MBA ’01, began tracing Lieberman’s steps through
the program, little had changed. With an avid interest in both environmentalism
and the broader concept of corporate responsibility, Wilcoxon wasn’t satisfied
with being a fly in the ointment. He raised the stakes—banding together with
classmate Derek Benson to create a multidisciplinary course called “Topics in
Sustainable Development.”
They secured a $10,000 grant from Shell and enlisted the sponsorship of
Professor Steven Moore, a faculty member in the university’s School of
Architecture. The seminar brought together graduate students from across
campus—architecture, public policy, law, natural sciences and business—and
speakers from both inside and outside the university to address topics they were
hungry to learn about: the social responsibilities of corporations, sustainable
business strategy and green building.
Still, there were few takers in the business school. But change was afoot.
A couple of years later, Shari Carle, MBA ’03, was starting coursework in the
Texas Executive MBA Program in the fall of 2001. The events of 9/11—just days
into her first semester—drastically changed how many in Carle’s class approached
their studies and the way they conceptualized their careers. “People just
started thinking differently—even though there wasn’t a whole lot of room for
flexibility in the executive program, there was a palpable focus on ethics and
on companies doing the right thing,” she says.
Over the course of the program, her vague interest in the environment solidified
into a career path. Within months after graduating, she parlayed her MBA into a
new position as a sustainable business analyst with Dell. Carle was the second
person hired onto the company’s newly established corporate social
responsibility (CSR) team.
By 2002, when Helen Brauner, MBA ’04, started the Texas MBA program, the tide
had begun to turn, and she found there were many opportunities to pursue her
interest in CSR. She completed her summer internship at the Austin Clean Energy
Incubator, where she reviewed hundreds of business plans for companies
developing clean energy products. She sensed from that experience that renewable
energy was going to get really big, really fast.
What’s more, Brauner took the sustainable development course that had been
launched by Wilcoxon and Moore and which is now part of the Interdisciplinary
Specialization in Social Enterprise. The curriculum includes courses such as
“Marketing and Society,” “Social and Ethical Responsibility of Business” and
“Natural Resources and Environmental Strategy.” She was also an active member of
the McCombs chapter of Net Impact, an organization that fosters leadership in
responsible business. The McCombs chapter has so grown in size, stature and
proactivity since its establishment in the mid-1990s, that it drew the
organization’s national conference to Austin in 2003. And in January, Net Impact
was a sponsor of the Sustainable Business Summit at the university.
Well into the first decade of the 21st century, the Dan Liebermans of business
school are no longer marginalized for asking the tough questions.
A Long Time Coming
Corporate social responsibility—and all its attendant concepts, including alternative energy usage, sustainable development and ethical business practices—took many years to catch on. And not just at business schools, but across the world and within the United States, especially. Arguably, the concept of corporate responsibility can be traced as far back as ancient Greece, when city officials set rules of conduct for merchants. In modern times, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972, was the first international meeting to address the influence of human activity on the environment. In 1987, the term “sustainable development” was introduced in “Our Common Future,” a book published by the World Commission for Environment and Development.But it wasn’t until the groundbreaking 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (also known as the Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro that sustainable development and the broader concept of corporate sustainability entered the public lexicon and began to reverberate in our national consciousness.
It would be another decade before the concept really began to take root in the United States. By then, the most progressive of companies had begun to accept a new form of accounting that comprises a triple bottom line: economic prosperity, environmental quality and social equity. Even now, Wilcoxon, director of climate change at ConocoPhillips, believes many companies’ CSR efforts focus more on reducing regulatory compliance costs than on truly turning environmental and social challenges into profit opportunities—win-wins for companies and their very broadly defined stakeholders.