good afternoon I'm gonna start by telling you a little bit of a story some of you may have heard this one before but I hope not all of you a businessman was visiting a fishing village in the South Pacific when he came across a small boat with one fisherman inside the boat was filled with beautiful fish and he asked the fisherman how long it took him to catch those fish the fisherman answered just a little while so the businessman asked him well what is it that you do it the rest of your time George the fisherman replied well I sleep in I fish a little I play with my children take an afternoon nap with my wife and then I go into town and I meet up with my friends where we drink ramen we stand we play the guitar I have a full and busy life the businessmen scoffed and went huh I have an MBA I can help you what you need to do is you need to stay out longer and fish more fish with the profits you make from that you can buy yourself a bigger boat with the profits from the bigger boat you can buy yourself sever boats until you have a whole fishing fleet then you can eliminate the middleman and sell directly to the processor eventually opening up your own cannery you then have to move your operations from the small island to Australia then LA then to New York where you can manage your expanding business the fisherman then asked well how long is this going to take twitch the businessman replied 15 to 20 years and then what happens ah that's the best part said the businessman with a big smile on his face when the time is right you could announce an IPO and you could sell your company stock to the public you'd become rich you'd make millions millions said the fisherman and then what would happen then you could retire move to a small village where you could wake up late fish a little play with your children take an afternoon nap with your wife and go into town and meet your friends in the evening for drinks people love to poke fun at MBA and business students who here has an MBA hands who here is a business degree or working on a business degree ok ok who here wants to do a business degree so then you'll understand when I say that when you talk about MBAs it elicits a whole variety of different responses you know some people you get a lot of respect when you say you have an MBA especially if you graduated from a top program but other people assume a lot of things about you who you are what's important to you some of which is true and some of which isn't I've heard people tell me that having an MBA makes you detached from the real world that you have a distorted view based on maximizing shareholder value the media loves to poke fun of people with MBAs they love to mention whether the latest CEO or manager to mess up a company had an MBA almost to say that it's the fault of the degree rather than the individual and when it comes to sustainability we never think of business graduates as being part of the solution often they're seen as a big part of the problem one has only to open a newspaper or turn on the TV to realize that we face a range of problems on the planet today environmental social and economic all the actors have a really important role to play NGOs community groups government but is perhaps the business sector that plays the most important role not just in terms of philanthropy and giving but more importantly in terms of the way that they do business luckily businesses around the world are getting more and more engaged in sustainability in all its shapes and forms the realizing that this goes way beyond just being a passing phase or a marketing tool this is an exciting business reality one that the individual employees want to get involved in and that businesses are increasingly benefiting from as they continue to move forward and sustainability they're realizing that there are new challenges and problems and arise challenges and problems that the next generation of managers and leaders are going to need to deal with so you would assume that business schools would be teaching this next generation to be able to deal with those problems the challenges that they're not and this is what I'm here to talk to you about today ice truly believe that the education sector and in particular business schools play a key role in moving us forward in terms of sustainability if we change the way that the next generation of managers and leaders think and act in terms of sustainability this will lead to broader changes in the way that we do business around the world and start to solve more problems than we create I give a lot of workshops a lot of workshops with students faculties business schools and businesses and last year I had the chance to go to Mexico to do some workshops in the North there and after one of the workshops I did with some senior executives one the owners of the mid-sized business came up to me after and he said at first I had no interest in all the sustainability stuff this is something that rich countries and rich companies are on about but I had nothing to do with me but he said that he supplies to a large multinational and this multinational has start again really engaged in sustainability so he said that because of that this multinational is really pushing its suppliers to get involved as well at first he said he was really frustrated that he had to he had to waste his time looking at these issues but he said the more and more he looked into these issues the more interested he got he put a group of employees to look at these issues and he said it may sound silly but they started showing up for work they started showing up for work on time and they were truly motivated and excited about this new project he said that they very quickly found some ways to save him some good money first by increasing efficiencies by minimizing waste they found some opportunities to sell one of their waste streams waste streams to a nearby company which was something that they had never considered before they then started looking at ways that they could bring sustainability into their existing products and actually got some inspiration about how to create some new products and services around sustainability because of all this work that they were doing he said they started getting calls from other multinationals and other companies around the world and in Mexico who wanted to work with them he also said he was starting to get a lot more CDs from graduates who wanted to work for a company that truly believed in these issues so he decided who's gonna hire some MBAs and it wasn't something he had done before but he thought that these MBAs would know more than her about sustainability and that they'd be able to move the company forward not just in sustainability but in a way that would strengthen and grow the business I remember him telling me after that he was really surprised and disappointed when the interview started he said that the majority of the students that he interviewed only had a vague understanding of what sustainability was some of them told him that this wasn't about real business and others had no idea what it was whatsoever how is it that we're going to move the business sector forward and sustainability if the next generation of graduates don't understand what these issues are about the problem is at the MBA and indeed most business training programs they failed to provide a deep understanding on what sustainability is and they don't provide graduates with with the ability to be able to embed sustainability into their jobs and careers instead is often presented as an add-on as a save-the-world approach is something that's not connected to the key messages and frameworks in the curriculum a lot of students have told me that when sustainability is brought up is brought up right before a midterm or it's brought up in the first day of school and then never again and the implicit message of this is that sustainability is only relevant to those people who choose a career in this topic despite the fact that increasingly this is going to be part of all of our jobs a lot of schools will tell me that sustainability that you know they're doing their part they approach it like a checklist and what they do is that they have their elective on climate change they have a core course on ethics and they have a faculty member looking at sustainability so they're doing their part others will say that you know the challenge as well as that faculty themselves are often not equipped to be able to teach these issues the other thing with the MBA is that it's all about training the next generation of leaders but this next generation of leaders is so busy trying to find the jobs of today and the jobs of today require of them something slightly different than we need of them tomorrow in addition the MBAs themselves are judged based on the salaries of those the jobs that they get today I had a really powerful conversation with a Dean a few years back who told me that despite all of the work that they were doing to embed sustainability in the curriculum they could never do really well in the MBA rankings and he said that there were two reasons for this first he said that a lot of the students were choosing alternative kinds of careers where they were getting lower salaries but he said the second reason was that they had a lot a much higher percentage of women in the program than most other programs and amazingly in this day and age women were still making less money for some of the same jobs as their male counterparts so MBAs are stuck in this game of rankings so what does a girl like me do in a world like this I left the UN where I had been working in sustainability issues since I was very young to pursue an MBA my colleagues at the time I remember very clearly they went into shock a lot of them thought that the business sector was the cause of a lot of the problems that we were trying to solve and that the MBA would make me evil and that it would make me see the world in an over simplistic and dangerous way in offense that's why I chose to do the MBA I felt that if we really wanted to before we needed to get the business sector engaged and I wanted to understand how that business sector thought and acted when I started I was surprised that the students were interested in these issues but they weren't quite sure how to balance that interest with the career post graduation many thought that it was a choice you either go into a traditional business career or you go into something more meaningful like an NGO or a community group often when sustainability itself was being brought up in our classes it wasn't being brought up in a way that was useful irrelevant to the majority of students and that's when I started asking myself if we want to move forward in sustainability and we need the business sector to do that we then need to make sure that our graduates actually have this knowledge to be able to do that shortly after I graduated I had a chance to go to Australia which is beautiful valuable country and there I was introduced in the city of Melbourne to a small company that sells two used bikes and this company is called Montana and they have a sign outside the premises that explains what the word means some of you may have heard this word before it's a Japanese word that means a sense of regret when the intrinsic value of an object or resource is not being properly utilized to me the MBA is known tonight when we talk about sustainability we fail to talk about the key role that business graduates could play in making that vision a reality last year alone half a million people graduated with business degrees from over 12,000 institutions around the world half a million and this number is growing imagine the impact of all those graduates not only understood what sustainability was but knew how to put into practice in their organizations in a way that made sense for the environment society and for those businesses considering that business graduates find their way into virtually every type of organization on the planet from NGOs to government to community groups imagine if these organizations slowly started filling themselves up with people who understood that the balance was part of the way that they did business imagine the impact that that would have on our business isn't on the world and it wouldn't take long to see a difference a generation perhaps a few years half a million highly motivated people and key organizations around the world is a lot of people and we wouldn't even have to wait until they graduated I remember when I was a student I was really jealous that design students were constantly being approached by businesses to come up with visions of the world of the future and Lucian's to different world and sustainability problems why aren't we asking business graduates and business students to do this business students are highly motivated group of people who have backgrounds and all sorts of different disciplines why couldn't we throw some of these seemingly impossible sustainability challenges at this group of students you could have a finance class which is all about figuring out the value of an endangered rhinoceros when I was at the UN we had a Seine which was if every consultant that went to go see a water problem brought a bucket of water that community wouldn't have a water problem anymore what if MBA students themselves weren't just hearing and learning about these issues but actually creating testing and preened into place innovative solutions to the world's problems imagine what the world would look like then but it wouldn't just be big international programs it would be problems at a community level as well the UN Global Compact did a survey that said that one in four ceos believe that the lack of skills and knowledge of their middle and senior managers was the key reason why they weren't able to move forward in sustainability if you combine this with the fact that the majority of small and medium-sized businesses would like to move forward in this area but often lack the resources and that and the skills to be able to do so why couldn't Business School students provide those resources I was reading lately about a series of banks in North America and Asia and they've opened coffee shops in the front of their provinces and the idea is that they want more people to come into the bank but what's interesting is the coffee shop has a range of short workshops and courses and one-on-one advice to teach people more about finance and make it more accessible why couldn't you have something similar in business schools where individuals could go in community groups NGOs not-for-profit small medium-sized businesses and get advice from students from faculty about how to move forward in terms of sustainability imagine the impact that that would have on our communities and then you have this half a million students that have just gone through a degree program where they've helped us solve world problems helps of community challenges and now they're able to go into any organization in the world and make changes from the inside out imagine the impact that that would have on all of our businesses as individuals we have a lot more power than we think businesses at the end of the day are made up of individuals such as ourselves individuals that make decisions on a day that affect the world around us as consumers we make decisions every day that send strong messages to companies about what we are and are not willing to buy our decisions may seem small but they're not the decision to change a supplier to give our team members more time to explore these issues can all have a huge impact I've heard a lot of people say that in order to make it impact you need to quit your job and go work for a not-for-profit this isn't necessarily the case I think that the biggest impact that we can have is by making changes to our own jobs from the inside out we need to take sustainability out of specialized departments and make it part of all of our jobs who here has a job at the end who here wants a job who here has a degree of any sort or is working on a degree right now so I'm talking about business school students but it's not at all limited to business school students imagine if in all of our degrees in all of our in-house training programs in all of the training that we received we were taught how to bring sustainability into those jobs imagine the impact that that will have we often hear about how important it is to teach young people that sustainability right from a very young age I've actually heard some people say that it's the responsibility of primary and secondary education to teach young people about sustainability and then if you reach church free education without this knowledge it's too late the problem is that when they're young we create these little mini eco-warriors and we send them off to university to learn the skills and tools that they need for their future careers there we tell them listen all that stuff about sustainability all that is really nice but that's not what's going to get you a job that's something that you do after work it's not compatible with work we need to teach ourselves our students and our employees how to bring sustainability into their jobs we need to teach ourselves how to take the values that we have at home and in our daily lives and apply them to our work rather than keeping it separate we're educating another generation of leaders to work in a world that we have no idea what it's going to look like in the future but we know that they're going to be creating it and the least that we can do is give them all the tools and skills to be able to do so but every year that another class graduates from any discipline without the skills and knowledge to bring sustainability forward is an opportunity wasted for the planet and for society there's a newspaper in Singapore which is 60 years old and they've recently done a major revamp of the newspaper and this isn't a time when people are talking about how the newspaper is disappearing and dying so when the owner was asked why is it that they spent all this time and money into this project he said it was because we expect to be around for the next 200 years this is the kind of language that I'd like to hear from business schools and businesses we need to create a generation that's able to maneuver the world as it is today but can see where we need to go in to get us there it's a simple idea but one that I think could have a huge impact and then when it comes to MBA programs themselves I hope that in the future they're not going to be judged on post MBA salary but rather on the impact of their graduates have on the world around them thank you