This post originally appeared in its entirety on clearadmit.com
New York University’s Stern School of Business today launched its new Center for Sustainable Business, aided by a $1 million investment by the Citi Foundation. With leading environmentalist and former Rainforest Alliance president Tensie Whelan at the helm, the center will work to educate a new generation of business leaders capable of and committed to doing well by doing good.
Stern and the Citi Foundation have collaborated for more than a decade on programming to educate students on ways the private and public sectors together can help tackle some of the greatest challenges facing the planet today while driving sustainable economic growth. The new center’s launch promises to expand these efforts through coursework; thought leadership and research; and stakeholder engagement and projects.
“The Citi Foundation is helping us to get this whole center off the ground because it has a strong history of both inclusive business and innovation around sustainability,” Whelan says. In addition to its major investments in sustainability, the foundation also has a specialist on staff who works with teams around biodiversity and is even developing a new asset class around energy efficient loans, she adds.
Stern, meanwhile, makes perfect sense as a home for the new Center for Sustainable Business. “Business schools are the place where the future business leaders learn—and we are at a phase in our global history where we need a new generation of leaders who adopt the idea that their businesses need to contribute value to society, not simply extract and deliver value to shareholders,” Whelan says.
That Stern sends large proportions of its graduates into finance and management consulting is also favorable in terms of the reach of the center’s initiatives. “We need more business leaders in finance who are looking to incorporate sustainability into their investment decisions,” Whelan says. “On the consulting side, I believe that more and more consulting efforts will be focused on helping companies transition to become more sustainable,” she adds. “It is exciting to have students going into these sectors where they will have real impact.”
The new center’s location in an urban area, too, is advantageous. “We know that much of the future’s growth will be coming in cities, and there will be a series of sustainability challenges associated with that growth.”
A Running Start
Since stepping into her new role early last month, Whelan has worked to establish an advisory board for the center that can help forge additional connections between academia and the corporate world. The board includes Citi Global Head of Productivity David Chubak; Raphael Bemporad, founding partner of BBMG; Nespresso USA President Guillaume Le Cunff; and John D. Williams, president and chief executive officer of Domtar. Creating an ongoing dialog with companies that understand sustainability can no longer be pushed to the periphery and that lead by example is one of her primary areas of focus.
She’s also focused on programming, specifically developing core sustainability classes for undergraduate and graduate business students. “These will be very practical and hands on—covering what you need to know to run a company in a way that is sustainable and bringing in guest speakers who are actually doing that,” Whelan says. The center will also provide executive education, working with companies interested in specially designed courses to help their executives learn sustainable practices. Longer term, Whelan hopes to also set up consulting projects with partner companies that will give students an opportunity to take what they are learning out of the classroom and into the boardroom.
Another area of concentration has been on advancing thought leadership and research. “I think there are several key areas where we can contribute,” Whelan says. “No one is really looking at innovation coming out of sustainability initiatives, for example, or at the impact a company’s commitment to sustainable practices has on its retention or recruitment of employees,” she notes. “We will focus on developing a better methodology of looking at business cases for sustainability.”
Center for Sustainable Business Director Tensie Whelan
It’s been a busy six weeks for Whelan since coming on board—and a big transition. “I went from running an organization of 400 full-time employees and 300 part-time employees in 50 countries around the world to…well, now it’s just me,” she says. But it’s precisely that background that makes her perfect for this new role. She brings 25 years of experience working on environmental and sustainability issues at the local, national and international level. While at the Rainforest Alliance, she grew its budget from $4.5 million to $50 million, recruiting 5,000 companies in more than 60 countries to work with the organization to transform the engagement of business with sustainability.
A Road Show to Publicize the Center’s Launch
Whelan will be introducing the center to NYU Stern students beginning with a Ted-style talk tomorrow entitled “Ten Minutes to Save the World.” She will deliver the talk as part of the Social Innovation Symposium hosted by the Social Enterprise Association MBA Club. Next week, as part of Social Impact Week for the undergraduate business students, she will participate in a fireside chat with Nespresso USA CEO Guillaume Le Cunff.
Whelan also hopes to reach out and engage students in these topics as part of an upcoming Job Fair put on with Collectively and VICE media. “This fair will help show students that there are companies interested in hiring graduates who have these skills—and that they can combine their values and meaning and purpose with their business career,” she says. “That is going to be really critical to success with the students—showing them that there are viable employment options.”
One day, Whelan hopes that sustainability issues will have an integral place within all of the most foundational business classes—from economics to supply chain to operations to finance—eliminating the need for special courses or programming. “But that will take time,” she says. “Generally, those kind of changes can take a decade or longer to accomplish.”
“Sustainability is a journey,” she says. “We are learning, there’s a lot to learn, a lot to research, a lot to understand—and it’s always useful to have a research institute for things that are new.”
Not only that, but the launch of the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business comes at a unique moment in time when all the governments of the world have come together and said the current system is not working. “Globally, people are recognizing that we’ve got a lot of work to do,” Whelan says. “Sustainability is the challenge of our generation, and it’s finally being articulated that way.”
As part of the COP21 Summit in Paris in December, 195 nations adopted the Paris Agreement, a global pact to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to limit the average global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. And just last week, the United States and 22 other countries reached agreement on the first-ever global carbon standards for commercial aircraft.
“Believe me, I’d rather there not be a need for me to build this center,” Whelan says. But amid incontrovertible evidence that there is, she’s up to the challenge.