Los costes de la diplomacia y de la guerra.

APPLYING THE BEST OF CONTEMPORARY THINKING Introduction

Based in England, Ashridge is consis- tently ranked as one of the world’s leading business schools and works with over 100 organisations and 9,000 managers in over 40 countries every year.

It enables individuals and organisa- tions from around the world to build management capability and to address individual and organisation develop- ment challenges. Clients span the private, public and not-for-profit sectors.

Its activities include open and customised executive education pro- grammes, organisation consulting, MBA, MSc, doctoral and diploma qualifications, applied research and virtual learning. It is one of the very few schools worldwide to achieve triple accreditation from The Association of MBAs (AMBA), EQUIS and AACSB; the UK, European and American accreditation bodies for qualification programmes.

Challenges

While it is relatively straightforward to recruit sustainability specialists into the faculty to provide specialist courses and specialist modules within other courses, to really embed the Principles for Responsible Manage- ment Education (PRME) across an institution’s culture is a far more ambitious challenge, which has required us at Ashridge to engage with the best of contemporary thinking on organisational change and try to apply it in our own institution.

My advice would be to seek to help and encourage faculty colleagues to see things differently, rather than trying to compel any kind of change. Rather than taking a scattergun approach of trying to influence everyone, focus on investing time in those members of faculty who are already expressing an interest. Generating small steps of change with these people, and creating success stories to influence others, will begin to build a critical mass one step at a time. Think about how organisational structures could be adapted to support and maintain new ways of doing things among those who’ve decided to try to do something new, rather than trying to use them to force change.

Matthew Gitsham, Director, Ashridge Centre for Business and Sustainability, Ashridge Business School

Actions taken

We have attempted to combine informal and formal approaches to change with both top-down and bottom-up – a bit of everything! One of our first principles has been to not try to compel any uniform change, but to support innovators. We think that an inclusive process that tries to motivate people to engage in change, although perhaps slower and more patchy in the short term, is more meaningful and enduring in the longer term. To effectively research and teach anything you must be curious about it yourself.

Top-level commitment has been important, with a number of members of Ashridge’s management team vocally making the case for why we should

be thinking about sustainability in our work. In addition to the vocal support of our dean, our head of qualifications programmes, for example, has championed this during the redesign of the MBA programme, and the head of open programmes has championed this during a review of the open programmes portfolio. This vocal leadership has helped create the space for others in the organisation to take the risk to experiment and lead change. Alongside support from the top there has been consistent effort to connect faculty and wider staff who are interested in sustainability into a relatively informal learning network. This includes guest speakers and sharing one another’s experience of innovation. Sustainability specialists on the faculty are acting as coaches to others in disciplines such as marketing, strategy, innovation, and leadership, to help them learn and innovate in their own work.

Results

This informal work has only been possible with more structural change at the same time: there are now eight full-time sustainability specialists who have been recruited to our core faculty, and three of these individuals have had their roles designed to give them time to develop and coach others. The faculty performance management and appraisal system has been amended – a new individual balanced scorecard now recognises and rewards any innovation around sustainability. Formal internal quality assurance pro- cesses have also been amended – for example, programme review procedures now include a question on whether and how sustainability features within the curriculum. Ashridge’s board of governors, which meets three times a year, reviews an organisational balanced scorecard, which now includes the School’s carbon footprint as one of its key metrics. All of these structural changes have been made with the intention of supporting innovators to change and maintain that change, rather than to force compliance.

We have also taken a proactive approach towards ISO14001, which typically is restricted to an operational management system for environ- mental issues.

We have used this as a wider platform for our broader efforts at institutional change. For the past three years, as part of the ISO14001 process, we have been through an annual school-wide engagement process to review where we are on sustainability, where we want to be in the long

term and what that means for the next year’s activities. This has created a comprehensive set of around 100 objectives in specific areas ranging across curriculum change, energy usage, water usage, waste management, food and paper sourcing, and biodiversity management. Each of these actions have been volunteered and agreed by individual members of staff to pursue in the following year. In 2012 these have included actions ranging from conducting an in-depth review of the curriculum of three flagship open programmes to involving our staff in constructing biodiversity habitats for priority species in our gardens and grounds.

Why PRME is/was important

. _{PRME has been very helpful in this process because the fact that} an institution as globally influential as the United Nations, and the UN Secretary General himself no less, are as interested as they are in what happens within business schools has been very useful in initially getting the interest of some members of faculty for whom this set of issues had not been on their radar before.

. _{The PRME also provides a unifying framework bringing together} what a school does across the areas of teaching, research and campus management, and so in some instances provides a useful stimulus for making the case for structural changes.

. _{Finally, the international community brought together by the PRME} provides an extremely useful and inspirational learning group for sharing ideas and experiences.

Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey