Sustainable development: how to prepare tomorrow’s business leaders 

At a time when it is becom­ing increas­ingly urgent for com­pan­ies to take on board today’s envir­on­ment­al chal­lenges, this study looks at how future com­pany man­agers view sus­tain­able devel­op­ment issues, and rein­forces the import­ance of address­ing these issues dur­ing their training.

Con­duc­ted pri­or to the Cov­id-19 health crisis, the study by man­age­ment doc­tor Pil­ar Acosta and pro­fess­or Maria Jose Murcia (Uni­ver­sid­ad Aus­tral, IAE busi­ness school, Argen­tina) is set against a back­drop in which the need for gov­ern­ments and busi­nesses to com­mit to genu­ine sus­tain­ab­il­ity has become even more press­ing since the pandemic. 

Sus­tain­able devel­op­ment, which aims to recon­cile eco­nom­ic growth with envir­on­ment­al con­straints such as lim­ited nat­ur­al resources, is emer­ging as the solu­tion of choice to envir­on­ment­al prob­lems. But the feas­ib­il­ity of such a change in our growth-ori­ented soci­ety is still being debated. 

This study looks at ways of chan­ging the way busi­ness lead­ers view sus­tain­able devel­op­ment. This vis­ion, which is cru­cial to the devel­op­ment of busi­ness strategies, shapes the cur­rent eco­nom­ic think­ing. The decisions taken by com­pan­ies have a real envir­on­ment­al, eco­nom­ic and social impact. So it’s worth look­ing at how future busi­ness lead­ers per­ceive sus­tain­ab­il­ity issues, and how they see the inter­con­nec­ted rela­tion­ships between three factors: eco­nom­ic growth, social prosper­ity and the environment. 

Mas­ter­’s degrees in busi­ness admin­is­tra­tion (MBAs) are the main route into cor­por­ate man­age­ment, train­ing the busi­ness lead­ers of tomor­row. By inter­view­ing stu­dents on this type of course, the study was able to determ­ine their con­cep­tion of sus­tain­able devel­op­ment, and how this, com­bined with the inform­a­tion and val­ues they con­sider, influ­ences their decisions.

The study, con­duc­ted stra­tegic­ally in Lat­in Amer­ica, a region con­tain­ing the world’s greatest biod­iversity and numer­ous nat­ur­al resources, high­lighted three major con­cep­tions held by stu­dents regard­ing the rela­tion­ship between eco­nom­ic growth, social well-being and the environment: 

• The pro-eco­nomy vis­ion: These future man­agers give pri­or­ity to eco­nom­ic growth, tak­ing an interest in social and envir­on­ment­al prob­lems only when they are aligned with eco­nom­ic objectives. 
• The pro-envir­on­ment vis­ion: For almost a third of those ques­tioned, envir­on­ment­al issues are cent­ral. Although this group favours redu­cing the con­sump­tion of nat­ur­al resources, they are unable to com­pletely link the increase in con­sump­tion with the envir­on­ment­al impact of eco­nom­ic growth. 
• The eco­nom­ic-envir­on­ment­al vis­ion: More than half of the future busi­ness lead­ers ques­tioned show an interest in envir­on­ment­al issues while favour­ing eco­nom­ic growth. This group finds itself torn, par­tic­u­larly as regards the bene­fi­cial effects of eco­nom­ic growth on social issues, or the role of new tech­no­lo­gies in com­bat­ing envir­on­ment­al problems. 

As a res­ult, a large major­ity (85%) of tomor­row’s busi­ness lead­ers show a strong interest in both envir­on­ment­al and social issues, while recog­nising the import­ance of eco­nom­ic growth. When it comes to sus­tain­able devel­op­ment, our future busi­ness man­agers are not look­ing exclus­ively for profit, nor are they seek­ing to recon­cile con­tra­dict­ory object­ives per­fectly. But this study also shows that future man­agers have a mixed under­stand­ing of the con­nec­tions between the eco­nom­ic, social and envir­on­ment­al aspects of sus­tain­able devel­op­ment. In prac­tice, this gap can lead to dif­fi­culties in mak­ing decisions that require the integ­ra­tion of inform­a­tion from these inter­con­nec­ted themes.

The concept of sus­tain­able devel­op­ment rep­res­ents an immense chal­lenge, since it involves tak­ing into account the inter­ac­tion of a num­ber of issues (the eco­nomy, qual­ity of life, respect for the envir­on­ment, etc.) on dif­fer­ent time scales (short‑, medi­um- and long-term solu­tions). So it’s not sur­pris­ing to find that respond­ents, like the rest of the pop­u­la­tion, find it hard to make sense of cer­tain information. 

As future busi­ness lead­ers rep­res­ent a cru­cial link in the estab­lish­ment of a sus­tain­able eco­nomy, it seems essen­tial to pre­pare them as well as pos­sible to man­age sus­tain­able devel­op­ment issues. So it’s not sur­pris­ing that more and more MBAs are trans­form­ing their con­tent to incor­por­ate envir­on­ment­al issues more directly. 

85% of tomor­row’s busi­ness lead­ers show a strong interest in envir­on­ment­al issues.

The study car­ried out pro­poses not only to intro­duce these sus­tain­ab­il­ity issues into the edu­ca­tion­al cur­riculum of tomor­row’s busi­ness lead­ers, but above all to make them face up to the mul­tiple chal­lenges that this implies by emphas­ising inter­dis­cip­lin­ar­ity. Stu­dents will be con­fron­ted with com­plex and some­times para­dox­ic­al situ­ations, chal­len­ging their own per­cep­tion of these issues. Work­ing on these issues in groups, through sim­u­la­tions and case stud­ies, and inter­act­ing with aca­dem­ic, indus­tri­al and gov­ern­ment play­ers, would help to devel­op crit­ic­al think­ing and con­struct­ive debates, driv­ing a change of per­spect­ive on sus­tain­able development. 

Wheth­er for future busi­ness lead­ers or for the gen­er­al pub­lic, aware­ness of the con­tra­dic­tions and para­doxes in our per­cep­tion of sus­tain­able devel­op­ment, although destabil­ising, could motiv­ate changes in beha­viour with a major impact on our eco­nomy, our soci­ety and our planet.