On Friday and Saturday, the Responsible Business Club of IESE Business School’s full time MBA students organized their annual conference which looks at how they can make the world a better place and still make a reasonable living. Since there are other critical issues to write about this week such as the Ukraine and Venezuela, there is a separate post on those issues and this space will discuss the conference.
Tomorrow’s Leaders?
As I wrote in a post on the Forbes web site, these students will be running the business world tomorrow and it is heartening to see their passion and energy.
Their conviction that we can have both profitable and socially responsible businesses was shared by John Bird, one of the speakers, who urged them to figure out business models which would lift people out of poverty while making them rich!
Another speaker, The Guardian’s Joe Confino, urged the students to hold onto their passion and to do amazing things.
Why Teach at IESE Business School ?
For me the most rewarding part of the conference was to see how well the students managed the entire event. They chose the topics, recruited the speakers, found the sponsors, moderated the panels and ran an engaging, professional, and all together fantastic event. Of course they had some help from IESE staff and faculty including Fabrizio Ferraro, Anontio Vaccaro, Heinrich Liechtenstein, and myself but the heavy lifting, learning, and success was all theirs.
At the conference a journalists present asked me why I enjoyed teaching at IESE and I answered that seeing the students take ownership of such an extraordinary event and being able to be part of their personal growth is really what teaching is all about. This has happened every year for the last 11 years as different students have taken the conference in slightly different directions and then gone on to do amazing things in the world.
The co-chair of the first conference for example, back in 2004, was Emma Coles, who is now the Vice President of Corporate Responsibility for the Ahold Group, one of the world’s largest super market retailers with brands such as Albert Hejin in Holland and Giant and Stop & Shop in the U.S.
Global Weirding Revisited
As promised in last week’s post, I did find time to talk at length with another speaker, Bjorn Lomborg and asked him about extreme weather and climate change. He conceded that the experts agree that climate change is causing fewer, but more severe storms and that these storms are causing increasing damage. He also, in line with much of his work, showed that the damage, while devastating to the people involved, did actually represent a smaller share of world GDP than in the past and this number would go down even more in the future.
Lomborg, of course, is a controversial figure, but made a great presentation which encouraged the participants to think through their own assumptions about global priorities.
Thanks for this article. helps me to get better in doing business
Great post! Thank you for sharing this. Gonna read other article. They are good!