Educating Leaders for a (extra) Round Future: How Enterprise Faculties are Driving ESG, Sustainability, and Optimistic Affect
Profession Climbers / 2nd June 2025
Alon Rozen
With all of the back-pedaling in current months on local weather, ESG and sustainability initiatives, particularly within the US, I hope that I can say this – with out ruffling too many feathers – that the way forward for enterprise can now not be take, make and dispose (i.e. linear). It’s arduous to disclaim the urgency of rethinking how we produce, devour, and discard in order that we extract much less, produce much less and devour much less (or higher). And but, we at the moment are seeing companies paradoxically scrambling to know ESG and sustainable accounting frameworks, on the one hand, and making an attempt to know why the identical buyers who penalized greenwashing and known as for strict internet zero goals in 2024 at the moment are backing off or reversing course, on the opposite. So, the trillion-dollar query that’s now looming for enterprise colleges all over the place: how can we prepare leaders to have the competence and the arrogance to deal with these challenges head-on in order that they are doing the precise factor regardless of quickly swirlingand ambiguous political winds?
Problem accepted!
At École des Ponts Enterprise College, we take this problem personally—in any case, we’ve been “in enterprise to make a greater world” since 1987. Because the enterprise college of the famend French engineering college,
École nationale des ponts et chaussées – Institut Polytechnique de Paris (the ENPC), which is below the tutelage of the French Ministry of Ecological Transition, we’re purely proponents of triple backside line accounting by which we take folks, planet and revenue into consideration. And we attempt to recruit contributors who share our values and who need to make an impression themselves.
As this version of CEO Journal is devoted to Inexperienced MBAs, please permit me to share with you a few of the pondering and design that went into our LeadTech World Government MBA that we run along with EADA Enterprise College in Barcelona. Now we have designed this program in order that it sits squarely on the intersection of expertise, innovation, management and impression (social impression, sustainability and circularity). And we don’t simply pay lip service to the idea of a sustainable and circular economy: we train it integrally, analysis it intensively, and encourage our college students to stay it authentically. Each single participant graduates not simply with an MBA however with a certificates in Round Economic system. Why? As a result of in tomorrow’s world, it gained’t simply be a aggressive benefit—it’ll be desk stakes.
Not a pleasant–to–have, a greater–to–have
Name it European values, however we’re enamored with the core tenets of the round financial system – utilizing property longer (to extract and waste much less), reusing property extra usually (to provide much less) and encouraging usership over possession (to extract, produce and waste much less). We see the round financial system as a extra superior and worthwhile enterprise mannequin that doesn’t sacrifice folks, planet or earnings alongside the best way. Which implies that going round is just not a nice-to-have, which generates good karma on the expense of upper prices; it’s a better-to-have, which permits enterprise to generate extra constructive impression along with greater earnings. To learn your entire article, click on right here!
