A meeting with Georg Kell, Head of UN Global Compact

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Working towards social and environmental sustainability can be testing, a long day of meetings out of the office can, at best, mean  a barrage of questions on technical details, at worst environmental professionals still face Bush-esque climate change denying Luddites gunning for business as usual. I often feel like grabbing them by the lapels and shouting “wake up and smell the carbon!”. 

The meeting with Georg Kell held at Elsevier’s London office was quite the opposite. Despite getting a little hot about the unnecessarily air-conditioned temperature of the offices, there was a refreshing breeze of coherent social and environmental responsibility blowing through the room of like-minded individuals. In a way, it was like stepping into the future, into a time and place where everybody gets what we’re aiming for. That is, of course, sustainability in business management that leads to continued growth in economic and human capital, without unnecessary resource depletion and consequential negative environmental impacts. Georg rather succinctly termed this “risk interconnectedness” in a way that he and only a few others can describe the fact that some multinationals have found their poor environmental performance can bite their economic backside.

When the UN talks, big business listens. Especially in these times when even the most successful of them are prepared to believe that they may have got things ‘just a little wrong’. They are also vying  against one another for a competitive claw-hold at the top of the financial hole in which we have found ourselves. Many of them realise (but some have not quite got it yet!) that green and responsible is the way to go if they want to be on the leading edge of economic recovery. Georg again cut through the waffle of business B/S’ers, “(climate change) will change the business landscape in the most fundamental way” and “early movers are always in a better position than late comers.” How else is there to think when we are sharing Earth’s dwindling resources between a growing population, especially when (happily) the economic situation is that even the poorest of developing counties have their fair share of talented and wealthy businessmen who can compete with the North (or West, depending on which model one uses) for the best of the resource extraction and supply systems that capitalism has created. 

The vocabulary for discussing how to treat other human beings in the workplace or how to incorporate management of Earth’s natural  resources and life-supporting ecological systems is rarely uttered in the business arena. But in order to once again talk about the ‘strongest growth ever, this quarter’ around the board table, the focus must be on churning out business managers who have both the walk and the talk to fulfil the demands for sustainable growth of environmentally and socially responsible business in the coming years. There are around 200 MBA courses either currently available or about to be rolled out which incorporate the UN’s Global Compact systems management processes, designed to integrate the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) philosophy into mainstream business management. CSR is not just a “moral postulate”, but a reality brought about by discerning clients who are looking for a lot extra from their suppliers, because they are increasingly cognitive of the world around them. 

Written by Toby Roscoe (EcoHub | Sustainability Solutions)