Business as change agent
Author: Maya Payne
CRAIN'S Cleveland Business on the web
Date: 03/08/2006
Edition: online
Annotation: taken from: http://www.crainscleveland.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200660307008
Business as change agent
By MAYA R. PAYNE
2:45 pm, March 7, 2006
Case Western Reserve University in October will host an event that aspires to be the "tipping point" in the development of a more sustainable and inclusive global economy, and area businesses are invited to participate.
Case's Weatherhead School of Management, the Academy of Management and the United Nations Global Compact will convene a group of more than 400 business executives to discuss how business can help make progress toward eradicating poverty, enhancing the environment and advancing peace, all while making a profit.
Another 3,000 people are expected to participate through satellite and via the Internet.
The three-day conference, Business as an Agent of World Benefit: Management Knowledge Leading Positive Change, will explore how business can bring its greatest strengths — adaptability, creativity and connectivity — to bear on the most pressing global issues.
Businesses are invited to submit their stories of innovation and impact related to sustainable development, social responsibility, and corporate citizenship or proposals for "how to" workshops to the forum’s organizers by e-mail by March 30.
In presentations, discussions, and breakout sessions at the forum, business executives, management scholars, civil society leaders, government policy makers and students worldwide will grapple with how to:
* unite the strengths of business with universal values like the eradication of poverty, restoration of environment and peace,
* challenge the illusion of a tradeoff between sustainable development and shareholder value, and
* re-envision management education to transform students' intellectual frameworks and attitudes.
These are issues that the presenting organizations address daily in their quests to combine citizenship and profitability. The UN Global Compact, a network advocating human rights, labor rights, anti-corruption and environmentalism, resulted from a challenge issued by Kofi Annan at the World Economic Forum in 1999. The Academy of Management is a professional association of scholars who study management and organizations.
David Cooperrider, faculty director of the Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit, said that this is the critical next level beyond corporate citizenship or social responsibility initiatives where companies go beyond "doing no harm" to proactively tackling global issues like poverty, terrorism and ecological ruin.
And business schools have much to contribute, said Dr. Cooperrider, who also chairs Weatherhead’s organizational behavior department.
"The million young leaders coming out of management schools each year are making the billions of decisions every day that add up to how we do as world during this transition in history," Dr. Cooperrider said. "We have about 25 years to move from an unsustainable environment doing irreversible damage to an economically and ecologically sustainable society."
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