Teaching (pr. p.) Students

The title is about "students who teach" rather than "the act of teaching to students", mind you. I just love meeting with students - it's one of the most enjoyable fringe benefits of this job.  I come away from ever encounter having been challenged, taught, and inspired.

My most recent experience was a couple of weeks back, at a panel session hosted by the Simmons School of Management chapter of Net Impact. It was the fourth annual event open to attendees from throughout the Boston area.  But this year, they expanded the program to include a set of intimate "breakout" sessions for one panelist and up to a dozen students to have an unscripted, interactive, unmoderated discussion. Well, it's wasn't entirely unmoderated. As part of the exceptional planning for this event, they assigned each of us panelists a "student ambassador" who not only met us in the lobby, guided us through the schedule, and were themselves exemplars of determination and enthusiasm, but were also armed with a fistful of questions to keep the breakout discussions going in the unlikely event that conversation flagged.

Which it most assuredly did not, in mine! The attendees were all interested in CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility, which was being used synonymously throughout the event) in general, and in CSR in the IT industry in particular.  The discussion covered a lot of territory, but a few things stood out for me.

 One of the attendees was a software developer. She told us that she tries to do her part by making sure that every application is accessible to all potential users. She was talking not only of accessibility for people with disabilities, as laid out in Section 508, but also accessibility to people of other languages, other cultures.

This really stuck with me in a couple of ways. For one thing, when we think of the "digital divide", we often think about people who don't have access to technology for economic and/or geographic reasons. But we have to think on far more dimensions! We have to consider not about how to get access to those who have it, but take a step further back and say "what might be stopping people from having access"? This is the kind of systems thinking that generates innovation.

Secondly, I was moved that she didn't start by saying "Business should…", or "How do you at EMC…", or "the government needs to…". She started by asking what she could do. And she's doing it.

Along related lines of asking the right questions, another attendee shared with us that she'd done a project studying the CSR strategy of a major multinational. The report, she told was, was really high quality - comprehensive with metrics, goals, challenges, priorities. But what was most telling was not what was in the report - it was what was NOT in the report! Oddly - and perhaps this is one of the risks that makes companies a little gun-shy about disclosure - the more open a company is in its report, the more it seems to be hiding by that which it doesn't say (whether deliberate or not). All the more reason for stakeholder input up front describing what constituents want to know about in a company's reporting.

I asked the others in the room how they defined "sustainability" and what they thought it encompassed. They spoke, not about the traditional Brundtland definition ("Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs"), but on the idea of "strategic CSR" that is integrated into brand, mission, and vision. Of course, these were MBA candidates, so I shouldn’t be surprised. But they were neither camped at the "we have to do it because it's good for business" end of the spectrum, nor at the "we have to do it because it's the right thing" end. In fact, I don't think they saw them as different worldviews at all. They're just both true, and both drivers for new models of how we define "responsible business".  Nor were their scopes limited to the usual suspects - in addition to accessibility, we talked about privacy, security, and the role of IT in mitigating impacts of other industries.

The panel was great, too, by the way. It was moderated by Dr. Sylvia Maxfield who clearly showed that her grasp of the issues goes far beyond the academic.  As usually, I enjoyed listening to and learning from my fellow panelists, who were Sheila Cavanaugh, Senior Vice President, Corporate Affairs at Fidelity; Chris Hagler, Partner at HaglerHomrich Sustainability Consulting Group; Harriet Hentges, VP of Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability, Ahold USA; and Hector Rodriguez, Director of Global EHS & Sustainability at Biogen Idec. We were asked what it looks like when sustainability is truly integrated into a company (note to self: mark for future blog), the ROI of sustainability, challenges, partnerships and more.

There were questions from the audience, but the one I was still noodling on when driving home after the evening's reception, was what can derail the sustainability trajectory? That is, not what is hard or can go wrong in an individual company's initiative, but what risks are there to sustainability continuing its growth as a corporate value in the private sector? We talked about the economy, about trust issues, about media hype, but I was particularly taken with the answer of one of my fellow panelists - that the biggest risk might just be putting so much effort into doing good things that we neglect to do great ones (note to self…).

Sometimes, I get discouraged with our ability to change the world. But talking to - and hearing from - students is the perfect shot in the arm. A special thanks to people like Erin Dopfel and Alex Pelletier and all the other volunteers whose commitment comes in the form of action and not just words.

It's so easy to fall into the trap of discounting students as being naïve, idealistic, impractical. Well, I say, thank goodness for that. If a fraction of a percent of them manage to bring this attitude intact into their professions, we stand a chance of making the change we need to create a sustainable society.

Comments

[Kathrin Winkler]

You just did!

[Attediede]

Grazie per aver scelto di consulenza, come posso ringraziarvi?

[Alex]

We were delighted to have you at the event. Your insights and questions offered us a thoughtful and interesting learning experience- I wish our breakout could have lasted for another hour! Thank you again-