Olin, Ross, Stanford Named Among Top 16 Schools for Green MBAs

In partnership with The Princeton Review, Entrepreneur magazine has compiled a list of 16 top schools for green MBAs based on a survey of students and administrators at 325 graduate schools of business.

Debunking the Notion of a Triple Bottom Line

The effective debunking of the notion of a triple bottom line is 6½ years old now, and it is still making people angry.

How to Build a Framework for Sustainability 2.0

For companies to succeed during these times of change, they’ll need to define and embrace a rigorous framework for sustainability – something that goes beyond well-intended but overarching statements and builds a foundation that helps a firm achieve its sustainability and business goals.

Four Steps to Becoming a Sustainable 21st Century Organization

Companies want to ensure the greatest environmental and economic return on each dollar (and hour) spent on sustainability. So which individuals or groups can you influence to support your sustainability efforts? Which individuals or groups pose the greatest business risk with respect to your environmental performance? Where do you start?

Companies should start by evaluating their stakeholders and then taking some counter-intuitive actions: Initiating partnerships with … [ Read more ]

The Seven Sins of Greenwashing: Is Everybody Lying?

An updated version of the 2007 report The Six Sins of Greenwashing has just been released. And like its predecessor, this version offers sensational findings: of 2,219 products making environmental claims that researchers found in North American retailers, “over 98 percent” committed one of several “sins.” The 2007 report identified six such sins. This year’s edition adds a seventh.

MBA Students Say Businesses Should Address Green and Social Issues

The vast majority of business school students think the private sector should be using its position to address environmental and social issues.

Unfortunately, less than a third believe this is actually happening, according to a new survey from Net Impact and the Aspen Institute Center for Business Education.

Navigating the Wilderness of Green Business Certifications

Getting your business labeled green though a certification program has many benefits, but as companies are discovering, the simple act of choosing which program opens up a world of complications.

Survey Shows MBA Students Believe Business Should Be Agent of Social Change

The overwhelming majority of today’s MBA students believe that businesses should work toward the betterment of society, that managers should take into account social and environmental impacts when making business decisions, and that corporate social responsibility should be integrated into core curricula in MBA programs, according to a new survey.

Creating a More Meaningful Market

Where is the intersection between personal meaning and business value? Unless we engage in a conversation about what meaning is, we can’t hope to integrate it into our work processes, goals, or solutions.

The Balanced Scorecard and Corporate Social Responsibility: Aligning Values for Profit

CSR reporting has grown over the past few years, but the information provided by those reports isn’t always used for strategic advantage. Tying values and measures to a Balanced Scorecard could be the way to make good intentions more profitable.

Good, Green Jobs

Published in October 2005, Good, Green Jobs is GreenBiz.com’s go-to guide to landing the environmental job of your dreams. The distinction between “mainstream” and “environmental” fields is a thing of the past; find out why your ideal job might be located in an unexpected sector. This briefing is chock-full of resources and tools to help you navigate your job search successfully, from composing a killer … [ Read more ]

CSR Reporting and Company Performance: Correlations

With so many companies worldwide producing “corporate social responsibility” (or citizenship or environmental or sustainability) reports, it’s relevant to ask both “how good are they?” and “what do they really tell us?”

Why Not ‘Sustainability Fundamentals’ in Corporate Reporting?

Sustainability reporting is often derided as being outside the mainstream of financial reporting, devoid of any relationship to performance. The Economist calls it “corporate storytelling.”

Unfortunately, The Economist is right. Reports are unique accounts of each company’s journey, impossible to compare with other reports, even when reporting frameworks such as the Global Report Initiative’s are applied. The hard analytics (earnings per share, price-earnings ratio, return … [ Read more ]

Adapting Your Accounting Practices to Triple Bottom Line Reporting

Certified Management Accountant David Crawford offers background and outlines next steps to help accountants and other financial professionals to meet the challenges of triple bottom line reporting.

The Carbon Trade

While some NGOs and “green” businesses favor the carbon trade and view it as a win-win solution that reconciles environmental protection with economic prosperity, some environmentalists and grassroots organizations claim that it is no answer to environmental problems and that it does not address the causes of global warming.

Report Names Practices that Lead to Environmental Accounting Fraud

A new report, “Fooling Investors and Fooling Themselves” identifies aggressive accounting and asset management tactics that can lead to environmental accounting fraud.

Literacy to Save the Earth

What’s the value of an environmentally literate America?

According to Kevin J. Coyle, the answer is: about $75 billion a year. And that’s just the low-hanging fruit.

Study Finds MBA Graduates Seek Ethical Employers

Last week a new study furnished yet another strong argument for the “doing good is good business” crowd: corporate social responsibility may just help your human resources department snag up-and-coming MBAs without sending first-year salaries through the roof. Researchers found that a surprising number of recent business-school grads were willing to earn less to work for more socially conscious companies.

Using Experiential Simulation to Teach Sustainability

Authors Susan Svoboda and John Whalen offer this practical guide for developing and using a simulation exercise to help MBA students and working professionals build an understanding of sustainability.

Editor’s Note: this article is also interesting for its analysis of the value of experiential learning via simulations.