When Doug Guthrie talks about sustainability, he cannot hide his passion for the movement that he says “has the potential to be the next innovation and technological revolution of this country and the world.”
Dr. Guthrie, dean of the School of Business, just defines the term a bit more broadly than some.
“Sustainability has become a word that’s been captured by the environmental movement, but the issues are so much larger than the environment itself,” he says. “We can’t really have a complete conversation about what it means for corporations to be sustaining their resources over time if we only talk about trees and ozone.”
Instead, Dr. Guthrie says, conversations about sustainability must include areas like labor and workforce sustainability, living wages and other things that matter to organizations. “These issues are too important to be left off the table,” he says.
Sustainability, Dr. Guthrie says, goes hand in hand with corporate responsibility, which dates back to the ’50s and ’60s. He cites businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 essay The Gospel of Wealth as a “call to arms of his class to step up and pay attention,” though the appeal was as much about checking communism’s rising power in Europe as best moral practices.
Nearly a century later, the environmental sustainability rhetoric that emerged in the ’70s mostly focused on pollution, according to Dr. Guthrie, and continues to be a driving force today.
Unfortunately, Dr. Guthrie says, sustainability is often discussed as a “normative idea of being green and using less water,” rather than as an innovative and technical way of doing business, which is why he says the School of Business is in the process of rethinking its sustainability efforts.
“In my mind, as we reshape this sustainability initiative at GW, we need to be really focused on how we deliver the highest level of technical expertise in corporate responsibility,” he says.
Dr. Guthrie praised the work of GW’s Institute of Corporate Responsibility and the Institute for Sustainability, but said he would like us to see them broaden their efforts. He also said the School of Business will be developing a specialized executive M.B.A. program focused on renewable energy. “It will be a mix of business, engineering and legal disciplines and will draw on resources from across the university,” Dr. Guthrie says.
“We also hope to link our sustainability initiatives directly to our future work on China and international development,” he adds. “As we build these initiatives, we hope to work with recent alumni like David Kirkland, M.B.A. ’10, and Kristen Nicole, M.B.A. ’10, who are both doing cutting-edge work in the solar and energy fields, and university trustee George Coelho, M.B.A. ’77, managing director and head of venture capital at Good Energies Inc.”
As the school expands its approach to corporate social responsibility and sustainability, Dr. Guthrie says it will continue to build upon its strategy, which is built on three pillars: leadership and ethics, sustainability and corporate responsibility, and internationalism and “embeddedness” in a global economy.
Corporations are not just “shareholder maximizing entities,” he cautions, but are the “greatest sources of power besides nation states in our society.” With that power, of course, comes great responsibility.
“I believe the world is waiting for a business school to stand up and say business is fundamentally embedded in and partners with society,” Dr. Guthrie says. “Understanding the role of businesses in helping to shape and be shaped by the realms of public policy, politics and social systems is a crucial thing that we all have to embrace.”
“What business school is better positioned to do that than the one that sits six blocks from the White House?” he adds. “We are the school that should be in that conversation or leading that conversation.”