email rounding up the latestWith climate change and inequality among the growing threats to human wellbeing, business is under pressure to embrace the issues of people and planet in place of the primacy of profit maximisation; and so is business education.
But metrics have their limits. As the broader debate about businesses’ environmental, social and governance responsibilities has shown, some topics are difficult to quantify easily, comparably and comprehensively. The same applies within education, which has a pivotal role in training the next generation of managers and entrepreneurs.
An important conclusion from this second year of the awards is that the strength of the inaugural winners was not a one-off. We received another impressive list of submissions from around the world and identified plenty of strong projects for the shortlists and joint winners. While the efforts made by individual winners deserve praise, their work also highlights the important role of mechanisms that link them to useful projects.in Berlin has a Responsible Leaders Fellowship, for example, allowing MBA and masters graduates to offer pro-bono support to organisations meeting social challenges in lower-income countries.
A growing range of business schools provided a wealth of relevant teaching cases, which are influential because they reach large numbers of students. The judges concluded that some of the best materials went beyond traditional cases, providing online training, simulations, coaching, mentoring and even meditation.
Attributing causality is never easy. All too often, however, academics continue to define impact simply as the fact of publication in specialist journals, which provide rigorous peer review but have a narrow readership. The better ones at least seek or note reporting of their research in the media and practitioner outlets.
There is no link between economic development and democracy. Development does not bring democracy. But democracy brings development. The work to be done is on bringing and supporting democracy.