In 2003, Dexter Dunphy and his colleagues published The Phase Model, which mapped an organisation’s response to issues of corporate sustainability. Rejection and non-responsiveness progressed through compliance and efficiency to strategic proactivity and ultimately to the sustaining corporation. It is a journey from denial to acceptance.
 

The journey can also be tracked, broadly, over time. Before 2000, the educational challenge was to make managers aware of the significance of environmental concerns. In curricular terms, this meant an elective for the converted, with many others rejecting the “tree huggers”. For the next five years, as awareness increased, compliance and efficiency were the order of the day. Corporate sustainability officers appeared, low-wattage light bulbs were installed and corporate social responsibility reports were issued. The tipping point came in 2006 with Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
 

The landscape today is thus not marked by education for

awareness but by a nervous quest for what to do in an environment marked by legislation promoting responsibility, consumers concerned by sustainability and organisations pushing their senior management to “do something”. A recent Ashridge study conducted with a group of business schools co- ordinated by the European Academy for Business in Society for the United Nations Global Compact presents a stark message: 76 per cent of senior executives polled say it is important that leaders in their organisations have the knowledge and skills to respond to future challenges such as resource scarcity and the low-carbon economy, but fewer than 8 per cent believe these skills are being developed within their organisations. They also do not believe business schools have responses in place.
 

A parallel study, Tomorrow’s Global Talent, conducted by Tomorrow’s Company, confirms these findings. The report calls for people capable of acting in the “triple context” of economic, environmental and social engagement. To find them means looking beyond the traditionally narrow remit of the historical definition of an organisation’s boundaries. Recruitment must be broadened to bring diversity into the organisation and engagement must take place with a broad range of stakeholders, whether they be in non-government organisations, among customers, in developing economies or elsewhere.
 

If we find it hard to react appropriately to the present financial crisis, that is only child’s play compared with devising sensible strategies for a future
The studies converge in an attempt to define the skills needed for tomorrow’s, or rather today’s, world. First, the global leader needs to understand the changing business context and the environmental drivers of sustainability.
 

Second, managers need to understand the complexity of actions and perspectives of regulators, customers, suppliers, investors and NGOs. In an increasingly ambiguous world, managers need to cope with massive, rapid change in creative and innovative ways. If we find it hard to react appropriately to the present financial crisis, that is only child’s play compared with devising sensible strategies for a future.
 

Third, there is the issue of connectedness – engagement with the myriad actors in the organisational ecosystem. Few managers have been truly successful in engaging with government, community organisations or environmental NGOs, but they will have to learn. Dialogue is much more difficult than telling people what to do or endlessly reiterating one’s position.
 

Businesses and business schools need to think through some intelligent design for our collective futures. Both studies concur in indicating that this will involve a move away from the traditional separation of content from context.
Developing talent for the future involves a broadening of the talent pool, an integration of education in the classroom and development in the workplace and ultimately an approach that does not tinker with small changes but that starts with a principle of sustainability rather than marginal improvements on an existing paradigm.
 

 

Kai Peters is CEO of Ashridge Business School. This piece was published in FT and can be viewed here.