BizEd

JulyAugust2008

Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/57462

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 39 of 75

themselves as participants in one of the most creative episodes in management history. I believe that students and faculty in business school class- rooms and laboratories everywhere should be engaging in this kind of process, designing for a sustainable world. As Drucker noted, management's essence is all about direct- ing vision and resources toward inspiring the strongest joint performance and achieving the greatest results. Think of the Marshall Plan or the global eradication of smallpox or John F. Kennedy's call to put a man on the moon. Management's greatest moments are when the call to collective action is clearest—when we turn our attention from the question "What could we…?" to the question "How might we…?" Our Finest Hour Which brings us back to what Drucker said to me in 2003: "Every single social and global issue of our day is a busi- ness opportunity in disguise." This statement leaps over and completely transcends "the great tradeoff illusion," which holds that socially responsible firms must inevitably sacrifice financial performance. It reunites management strategy and The Manager's Design Library A growing genre of management books is emerg- ing to help business managers—and faculty—learn ways that design concepts can help them envision, create, and innovate within an increasingly uncer- tain and dynamic world: Managing as Designing by Richard Boland and Fred Collopy, 2004 Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work by Robert Austin and Lee Devin, 2003 Discovering Design by Richard Buchanan and Vic- tor Margolin, 2000 Designing Information and Organizations with a Positive Lens by Michel Avital, Richard Boland, and David Cooperrider, 2008 Sustainable Value by Chris Lazslo, 2008 Appreciative Inquiry by David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney, 2005 It is essential that we enable our young people to see social responsibility into a powerful and integral whole. Most important, it points to opportunities that mutually benefit soci- ety and business. More than 20 years ago, my colleagues and I predict- ed that sustainability might well transform manage- ment education more than anything that has come before. We wrote about its promise to change how we teach accounting, strategy, marketing, organizational development, operations, economics, and informa- tion systems. It took a bit longer than we had anticipated, but in 2008, we are here. Business has the technologies to redesign the world energy economy and sta- bilize climate change. It has the capacity to eradicate extreme poverty within a generation or two. It has new, emerging approaches to turn all of these issues, and many more, into business opportunities for tomorrow's industry leaders. After nearly 30 years as a management educator, I have never seen a time when our students, corporate partners, and faculty have been so excited. Management education is on a world stage and has an important role to play. Millions of students graduate annually from our undergraduate, MBA, doctoral, and executive education programs. These students will make billions of decisions each day. As business educa- tors, our influence on those decisions is huge. Teddy Roosevelt once said, "Our chief usefulness to humanity rests on our combining power with high pur- pose." In my view, this fundamental combination is the goal of business schools today. It is essential that we enable our young people to see themselves as participants in one of the most creative episodes in management history. We can instill in them an overarching perspective and sense of purpose in relation to the sustainable value revolution. We are on the eve of management education's finest hour. n z David Cooperrider is the Fairmount Minerals Professor of Social Entre- preneurship at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio. 38 BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2008

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of BizEd - JulyAugust2008