Occupy Our Business Schools

Once you make ethics and social impact considerations part of how every aspect of business is done, you need to show and practice how all the pieces fit together. Create interactions with corporate executives in which multiple business disciplines plus ethics all come together in one messy ball—because that’s what happens in the real world. At the Leeds School of Business, we also address the multidimensional, multidisciplinary, multimessy nature of the world of work through special courses that pull together all the pieces and highlight how ethics enters into that complicated equation.

We’ve found that you need a structure to support all that. We don’t want knowledge creation or delivery in the traditional core of business disciplines to suffer even a bit. (Good faculty would never permit that anyway.) For us, the support structure is our Center for Education on Social Responsibility. The center finds ways to create integration, gives faculty specific tools and methods to make it happen, and delivers the classes and experiences that bring the pieces together at a macro level.

All our business schools should do this—just as all our business schools need to teach finance. If that happens, we’ll have the army of 21st century business leaders we need.