A citizenship focus in business education

Frank Mantero is the Director of Corporate Citizenship programs at GE.
In a world that demands corporations to be more transparent and accountable, the expectations for businesses are higher than ever. With the heightened need to restore confidence in companies, ensuring that leaders have a strong set of values to nurture a culture of ethics and compliance is critical. For graduate business schools, this means preparing leaders by integrating a corporate social responsibility lens throughout all coursework so that graduates are ready to navigate the broad spectrum of challenges they will face in today’s world.

We’ve been working with business schools to share best practices and case studies to help them blend corporate social responsibility into curricula. I’d like to invite you to read about a recent workshop at the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame.

At this two-day convening, I worked with Krista Bauer and Catherine Rogers of GE, Andrew Boner of the Institute for Sustainable Communities, Laura Commike Gitman of Business for Social Responsibility, Carolyn Woo, Dean of the Mendoza College of Business and several Mendoza faculty members to start closing the gap between corporate social responsibility in the business world and in the classroom. The workshop was helpful for both sides. We left the convening with a stronger partnership and our discussions were also incredibly valuable to inform our own process.

For more insight into the workshop, listen to Dean Woo’s perspective about ethical conduct and the importance of teaching business students that doing business is more than returning value to shareholders.

You can also read more about it in Sustainability: The Journal of Record.

* Citizenship web site: GE at the Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame