Green MBA

There was an article in the online version of The Guardian today about a 'green MBA' which is run by a university in Spain. According to the various comments attached to the article, it turns out that this 'university' is some sort of scam, which is why I'm not bothering to post a link to the article itself. Even so, the article started me thinking about how 'green' my MBA course is and how rapacious it is (all business schools teach their pupils to be rapacious in order to maintain continual growth, no?).

I have to conclude that the course is exceedingly grey and non-rapacious. Maybe one learns to rape and pillage in some of the optional courses, such as 'mergers', but I won't be taking that course.

In fact, the degree seems to be very 'parveh', as we would say in Hebrew: neither meat nor milk. The basics of several disciplines are taught but we are not taught what to do with them. The closest I have got so far to a rapacious course would be Marketing, in which we were taught how to analyse a market and slice it (I'm sure there's a better term but the word escapes me at the moment). We were not taught how to plan an advertising campaign nor how to rip off consumers. In Organisational Behaviour, we learnt the theory of changing company culture and structure but not how to carry it out. We learnt about balance sheets in Accountancy, but not how to improve profitable product lines at the cost of less profitable ones.

Here's a comment to that article which sums up my position:

Business is powerful and it only makes sense to try to change the system via the channel with the most leverage. While some "green" MBA programs are bandwagon-jumpers, there are others, like my alma mater, that are dedicated to changing the way business is done by integrating triple bottom line (people, planet and profit) into every course, from finance to marketing to management. Check out greenmba.com and others.