Career Opportunities for Green MBAs: Generating Green $$ from the Green Movement

Download: HERE (9.0 MB)

Script from: http://www.mbapodcaster.com/MBA_MoreInfo/Green-MBA.asp?iEpisode=93

MBA에 대한 인기가 예전만 하지는 않지만 여전히 매력적인 학위라고 생각합니다.  특히 어느학교로 가느냐도 중요하지만 어느분야로 정할것인지 결정하는 것도 중요하다고 생각 합니다.  MBA는 전형적인 'need base'로 그 수요가 결정되는 분야이므로 정확한 가까운 미래의 수요예측이 졸업후 진로에 크게 영향을 미친다고 생각 합니다.  'Green MBA'에 대한 수요예측을 오늘의 podcast에서 다루고 있습니다.....!  

Welcome to MBA Podcaster, the only broadcast source for cutting edge information and advice on the MBA application process. I’m Heidi Pickman. The buzz in business right now is triple bottom line: People, Planet, Profit. World leaders are gathering for climate summit in December. Congress is considering climate legislation and major companies like Nike and Pacific Gas and Electric are leaving the US Chamber of Commerce over their opposition to climate legislation. Sustainability issues have made it into the consciousness of business leaders. They need MBAs who can incorporate the issues into the decision-making process. So the demand is there but how exactly does the Global Green Movement translate into Green as in competitive salaries for business school grads?

Today’s show, we’ll focus on real life career opportunities for Green MBAs. Which companies are hiring, where the growth will come from in the Green movement, what the long-term career prospects for Green MBA Grads are, and what you should do to prepare yourself for a sustainable career?

We have a great line-up. We talked to a dean of Sustainable MBA program about the companies who are recruiting on campus. A recruiter about the trends in sustainable careers and the author of A Resource Guide for MBA Careers and Sustainability will advise you on the best ways to find an appropriate job.

Let’s start with the story of Michael Callahan, a passionate social entrepreneur whose inspiration from his company and ultimately his education comes from a grandmother who lived in the shanty towns of Lima, Peru with her two orphan grandchildren.

Michael Callahan, MBA and Co-Founder, Powermundo: And she used a candle to light her shack and make handicrafts at night to sell to support herself and her two orphan grandchildren. And she came to our demonstration and sold her the solar lights and solar panels, and we realized that this could save her money like she wouldn’t have to buy candles or kerosene, she could work more efficiently and her children will be happier. I came back after selling her the product two nights later and she was ecstatic on how much it changed her life. And it was that inspiration in seeing how we could help just one family and then realizing that there’s no reason that this business couldn’t scale that we couldn’t become a wholesale distributor for clean technology in developing countries so that people like Maria had access to products that improves their life, made it easier for them to work, and were healthy for themselves in the environment.

Heidi Pickman: So Callahan enrolled in the Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise Masters Program at the College of Business at Colorado State University specifically to start his own business, to recruit a team, and make connections to funding. A Sustainable MBA or Green MBA incorporates the study of managing for environmental and social factors with traditional business subjects such as finance, economic theory, business ethics and management. It’s a fairly new field. Five years ago there were only a handful of programs. Now, the Aspen Institute puts out a top 100 Green MBA ranking. This podcast will focus on the career opportunities for our Green MBA. But if you want to learn more about schools offering a Sustainable MBA, listen to our related podcast on our website. The Green MBA: How Business Schools Are Making an Impact on Our World and Environment.

There are lots of interested parties out there. Katie Kross is the Associate Director for the Corporate Sustainability Initiative at Duke University. She says student interest in the Green MBA is exploding.

Katie Kross, Associate Director, Corporate Sustainability Initiative at Duke University: We did an info session related to social entrepreneurship and sustainability early on with the first year MBA students, and last year we have 90 students attend, and this year we have 190 students in our first year MBA students class attend. So I think that’s just one example of how we’re seeing the interest among MBA students grow.

Heidi Pickman: Just to put that in perspective, Duke’s first year MBA class was 430 this year. Kross also says that companies are just as enthusiastic about sustainability as the students are.

Katie Kross, Associate Director, Corporate Sustainability Initiative at Duke University: Sustainability is really the hot topic in the business press these days. Companies in all the different kinds of industries, whether that’s Wal-Mart and its supply chain partners or whether that’s renewable energy companies and Cleantech Venture capital firms or whether that’s the investment community looking at new ways to incorporate environmental and social issues and to investment evaluation. So the interest comes from a lot of different industry sectors and it’s growing across a lot of different types of organization and fields of interests.

Heidi Pickman: In fact, sustainability is about good, forward-thinking corporate strategy. Every company, Green or not, is going to be operating in a different corporate context over the next decades. Nicola Acutt is the Associate Dean of the Presidio Graduate School, which declares that it is dedicated to developing business and civic leaders with the competencies and the courage to implement their ideas for creating a sustainable future.

Acutt says one of the most important things to understand about sustainability is that it’s relevant to every industry and sector.

Nicola Acutt, Associate Dean, Presidio Graduate School: I have observed a significant shift from what I would call the pioneer stage with the early adopter companies, you know, the Cliff Bars and those types of organizations to really seeing more and more traditional companies showing an interest in our students, and for example Clorox and Travelocity recently posted positions. We see the categories of employers, of our students ranging from consulting firms like Saachi and Saachi or Domani Sustainability Consulting who are building targeted client services and new sustainability then across a range of other sectors like government, non-profit, education and in public service or public sector organizations from PG&E to Blue Shield, Kaiser, the City of Berkley, EPA, Goodwill, University of California. It’s really across all sectors.”

Heidi Pickman: So there’s room for those primarily interested in the environment but also traditional MBA positions like the VP of Marketing and the Director of Operations and Finance. But Acutt says Green MBA add a twist to tradition.

Nicola Acutt, Associate Dean, Presidio Graduate School: You know what I would say is difference about the types of jobs. In the traditional sense, it’s how the students are approaching their job. So what they’re bringing to the job is the ability to see new ideas and solutions to create policies or projects or new products or services that are sustainable in the long term.

Heidi Pickman: Opportunities are abundant for people who decide to obtain a Green MBA. Acutt says there’s a shortage of people trained in sustainability.

Nicola Acutt, Associate Dean, Presidio Graduate School: Interestingly McKinsey & Company put out a survey recently. They surveyed executives and one of the interesting findings was that CEOs ranked the inadequacy of the education system and the lack of talent. As a top future constraint in meeting the challenges, environmental and social challenges, that they see either existing now or on the horizon and also being able to operate and manage in emerging markets.

Heidi Pickman: Ellen Weinreb is a Sustainable Recruiter who has been working in Corporate Social Responsibility consulting and recruiting for 12 years. She also believes the future job market for Green MBAs will continue to grow.

Ellen Weinreb, Owner, Sustainable Recruiting: Where there’s the most growth is around Cleantech in developing new technologies largely spearheaded by the Department of Energy. So wherever they’re putting money and investing resources, there are a lot of businesses and programs that are developing perhaps around plug-in hybrid and solar. Then around sustainable brands, also there’s a lot of growth. Those brands are just being picked up by consumers. Consumers are more aware of the unhealthiness of certain products and they’re making decisions and they’re putting their money where their mouth is and buying more organic and more green and they’re finding greater value in it and so that’s also a growing field. Then in terms of the corporate social responsibility jobs, again more growth that’s largely dominated by climate change. They recognize it as a risk and they’re developing systems to mitigate the risk to calculate their carbon and then to offset it.

Heidi Pickman: Companies that can move faster to reduce packaging or reduce their carbon footprint and sell their products in a meaningful way to consumers will have a competitive advantage. MBAs will find opportunity in Green marketing or supply chain management. Katie Kross from Duke adds that the financial crisis has birthed the more socially responsible business person in traditional MBA areas.

Katie Kross, Associate Director, Corporate Sustainability Initiative at Duke University: We’re seeing a new push towards incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors into investment evaluation and seeing a lot of opportunities for MBAs, for instance, that want to combine their interests in environmental and social issues with the focus on finance, whether that’s in the banking or the venturecapital industry.

Heidi Pickman: For example a hot topic is calculating metrics for sustainability or inventing social return on investment metrics.

Katie Kross, Associate Director, Corporate Sustainability Initiative at Duke University: And a lot of companies are wrestling with this right now. How are we going to measure sustainability? What does that really mean? And what are the appropriate managerial decision-making metrics to use? We have students, for instance, that are working with some of the partners involved with the sustainability consortium which is looking at what should the sustainability metrics be at the product level. We also have had students work with local companies on what their sustainability metrics should be at the firm level.

Heidi Pickman: This is part of a trend in which students are carving out a new job category that didn’t even exist a few years ago says Nicola Acutt of Presidio.

Nicola Acutt, Associate Dean, Presidio Graduate School: So an example would be Jason Smith, one of our graduate students who’s VP of Key Accounts at an organization called Climate Check which is the Greenhouse Gas Management consulting practice. And this is an industry that barely even existed when Jason started at the MBA program, and you know I think this is just the beginning of an emerging sector where students will have the opportunity to carve out positions and jobs in horizon industries like the Water Market or Ecosystems Services and the like.

Heidi Pickman: Companies want expertise in sustainability to help them with the particular goal or helps at strategy, for example.

Nicola Acutt, Associate Dean, Presidio Graduate School: One of our students was a global sustainability specialist at Mattel and now the student is the Director of Sustainability at a major mining company, and their job is to help the company reduce their carbon footprints and address the embodied water of their products and processes, for example. Another example would be a sustainability analyst who would be hired by a utility company, for example, to either launch or improve their renewable energy projects.

Heidi Pickman: Ellen Weinreb describes another emerging job title, the Sustainable Brand Manager.

Ellen Weinreb, Owner, Sustainable Recruiting: The people working for sustainable brands, any kind of role within that sustainable brand will be a sustainable job, a sustainability job so you could be doing marketing or sales or finance. But if you’re working for Burt’s Bees, they’ve got a mission and it’s an all-natural product and so, you know, you’re furthering their mission. So the MBAs tend to fit in for the most part. Their value for the toolbox that they bring and they’re also working with a lot of other MBAs who are in those companies.

Heidi Pickman: And Acutt says we must not forget about the entrepreneurs.

Nicola Acutt, Associate Dean, Presidio Graduate School: We have, just in our short history, had twelve startups launched and, five of them in the last two years securing over a million dollars in initial funding. An example of this would be a student who worked on Mission Motors and they’re actually the fastest production electric motorcycle and this was a project started in Graduate School and they’re now competing against Honda and Lamborghini at a prestigious Italian motorcycle competition.

Heidi Pickman: So what skills do you need to succeed at one of those companies? Weinreb says that expertise depends on your focus. Supply chains sustainability experience will give you an advantage in the corporate world.

Ellen Weinreb, Owner, Sustainable Recruiting: They specifically were looking for people who have developed management information systems to measure sustainability along the supply chain. Secondly, I think the MBAs are great candidates in general for supply chain corporate social responsibility jobs because building a corporate social responsibility is management. You’re basically building a program and getting support from different internal stake holders and external stake holders.

Heidi Pickman: And if you want to go into Cleantech.

Ellen Weinreb, Owner, Sustainable Recruiting: So in Cleantech Finance you would need finance experience in Cleantech building, you would need maybe architecture or LEED certification, and you might be doing project management, or financing around Green building.

Heidi Pickman: And marketing skills come in handy if you want to work for a sustainable brand like the Stoney Fields, Burt’s Bees or Seventh Generation. The other scale that comes in quite handy is the ability to overcome a lot of resistance with the power of persuasion. Often times the person who has the CSR position is passionate about sustainability, but that doesn’t mean that everyone at that company is passionate about sustainability. You need to able to convince everyone that your way makes sense for the triple bottom line we mentioned earlier: People, Planet and Profits, and of course you need to know about sustainability.

Kross says MBAs can get up to speed on the issues.

Katie Kross, Associate Director, Corporate Sustainability Initiative at Duke University: It is important that they understand not just sort of the business side of things but also the public policy side of things because issues like climate change regulation are going to have profound impacts on what the cost benefit analysis of many decisions look like. So they need to have an understanding of what is sustainability and some of the fundamentals of what those environmental and social issues are and how companies are looking at them. But then a lot of the sort of skills about how it’s actually applied are continuing to emerge everyday. So I always tell the MBAs who are graduating now that they are in a really exciting position because they’re going to be the pioneers in a lot of these careers, and they are going to be the ones that are developing how to apply sustainability in a corporate context.

Heidi Pickman: Acutt says the degree in sustainable management is so much more than figuring out how to change out the light bulbs.

Nicola Acutt, Associate Dean, Presidio Graduate School: They really, really understand the relevance of whole systems thinking ecology and economics for business. They understand how to use the principles of sustainability to help orient, make sense of, and guide business strategy and this is in the context of emerging issues all over from climate change to regulation, water shortages, economic stability, finance across the board, and beyond that they’re not only able to make the business case for more sustainable practices but they’re okay with emerging management tools and strategies whether it’s carbon accounting to life cycle analysis to stake holder engagement.

Heidi Pickman: Remember Michael Callahan, our passionate social entrepreneur. He’s the Co-Founder of Powermundo—a company that builds and manages a network of customers, retailers, and suppliers to deliver appropriate clean technology products for people in developing countries. He also does consulting. He says a Green MBA isn’t always enough.

Michael Callahan, MBA and Co-Founder, Powermundo: It’s what you do with it. What my job offers wasn’t that you have a Green MBA. It was, oh, you raised this much money, you started your own business, you wrote your business plan, you have presentation skills, you’re interested in sustainability. So it fits perfectly with the consulting company that I’m working with now, as well as the Solar Farm Developer, as well as other Green companies and so I was shocked because I needed money to support myself to supplement my income that I had as many job opportunities and it was because the combination of skills and not just the Green MBA. The Green MBA was a help, but it’s still being defined, you know, what is a Green MBA? You still have to have strong finance skills, marketing, accounting. You still have to have all of that.

Heidi Pickman: And like investing the keyword is diversification.

Michael Callahan, MBA and Co-Founder, Powermundo: If you’re interested in finance, by all means I can understand but diversify with your experience and what you can do, it might end up being a very different type of finance job and what were existing a couple of years ago. So diversification of skills, different internships that are completely different, these people may have friends that are unemployed that are in debt and unemployed with big name MBAs because they’re not very diversified in what they’re able to do. And so transferable skills, networking, and really following what you love to do as well as entrepreneurship, it’s a great opportunity just to really go out and try things.

Heidi Pickman: So you understand life cycle analysis, you can calculate a carbon footprint, you’ve done a bunch of internships, you’re ready to send out your resume. Your Green MBA is different. Should you be using traditional tactics for finding a job?

In addition to working on sustainability for Duke University, Katie Kross is the author of Profession and Purpose: A Resource Guide for MBA Careers in Sustainability. She interviewed a lot of former students who are working in sustainable careers to find out how they got their jobs.

Katie Kross, Associate Director, Corporate Sustainability Initiative at Duke University: There were two things that kept coming up over and over again about their job search. The first is the power of informational interviews. So many of those practitioners got their jobs as a direct result of informational interviews, which I know sounds sort of mundane but actually this field of practice is so new and so small that having good relationships with people in the industry can really go a long way towards finding a job opportunity, and many of these positions are not posted anywhere publicly. They’re not on the websites. They’re not doing on-campus recruiting. They are positions that job candidates are essentially writing for themselves based on their relationships and their experience. And the second thing that came up over and over again is how many of these practitioners got their job as a direct result of a project that they worked on while they were a student. So whether that’s a class project or an internship or an independent study research project or some other kind of practical project that they worked on while they were a student, they leverage that directly into a job for themselves.

Heidi Pickman: And creativity plays a big part.

Katie Kross, Associate Director, Corporate Sustainability Initiative at Duke University: Really be creative in your networking and in seeking out those opportunities even when that means that you have to write the job description yourself. Conferences are a great networking opportunity. It really helps to read up on not just sustainability news in general but in the industry news and how which particular sustainability topics are affecting the industry that you’re interested in. And be determined, don’t give up.

Heidi Pickman: In addition to being creative in your job search, Ellen Weinreb advises that graduates focus.

Ellen Weinreb, Owner, Sustainable Recruiting: So my one piece of advice is for an MBA student to build on their past experience but identifying a narrow field within sustainability, so let’s say Microlending in China would be something very specific and narrow. They’re interested in organic food marketing because if they are too broad in their focus then they won’t be able to have the kind of creative, interesting, intelligent conversations that actually lead to jobs.

Heidi Pickman: Diversity, creativity, and focus, plus a degree and experience equal more than a job. Katie Kross says we’re at the beginning of a new way of doing business.

Katie Kross, Associate Director, Corporate Sustainability Initiative at Duke University: I think this is a really exciting opportunity for us all and I really do believe that today’s MBAs have an opportunity to be pioneers in this field and change the world of business for the better.

Heidi Pickman: For more information, a transcript of this show or to register for your bi-weekly MBA Podcast, visit MBAPodcaster.com. Join us on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to get the latest news and the insight in the world of business school. This is MBA Podcaster. I’m Heidi Pickman, thanks for listening and be sure to tune in next time when we explore another topic of interest in your quest for an MBA.