COURSE CONTRIBUTION TO PROGRAM
Organizations of all kinds are faced with the challenge of environmental and social sustainability, often urged on by consumers, regulators, investors, and other stakeholders. Firms in particular find it necessary to rethink their relations with society. These trends toward sustainability present both opportunities and risks for firms. For some, this shift offers possibilities for new products and services, for reinventing old ones, for solving problems in new ways, and for reaping economic and reputation benefits from pursuing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategies. Others, however, face real struggles with far from obvious solutions.
As these challenges of sustainability and stakeholder relations are increasingly central to business strategy, marketing professionals have a key role to play. Today, marketing's role goes beyond traditional marketing tasks and can help with transforming firms, markets, and the political and social environment. The Business in Society course analyzes where marketing fits in this task of translating real-world challenges into future business opportunities and of creating the change needed, at the pace needed, for a sustainable world.
Course Learning Objectives
The principal goal of this course is to equip you with the concepts, frameworks and tools needed to effectively manage the challenge of sustainability in your future career. Specifically, the course pursues three overarching learning objectives:
1) To develop your systems thinking. We examine the environmental, economic, social, political, and organizational drivers of sustainability and CSR and see how they interact.
2) To assess strategies for sustainable business. We evaluate the business case for sustainability, both in the opportunities it presents and in its uncertainties and limitations. We also explore organizational hurdles to sustainability strategies and ways to overcome them.
3) To equip you with tools and frameworks to meaningfully reflect on your own choices, as a manager and entrepreneur in your future career and as a consumer, on how you want to lead, participate in, contribute to, or possibly resist the changes around sustainability and CSR.
