Dear PRME community,
As 2020 is coming to a close, we can all think back on a year that has been filled with unprecedented challenges and uncertainty. This has not been a year of ‘business-school-as-usual.’ We are facing deep and urgent environmental, social and economic crises globally, all exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, itself a symptom of unsustainable environmental practices. We have witnessed a massive transition to an online reality and lockdown periods with huge implications on our professional and personal lives. We have been forced to learn, teach and improvise with new technologies in ways and with a speed that we had never imagined.
2020 has opened novel ways of thinking about the role of higher education and the importance of responsible management education. Today, approximately 3 million students are enrolled at PRME’s more than 860 + Signatory schools around the world. Of course, this does not mean that all the 3 million students are actively engaged in responsible management education, but it provides an idea of PRME’s potential collective reach to engage future leaders in understanding the importance and the frameworks needed to create a more just and sustainable world. The pandemic’s necessary social and physical distancing has opened our eyes for the ease of engaging students and colleagues from ‘the other side of the world’ in knowledge exchange and debates. In 2021, with the working title ‘PRME Global Students,’ we will start to explore how students at PRME Signatory schools may engage in virtual network activities via PRME, to further stimulate sustainable development.
Throughout 2020, it has been wonderful to see the continued engagement and support from everyone in the PRME Chapters, PRME Working Groups, PRME Champions, and in all the work in committees, sub-committees, conferences, webinars, and meetings. Whether this has been happening in your schools, across schools, in your regions or across the globe, it is all this work in and around the classroom that makes up PRME.
As we enter 2021, PRME is firmly grounded in its ‘re-set’ with a new PRME Board, a revised MoU for PRME Chapters, a new PRME Global Chapter Council, new regional Chapters in emergence, a new business model, a new global website, and in process towards a renewed and emboldened engagement with UN Global Compact. And all the exciting events and activities that are occurring at local, regional and global levels. 2021 will be a year to support the implementation of and follow-up on the decisions from 2020 as well as a year where we will launch new initiatives and offer new opportunities to engage for PRME Signatories around the world.
It is a privilege to work as Head of PRME, the United Nation’s largest initiative on responsible management education. As we are all working to recover from the pandemic at a professional and a personal level, it is truly inspiring to see how PRME Signatory schools continue to develop national and international educational practices with the purpose of creating a more sustainable, more just and more resilient world for the future.
I look forward to advancing PRME with you on an exciting journey in 2021!
I wish you a Happy New Year!
Mette Morsing
What's the tone from the top?
Over the past four months I have had the pleasure of engaging in aspirational panels with PRME Signatory Deans, in inspiring ‘PRME Deans Dialogue’ interviews, and in conversations with Deans on the PRME Board. Last year I also interviewed PRME Signatory Deans, as I prepared the PRME Strategy Review 2019. Having navigated in the field of responsible management, CSR and sustainable development for almost twenty years, I cannot NOT note the change of the Deans’ approach over these many years. A remarkable change is occurring. Not just over the past ten years, but more so over the past 3-5 years. Deans are so much more outspoken and goal-oriented with regards to the need for their schools and universities to step up and address urgent global challenges such as inequalities and climate change.
Irrespective if this is due to students putting a demand on educational programs, accreditation agencies, ranking bodies, governments or business urging business school Deans to focus on sustainable development - it is happening. Sustainable development is entering strategies, policies and curriculum. And I am not naïvely saying that an increased focus on sustainable development in business school strategies and policies means that business schools are immediately redirecting all of their resources and attention to actually act on such promises and deliver on aspirations. But I am saying that prominent Deans are putting a visible emphasis on sustainable development (e.g. Walsh, forthcoming). We should follow that trend with great curiosity, push and hope.
While this is promising, I am fully aware that as a Dean who is signing up to PRME, you are likely to already support the Six Principles of PRME and to have your school, your board, your provost and other significant stakeholders, supporting a trajectory toward sustainable development in education, research, and partnership programs. And while I am aware that there are still many business schools and universities working out how to define their schools’ engagement in the SDG journey, it may still be inspirational to hear what some of the experienced Deans have to say about that journey.
From the North and the South, I have myself been very inspired to hear business school Deans agree on a new need for at least three important targets to reinforce business school students in their understanding of their responsibility in the world:
To educate students to be responsible citizens, and to state that the world is not there for us to take advantage of, but we are there to take care of and advance the world. Hence, the ‘for’ the world emphasis. As one Dean said very precisely: "at the heart of our institutional ambition is to create not the best leaders in the world of the world but the best leaders for the world and society"
To educate students "although many future leaders may come from privilege, it is important that they care about all demographics and thus build institutions that care.” Businesses are powerful and perhaps too powerful in some areas of the world, say more Deans, and business schools have a big role to play to develop the right kind of moral leadership to accommodate for business being more inclusive. Driving a good business for the purposeful betterment of us all demands an educational system that “implies ethics, implies environmental consciousness, implies balance, implies being a responsible corporate citizen to a large number of different segments.”
To educate students to ‘put yourself in the place of the stranger’. Businesses are navigating in undefined territories with new opportunities and risks. Being able to ‘sense’ how other people and unknown issues may emerge and to ‘listen’ to new concerns, and accordingly, new opportunities are deemed new core skills by Deans these days. I think empathy is a core skill to master as a human being. But can I ask you: when did you first hear that from a Business School Dean?
Something new is looming. And some of this is new tones from the Dean's Desk. In January 2021, we will release a new ‘PRME Deans Readings’ for you to be inspired by what Deans are reading and finding inspiration from these days.
Take care.
Mette
Coordinated Action: PRME and UNGC Strategy
Over the past month, PRME has been invited to be part of the UN Global Compact’s Strategy Working Group. This implies that I am engaging in a number of highly informative and inspirational discussions with colleagues on how to advance the value proposition of the UN Global Compact in future activities. Of course, I see how PRME can develop into a more explicit part of the UNGC value proposition, in the same way as I see how UNGC can become a more explicit part of the PRME value proposition. The plan is, that after an intensive two-month process lead by BCG Consultants, the UN Global Compact will present the results of the strategy process in December 2020.
At the same time, we have our own strategy process in PRME. One of the main ambitions with the new PRME strategy is exactly to explore how PRME and UN Global Compact may strengthen and develop new ties. Accordingly, our strategy process unfolds hand-in-hand with UNGC’s process but at a little slower pace to provide us the advantage of leveraging on the synergies with our colleagues. Currently, we are developing a plan for how to make the PRME strategy process inclusive and transparent to be presented to the PRME Board on November 30.
If there is one little beam of light in the midst of the dire COVID-19 context, it is that we are likely to arrive on the other side of the pandemic in a society where business schools and universities together are much more inclined to explore collective and inclusive action in the new and enlarged online reality. Where only a few months ago it seemed too overwhelming and costly to take a group of business leaders, faculty, and students on a joint world tour to explore and feel for themselves true global value chain challenges related to climate change, inequality, and labor rights, from both Global North and Global South perspectives, today we have all become accustomed to engaging beyond our comfort zones with new communities, geographies, and time-zones. Let us regard these new experiences as a fertile platform for our own future joint PRME and UN Global Compact action.
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing
What's new with PRME?
I hope you are all well and will stay safe as you are returning to the physical or virtual classroom reality, re-engaging with the students.
With this message, I would like to provide a brief update on some of the activities and plans, we in the PRME Secretariat are working on these days – which of course already involves many of you! I have met with many of you, and you have generously invited me to your meetings, workshops, and other inspiring events. Several of you encouraged me to write this brief update.
It has now been five months since I took on the job as Head of PRME. This first period has been exciting and energizing. I arrived during the COVID-19 pandemic, in a time where management schools and universities are being radically challenged and busy adjusting to the new realities, I want to thank you all for welcoming me so warmly and energetically. I have received a great number of innovative ideas, suggestions, and input and much enthusiasm for how we can grow and strengthen PRME together into the future. So, it is with great optimism and energy that I am embarking on this essential journey ahead of us.
First, I am delighted that we now have the PRME Board in place, and that we have had the first meeting in August. It is a board that expresses a strong wish to be engaged and to assist PRME on our journey ahead. The PRME Board ToR (Terms of Reference) is currently being developed and the plan is for the Board to approve it during the next meeting in November. Hereafter, the details will be published on the PRME Secretariat website. Central for the board is to develop the PRME Strategy. With input from key stakeholders, I am working on developing the first contours of a proposal for the PRME Strategy to be discussed at the Board meeting on November 30. This proposal is based on the strategic reviews from 2016 and 2019 and input from the community.
Upon board members wish to be an actively involved board, a number of them are now engaged in some concrete activities: reviewing the PRME Chapter governance structure, setting up a process to have community input as we develop PRME strategy, exploring how PRME and UN Global Compact can build stronger ties and action, clarifying PRME value proposition (including how do we account for our success), exploring how to engage students more actively in PRME work, investigating how to make a PRME business model for the future as well as helping to develop new regional PRME Chapters. And, of course, several engaged individuals from the PRME community have generously volunteered to contribute and lead much of this work.
Today I am so very pleased that we decided to go ahead and make the PRME Global Forum 2020 a virtual reality. The 2020 Virtual PRME Global Forum was held in June and was the largest PRME Global Forum to date with more than 1,000 participants, including a successful Eastern Hemisphere session to accommodate for the time zone differences. Again: a big warm thank you to all of you who participated so actively on the stage, in the chat, as participants, and afterward in sending us many positive communications about the event. We are sending out a brief PRME Global Forum Survey to you all these days, inviting for your assessment and your ideas for PRME Global Forum 2021. Your input is highly appreciated.
The 1st Global Chapter Forum will be held on October 2. Here PRME Chapter Chairs take a lead on conversations related to our work in the context of COVID-19. You are of course all warmly welcome. You may also have noted how we are inviting a new Chapter each month to host and organize a one-hour PRME Chapter Talk on a particularly challenging topic related to responsible management education and the SDGs. The idea came out of consultation with Chapters where interest was expressed to hear more regional differences and experiences across the PRME community. In the same spirit, we have established a new video series: ‘PRME Deans Dialogue’. Every month, a Dean from a PRME signatory school is invited for a short ‘fireside chat’ style with me on a theme of their own choice, that is relevant for the PRME community. In this first round, I will invite the Deans of the current Chapter Chairs’ schools to the conversation. I am excited to see how the PRME Champions have launched the PRME Blueprint for SDG Integration into Curriculum, Research and Partnerships, which is a practical resource with concepts and frameworks, including the PRME SDG Compass, to support faculty in business schools in contributing to and achieving the SDG agenda. The current Champion cycle is now working systematically to provide content from schools to make it truly serve as a repository for inspiration and best practices globally.
Those of you who engage in social media will have noted how we are engaging the PRME community in a ‘two-way communication strategy’. The idea is to engage the PRME community more actively in PRME communications, and for example, we invite every month a faculty from a PRME signatory school to be the PRME Twitter Voice. The purpose is to air different regional perspectives on PRME-related work and share them with the community. In the same spirit, students from the oikos International network have been invited to develop a strategy for the PRME Instagram account. We are in dialogue with the PRiMEtime Blog and other PRME communication channels to assist with new ideas over the coming months. The PRME BOOK is coming on well and will be published by Routledge. We have received most of the manuscripts, and I am excited to see how it is progressing into a timely and highly relevant book about PRME. As you will know, the purpose is to present the achievements and aspirations of the PRME community to a wider global audience.
Finally, we are happy to have introduced the new PRME website. The website is key for PRME. It is the central infrastructure where we keep each other informed about our progress and action. Central to the website, is that now all Chapters Chairs (Working Groups to come) have access to their own Chapter pages on the website and are able to upload information on governance, share reports, and update their respective calendars themselves. This has been an important request from the community. We are aware that it will take some time till the website’s full potential is explored and engaged and till all information from the community is uploaded on a regular basis. But it will be good.
A lot more is going on in the PRME Secretariat, and of course even a lot more is going on in PRME signatory schools, PRME Chapters, PRME Working Groups and PRME Champions - and the wider PRME community. I encourage you to keep yourselves informed on the PRME Secretariat website, but also on the local websites that some PRME Chapters and PRME Working Groups have established. As we do not have all the information on the PRME Secretariat website yet.
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing
System-thinking. The new normal in management schools?
The pandemic has surfaced vocabulary that in many management school contexts sounded solemn and somewhat ‘altmodisch’ only a few months ago: system-thinking, solidarity, humanity, inequality and empathy. Today, these words are regarded relevant, urgent and necessary to discuss in those (virtual) classrooms filled with future leaders. As a reflection of this new turn, ‘system-thinking’ was one of the most frequently used words at the sessions I joined at the recent virtual Academy of Management 2020 Conference. System thinking is basically an appreciation of how one part of a system is interdependent on all parts of the system. And that changing one part of a system may affect other parts or the system as a whole in ways that are sometimes predictable and sometimes not. Fundamentally, system-thinking in the context of business and management education, is a way of appreciating that business is one among many parts that depend on each other and that together form larger systems on which they depend, and which depend on them. While this may seem pretty basic as a principle, it brings a high degree of complexity in practice, and it is not always an easily conveyed message in a classroom with a focus on toolkits and frameworks in siloed disciplines.
But the pandemic is showing the necessity of system-thinking in practical reality and bringing the need to understand how business is an integrated part of society in complex systems, where business inextricably depends on society and society on business. The pandemic has shown the need to set aside disciplinary differences and the upside of global agreements on how to best navigate our societies together through the crisis. Our business school students are witnessing how free-market actors are now asking governments for economic support, and how political leaders are being applauded for asking business to help society in new ways, including calling on industry to transform production in support of overcoming the crisis. They are witnessing how old political decisions to commercialize public health are now putting health at risk for entire populations. The global crisis demonstrates that by coordinating our efforts across regional, disciplinary and many other boarders, we will enhance the likelihood of overcoming it faster. Our students have over the past six months very concretely witnessed how solidarity and empathy at work is not ‘cheap talk’ but for many individuals and families the very reason they are still alive. They have experienced system-thinking in practice where the individual parts of the global society are interdependent and that by helping and protecting each other, all parts of society are more likely to prosper. This includes business. After all, we are in this together.
Some management schools have integrated system-thinking in the educational programs and in the way examinations, project work, and, for example, capstone assignments are designed. Here students are asked to explore how business and society may serve each other in the long-term. It is a big and exciting challenge how management schools will make system-thinking ‘the new normal’ in business programs, in a way that reaches even outside the traditional management disciplines and integrates knowledge from the natural and technical sciences and humanities.
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing
Re-thinking the role of higher education: balancing ‘Bildung’ and ‘Ausbildung’ *
In a world that is searching for how to recover better and a university system that is severely challenged in a global pandemic, now seems to be a good moment to re-think the purpose of the “traditional” University. How can we educate responsible leaders that have the skills and the mindset to address urgent problems of climate change, rising inequality and disregard for human rights? It is often said that we already have the technologies and the skillset (i.e. via the ‘Ausbildung’) needed to solve these global challenges but we have not yet the global governance structures and the mindset (i.e. the Bildung) that enable us to actually do it. How do we develop educational programs and systems that enable a bridging of skillset and mindset to advance responsible leaders?
While much focus is rightly oriented to educating for an unknown future, sometimes we can also find inspiration in ideals from the past. One example of a university ideal has for long been the Humboldtian model of higher education, with its central notions of ‘Bildung’ and ‘Ausbildung’ to emphasize the dual role of higher education. The noble idea is to educate students to become world citizens with a holistic outlook, who are autonomous individuals developing their own reasoning powers to decide between right and wrong (Bildung), while at the same time providing them with more specific professional skills required through schooling (Ausbildung).
“There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life.” (quoted in Profiles of educators: Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) by Karl-Heinz Günther (1988), doi:10.1007/BF02192965)
This noble aim seems of significant relevance for the Sustainable Development Goals. To address complex global challenges, there is a need for responsible managers to have not only the right professional toolkit but also to be able to engage in a systems-thinking mindset that can put together pieces in novel ways with a regard for longterm development.
In a pandemic-struck world with an alarming rise in unemployment, today, many students are looking to develop a professional skillset that can provide them with a job despite the circumstances. This has brought a renewed demand for ‘Ausbildung’.
Only a few months into the pandemic, business is already offering a helping hand to educate students with relevant skillsets to enter professional jobs. At a fast pace, a number of companies are developing their own university-equivalent educational programs. Google is now offering a new professional career certificate on digital skills that can be completed within six months at the cost of a monthly fee of USD 49. Prior experience and higher education are not prerequisites, and Google hiring managers say they will treat the program as equivalent to four-year degrees and consider favorably their students for the future workforce. LinkedIn, Microsoft and National Retail Federation (NRF) have similar low-cost educational offerings, and the message is clear: the lack of a university degree is no longer the obstacle to a skilled job. Business is offering a relevant and inexpensive education option to prepare students for an ever-transforming digital job market that also promises high economic opportunities.
This is a promising development for youth and prospective students and will allow for low-income populations and minority groups who may have found access to university programs difficult for a number of reasons.
However, it is important to understand how the focus in these educational programs appears to be specifically on Ausbildung. These programs will deliver focused training for specific types of jobs. This is good news, but there’s a caveat. These programs are not designed to educate global citizens. For this purpose, we look to the Management School and the University. We need management schools to engage in educating students who are able to embrace a broad multi-perspective both on the organization as a whole and on the role of the organization in society. Management schools play an urgent role in developing new ways of engaging students in rethinking the social impact of the processes, products and services delivered by market actors, and importantly, to think of themselves as change agents for longterm sustainable development. Management schools need to continuously redefine and nurture their expertise on Bildung to educate world citizens, who will understand how to integrate the Sustainable Development Goals into their daily decision-making.
So, one central question lingers: how can management schools find the right balance between Bildung and Ausbildung to develop responsible leaders? This is not a trivial question.
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing
* Ausbildung refers to the role of higher education to educate and train students in specific professional skills, whereas Bildung refers to education and training of students to become autonomous individuals with a world citizen mindset.
Racial equality Is not an ‘add-on’ in higher education
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends” Martin Luther King (1965)
The killing of George Floyd has brought a new global attention to the conspicuous racism that millions of black individuals are exposed to everyday. But it has also raised attention to the everyday implicit systemic racism that informs and legitimizes racism to continue and in some communities even thrive. It is a racism that is so deep-seated in our institutions that it has become a norm and is taken for granted in ways where its unacceptable scope and negative impact goes unnoticed by even ‘good-hearted’ people.
Let me echo the words of the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, “my position on racism is crystal clear: this scourge violates the UN Charter and debases our core values. Every day, in our work across the world, we strive to do our part to promote inclusion, justice, dignity and combat racism in all its manifestations”. Yet, the Secretary-General also realizes that the world is very far from the target. He has called for an action plan to engage a focused debate on how to fight racism.
Now is the moment for higher education to do the same. Because, unfortunately, systemic racism is also happening in higher education. In fact, some say that higher education is a big part of the problem. That higher education is re-producing the silent systemic racism that is happening in society instead of challenging it. We like to think of universities as racially just and inclusive institutions working to educate youth to create a better world, but research shows again and again a systemic oppression of people of other color than white. It is time for academe to move beyond the sterile comfortable language of ‘diversity and inclusion’ and inform, first ourselves, and then our students about the history and prevalence of racism around the world. And how the silence of decent and nice white people perpetuates racist systems that redound to their benefit. It is difficult to make true gains in the former without the latter.
If we believe that management schools and universities are among the most influential institutions in the world to set the standards and create the mindsets for responsible leadership in our organizations, then our deans, chairs, chancellors and senior administrators need to have a racially and culturally literate leadership. Because it is a leadership challenge to fight the structural nature of race inequality with its prejudices, stereotypes, and unconscious biases, which must be debated and integrated into policies and processes at institutional level. If any global institution ought to show a first leadership on racial equality, it is higher education.
Warm regards,
Mette Morsing