Global Warming fails to heat up Harvard Business School

I just found the very first thing I ever wrote about climate change and the environment. It was 1989 and I was just starting my second year at Harvard Business School. And - surprise, surprise - it's a rant about how HBS was not taking the subject seriously. A portent of my future career path, perhaps, though I didn't know it at the time.

I spent the summer of 1989, between my two years at Harvard Business School, reading Jack Kerouak and Hunter Thompson, and driving around North America. 16,000 miles of cities and national parks, highways and dirt tracks, stadiums and speakeasies. The evidence I saw of rapid environmental degradation shocked me; although what I wrote when I got back to Boston was about the curriculum at HBS - how blind it was to the environment - it might equally well have been about US business in general.

This was the first time I put down on paper some of the concerns that still animate me today. Back in 1989, it didn't feel like I had put my finger on the business mega-trend of the following century. I was just bugged by something that felt... wrong. Thirty years later, here we are: still fighting the same battle, but on a much wider front, with even higher stakes - but now with so many powerful allies.

Anyway, here is the piece, in all its self-important, student glory. Enjoy...

"Power stations in the desert spew out plumes of unscrubbed effluent; mountain-sides cleared of trees erode into chocolate-colored streams; trucks belch smoke so dense it hangs in clouds over the road; housing developments spread like weeds across the country; pollutant foam floats in thick rafts below waterfalls in the wilderness.

"This is not Brazil, Malaysia, Eastern Europe or any of the other countries we stereotype as being unconcerned with the environment: these are common sights in America. And it would not be realistic to hope that now a certain level of public awareness of environmental issues has been achieved, these problems will go away; instead as quickly as some problems are recognized and solved, new ones arise.

It would be incorrect to assume that environmental damage is an inevitable by-product of America's enjoyable and rightly-envied consumer society

"It would be incorrect, though convenient, to blame each of these occurrences on a criminal or cynical infringement of existing, enlightened legislation. It would also be incorrect to assume that environmental damage is an inevitable by-product of America's enjoyable and rightly-envied consumer society; that is simply an excuse for inaction.

"Maintaining that every individual has a responsibility to help solve these problems, for instance by recycling waste, is no longer an extreme position; yet it is beyond doubt that it is industry's practices which result in a large part of the pollution. The environment will be an increasingly important business issue throughout our working lives, but how does Harvard Business School's first-year curriculum help prepare us to deal with it?

We practiced communicating thousands of sackings but no environmental disasters

"Production Operations Management ignored the problem of waste disposal; Business, Government and the International Economy didn't cover international environmental efforts (such as debt-for-rain-forests swaps or the "30% Club" [a 1980 initiative to cut SO2 pollution by 30% by 1993]); Marketing didn't look at the success of ethical investment funds or environmentally friendly products; and in Management Communications we practiced communicating thousands of sackings but no environmental disasters. Oddly enough, Managerial Economics proved to be the most environmentally aware course in the first year (remember the foxes and rabbits?). Control [accountancy] was a close second with its exhaustive examination of the finances of wind generation plants.

The one case involving a chemical spill was more to do with avoiding law-suits than with the environment.

"The course which could easily have addressed the environment gave it only the most tangential backward glance: Ethics. The one case involving a chemical spill was more to do with avoiding law-suits than with the environment. What we learned in this course was that one viable ethical paradigm for business was to consider managers as merely the agents of company owners; from there it is a short step to condoning anything that maximizes returns.

"But this is not an acceptable position where the environment is concerned for several reasons. Legislation is not perfect, since long delays may occur before suspected problems are addressed (more than fifteen years in the case of ozone depletion); enforcement may be so weak as to be easily ignored; and it may even be more profitable to pay fines than to obey the law.

"I am not suggesting that we should be taught that as soon as we are in positions of responsibility we should adopt any and every environment-friendly practice proposed, irrespective of how uncompetitive it may be. Nor would I enjoy a token "love-in" class in which we all publicly profess this approach as our goal, but leave privately unconvinced of the need for action. But surely it should be possible for a few cases in the first-year curriculum to reflect society's growing concern with the quality of our environment, and the impact of this concern on business.

I would hate to think that it may one day be classmates of mine who lobby for the continuation of practices which are the proven causes of massive and unnecessary environmental deterioration.

"As Harvard Business School graduates we will one day have great power to effect or resist change in this arena. I would hate to think that it may one day be classmates of mine who lobby for the continuation of practices which are the proven causes of massive and unnecessary environmental deterioration. But given the total omission of these issues from our courses, I have no cause to be optimistic."

Go young Michael! Now, what's the thing with the hair?

This piece first appeared in Harbus News, the student newspaper of Harvard Graduate School of Business, on 18 September 1989.