Like most business school students, Gui Deng Say didn’t set out to change the world. After graduating from the National University of Singapore with a degree in environmental engineering, the 27-year-old decided to stay on and take a Master’s degree in International Management.
Because Singapore is a member of CEMS, a global alliance of business schools, Say was able to divide his second year of study between two other CEMS campuses, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Paris, or HEC, and the London School of Economics. At HEC, Say studied for a Real Estate certificate, and seemed destined for a fast-track career in international property development. But thanks to a chance encounter at the CEMS graduation ceremony he is now working for the Grameen Bank.
“I realised that I will have my whole life to pursue my career,” Say said in an interview. “I thought I should try something really different. And what I’ve learned from my work here is a very different approach to what we were taught in business school. It’s a far more simple and down-to-earth way of doing things. And it’s very effective.”
According to Thomas Bieger, chairman of CEMS and president of the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, business schools and the nonprofit sector have much to teach each other.
“In the aftermath of the world financial crisis, business schools came in for a lot of criticism,” he said. “Some people argued we were co-responsible for the crisis, because we had been teaching the wrong methods, and not paying enough attention to questions of ethics and sustainability.”
“Actually our faculty have always been interested in corporate social responsibility,” Dr Bieger said. “And we have always encouraged our students to pay attention to what happens to the employees of a company, and to what happens to the local communities. But we felt that we had to improve our efforts — and to give those efforts more visibility.”
So at the end of last year, CEMS, which had already forged partnerships with more than 70 corporations from the pharmaceutical giant Astra-Zeneca and Google to Shell and Statoil and Zurich insurance, inaugurated its first “social partnerships.”
Like the corporate partners, social partners will be involved in shaping the curriculum, advising on admissions and in some cases actually teaching or developing courses. “We don’t want passive partners,” said Kevin Titman, a spokesman for the CEMS head office based at HEC.
Although the group hopes to eventually include a dozen social partners, so far they have formalised relationships with three: CARE, the international aid organisation; Fairtrade International, which campaigns for the rights of producers and farmers; and the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, which aims to improve cross-cultural understanding. A fourth partnership, with Transparency International, the anti-corruption organisation, is expected to be announced soon.
The new social partners will all be given seats on the CEMS governing body, and, like their corporate counterparts, have privileged access to recruiting CEMS students for internships and as graduates. But while the corporate partners pay $31,000, a year for membership, the social partners will not be charged.
Founded in 1988 as the Community of European Management Schools, CEMS began with just four members: HEC Paris, the Bocconi University in Milan, ESADE in Barcelona, and the University of Cologne. But in recent years the group has expanded far beyond the boundaries of Europe, now comprising 26 member schools including Tsinghua University in China, Keio in Japan, the Graduate School of Management at St Petersburg University, the Koc University Graduate School of Business in Turkey and the Fundacao Getulio Vargas-EAESP in Brazil.
Thomas Bieger said it is precisely the desire to work across national and cultural boundaries that sets CEMS students apart. “Although many of our schools are the best in their respective countries, and are considered quite selective, when we recruit students we tend to focus less on measures like GMAT scores and more on looking for students with the highest cultural sensitivity,” Bieger said.
Pernille Son Paulsen, a native of Haderslav in Denmark who graduated from CEMS last year, did her undergraduate degree in business, language and culture at the Copenhagen Business School. “I spent my third year in Peru, where I wrote my bachelor’s thesis about the impact of the Fairtrade movement on the country’s coffee growers.”
“One thing I noticed was that although Peru had a lot of export industries, not just coffee but also mining and minerals, all the value-added portion happened outside of Peru,” she said. Although Paulsen’s languages are Danish, English and Spanish, she spent her final term at the Rotterdam School of Management, where her Master’s studies focussed on “questions about global governance.”
Paulsen currently works as an analyst at Fairtrade headquarters in Bonn. She says that forging formal partnerships with social enterprises “will change the mix of people who choose to apply to CEMS,” making the schools more attractive to students like her, who seek to go beyond the traditional focus on the corporate bottom line.
Apart from access to an idealistic cohort of young people, what do the social partners hope to gain from their involvement?
Robert Glasser is secretary general of CARE, based in Geneva. “Our relationship grew out of conversations between some of our directors in Paris and the CEMS council,” he said in an interview. “For us it offered the chance to try and interest some of the brightest students in the world to consider alternatives to a traditional business career.”
“We get phone calls all the time from mid-level executives, very successful people who want to change their careers. It’s like a gap in their souls isn’t being filled. This gives us a chance to reach these people when they are still young.”
Paulsen’s experiences at CEMS and at Fairtrade have led her to believe she may not have to choose between doing good and doing well. “Even conventional businesses are beginning to think more about sustainability,” she said.