Class topics: effects of emerging technologies on stakeholders, including sustainability implications.
Sign Up For Our Newsletter:
Beyond Grey Pinstripes
Georgia Institute of Technology
All Participating Schools
Georgia Institute of Technology
800 West Peachtree St. NW
Atlanta, GA, 30332
United States
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA, 30332
United States
Demographic Information
Number of full-time MBA students (2011):
70
Number of part-time MBA students (2011):
65
Total duration of full-time MBA program:
22 months
MBA faculty (Fall 2010):
103
Females as percent of student body:
31%
Private Sector (86%)
Non-profit (9%)
Government (5%)
Description of MBA Program:
Georgia Tech College of Management has a strong emphasis on social responsibility and sustainable, environmentally friendly business practices, and incorporates these concepts into all aspects the MBA program.
Dean Steve Salbu, a noted business ethicist, views these areas as important niches for the school to fill, predicting that the business world will increasingly embrace sustainability. Our state-of-the-art facility teaches the value of sustainability as one of the first academic buildings to achieve a (LEED™) certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.
"Business Ethics" is a required class for MBA students, and sustainability topics are integrated into the entire program by faculty members who are creating such courses as "Business and the Environment" and organizing symposiums on related issues. Recent NSF grants are funding cutting-edge research in the sustainability arena. Such activities present opportunities for students to learn from researchers and representatives from major companies and public agencies about innovative environmental solutions and business opportunities.
The interdisciplinary Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship (ILE), housed in the College of Management, offers new opportunities for MBA students to explore the concepts of sustainability and social responsibility through the development of interdisciplinary degrees related to sustainability and social responsibility.
The Institute offers MBA students the chance to participate in pro bono consulting projects for non-profit organizations.
The annual Ideas to Serve (12S) business plan competition focuses on social innovations, creativity and entrepreneurship: http://www.ile.gatech.edu/i2s/index.html
Opportunities to work on sponsored projects through the Cowan-Turner Program in Servant Leadership. (http://www.ile.gatech.edu/programs/cowanturner/projects.html ) include such organizations as: African American Student Union, GT Alternative Break Learning Experience, GT Leadership Conference , Humanitarian Logistics Center, Leadership Development in Jordan,, Net Impact MBA Chapter, Student Hospital Connections, Student Leader Retreat and LeaderShape, Women's Resource Center, and Young Kings & Queens Program
The annual IMPACT Speaker Series, held weekly throughout the academic year, frequently highlights values-based business practices through its heavy-hitting lineup of guest lecturers from the corporate community each week during the academic year. Some recent speakers on the topics of ethics, sustainability and social responsibility include: John Wells, CEO of Interface Americas, a leading carpet manufacturer at the forefront of sustainability; Stephen B. Young, global executive director of the Caux Roundtable and author of Moral Capitalism: Reconciling Private Interest with the Public Good; Vice President Al Gore, who discussed the “Inconvenient Truth” about global warming and the environment; and Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and founder of the Grameen Bank.
The Board Fellows Program run by the ILE, prepares Georgia Tech MBA students to be effective civic leaders by serving as non-voting members on Atlanta-area non-profit boards. Students develop awareness of board roles and functions by providing business skills, new insights, and innovative perspectives to the boards on which they serve.
How does the MBA program 'walk the talk' of social and environmental impact?:
The College of Management is committed to incorporating initiatives in social impact, ethics and environmental management in both activities and as part of the curriculum.
Philanthropy is central to our education at the Georgia Tech College of Management. Through volunteering and interacting with the community, we learn leadership, responsibility, and the value of giving back. All philanthropy activities are developed and run by students. These activities include:
• Saint Bernard Project- Over the last four years, MBA students have made 8 trips to Saint Bernard Parish, the county immediately adjacent to the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, to rebuild houses and help with community revitalization after Hurricane Katrina. Our students volunteer through the Saint Bernard Project and have been asked by the organization to help develop specific volunteer opportunities for MBA students.
• Junior Achievement- Every year, students from the MBA Program volunteer with Junior Achievement, an organization that places professionals in schools to teach children about real-life skills.
• Red Cross Blood Drives -Twice a year, students from the MBA program partner with the Red Cross to hold blood drives in our building. Students have studied these blood drives for their Operations Management class, and the College welcomes professionals from the surrounding office buildings to participate in the drive, increasing visibility of our program and our students.
• Pro Bono Consulting- What started as a volunteer project has become a college-recognized course for credit. Every semester, two teams of students take on consulting projects for local non-profit organizations.
• Net Impact Board Fellows- Through the Georgia Tech COM chapter of Net Impact, an organization that promotes sustainability in business, over ten second-year students are placed on local boards of non-profits. On those boards, these students build their leadership skills, take on important projects, and build the visibility of the Georgia Tech brand.
Course Name: Business Ethics
Instructor: Arn Rubinoff
This course is a survey of ethical issues with which the manager must be familiar in order to adequately understand the business environment in which the modern company operates. The course is designed to teach and foster discussion about important topics in ethics (moral problems and ethical duties) and will give the student a formal experience in analyzing how the ethical environment creates a structure (sometimes welcomed, sometimes not) for commercial activity at the firm level. The grading for the course is based upon written and spoken components.
Course Name: Business Strategies for Sustainability
Instructor: Beril Toktay
Environmental product differentiation opens new markets. Green procurement and total quality environmental management significantly reduce input and operating costs. Product innovation and eco-entrepreneurship are ways of doing well while doing good. These are some of the opportunities.
The cost of landfilling in the US is increasing rapidly. Communities are demanding higher standards of air, water and soil quality. European and Japanese legislation on product take-back and waste exports concerns many US manufacturers. Rising fuel prices make fuel-efficiency a competitive factor. Global warming is changing the way governments and businesses need to think about carbon. These are some of the challenges.
This course takes a holistic view of the interaction of businesses with the environment. It outlines reasons why businesses would want to care about environmental issues, introduces environmental assessment and management tools, and visits topics from various business functions. The main topics that will be covered are:
? Relevant domestic and international environmental legislation
? Environmental assessment and management tools
? Corporate environmental programs
? Sustainable development
? Environmental marketing
? Environmental operations
? Environmental stewardship
? Closed-loop supply chains
Current issues such as global warming, energy and e-waste will be discussed in the context of a number of cases.
Course Name: Consumer Behavior
Instructor: Samuel Bond
Ethical ramifications are discussed in almost every class topic.
Course Name: Financial Reporting and Analysis of Technology Firms
Instructor: Charles Mulford
Financial Reporting and Analysis of Technology Firms is taught in three parts. It is in part 3 that the ethics of financial reporting practices is discussed. Two 1 ½ hour sessions (a week of class) is devoted to ethical issues of financial reporting. The topic is dealt with by tallying students’ responses to a questionnaire that has been administered to approximately 200 financial professionals. At issue is the students’ opinions regarding their view of how various transactions have been accounted for. The questionnaire measures whether they view the transaction as having been accounted for well within the boundaries of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), at the limit of GAAP without going beyond them, beyond the limits of GAAP but not considered fraud, or whether they consider the accounting treatment to be fraudulent.
Course Name: Gender, Race, Ethnicity in OB
Instructor: Gail Evans
This course will examine how managers and employees become more effective leaders by understanding the role gender, race and ethnicity plays in the life of the organization. Many of us want to believe that we are objective, however, research has shown us that gender, race, and ethnicity and even the clothes we wear are determinate factors in how we deal with each other in a business environment. In this course, we will examine these differences and attempt to understand the reasons behind the conflicts that arise within a diverse workforce.
When we speak of gender and ethnic issues, we usually discuss them in terms of the problems of the minority group. In this course we will also look at these issues in terms of the way the majority views itself and what effect this has on change within the organization. We will explore how a leader can use an understanding of these divergent styles to enhance both the individual’s and group’s effectiveness. We will go behind the façade of difference into the subtle nuances of interpersonal relationships in an attempt to make each student a more powerful employee, manager or leader.
Course Name: Leadership and Organizational Behavior
Instructor: Nate Bennett
The primary emphasis of this course is on developing an understanding of how to effectively manage and lead in business. Given the increasingly global nature of business, it is essential that the approach taken include an explicit emphasis on social and ethical issues. Additionally, corporate social responsibility - an appreciation of all that is involved in considering simultaneously the needs of people, the planet, and firm profitability - is critical. This material is addressed in the course through the course materials selected as well as the structure of class assignments and discussions.
Course Name: Microfinance
Instructor: Terry Blum
The course explores why and how microfinance operations have grown to provide financial services to poor and low-income people on a sustainable basis. The class brings together advice and best practices from successful practitioners and institutions around the world as well as new technology startups targeting the industry. This course will provide students with an excellent introduction to microfinance as an important development effort in the war against poverty, and it will also serve as an excellent forum to learn about current challenges and debates in the world of microfinance.
Course Name: Operations Management
Instructor: Ravi Subramanian
In our core MBA operations management course, we have two sessions dedicated to sustainability. During these sessions, we discuss how some practices can be both environmentally friendly and more profitable for the firm. We also debate whether it is businesses’ responsibility to undertake environmental initiatives when it is not clear that they are profit maximizing.
Course Name: Strategic Brand Management
Instructor: Koert Van Ittersum
Strategic Brand Management is an advanced MBA elective that addresses important brand decisions faced by an organization. The basic objectives of the course are 1) to increase the understanding of the important issues in planning and evaluating brand strategies; 2) to provide the appropriate theories, models, and tools to make better branding decisions; and 3) to provide a forum for students to apply these principles in a high-tech environment. Particular emphasis is placed on understanding psychological principles at the customer level that will improve managerial decision-making regarding brands. At the end of the course, students should understand the importance of brands, and be knowledgeable about and able to apply instruments to create, monitor and manage brands. Social and ethical issues associated with branding are discussed when appropriate.
Pages
Date: August, 2010
Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen bank and microfinance pioneer, speaks at the College of Management's monthly Impact Speaker Series
Date: September, 2009
David Murphy, CEO of Better World Books, speaks on social entrepreneurship. Better World Books is a global bookstore that harnesses the power of capitalism to bring literacy and opportunity to people around the world. An award-winning social entrepreneurship venture, Better World Books benefits a number of literacy charities around the world.
Date: September, 2010
Donna Callejon, chief business officer of GlobalGiving. Her organization revolutionalized international philanthropic giving by building an efficient and open marketplace that connects people who have community- and world-changing ideas with people who can support them.
Date: February, 2011
Brian Cayce, principal at Gray Ghost Ventures, speaks on social entrepreneurship in the emerging markets. Part of monthly Impact Speaker Series.
Date: October, 2010
Patrick F. Loughlin, Vice President, Environment, Health, Safety, and Quality Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. with a talk on 'In Search of: Sustainability and Growth in a B2B World.'
At a time when energy related issues are so significant—national security, economic development and Green House Gas management—the university can serve as a neutral open forum for their discussion. The goal of the Series is to provide an objective, factual and comprehensive analysis of the Southeast’s energy and power requirements to 2030 and to examine the extent to which clean energy technologies can meet some of these demands.
Date: March, 2011
Bill Bolling, founder and executive director of the Atlanta Community Food Bank, speaks about non-profit business challenges. Part of monthly Impact Speaker Series.
Date: March, 2010
Greg Papadopoulos, co-Author of Citizen Engineer: A Handbook for Socially Responsible Engineering, will speak at the Impact Speaker Series. His talk is entitled: Citizen Engineer: Leading the 21st Century.
Date: September, 2010
Penelope McPhee, president of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, speaks on "Philanthropy: Why It is Right and Proper that Benjamin Franklin's Portrait Appears on the $100 Bill."
Date: January, 2011
David Jernigan, CEO of KIPP Metro Atlanta, speaks at the monthly Impact Speaker Series. KIPP is a non-profit that deals with education in low income areas.
Date: September, 2009
Terry Royer, director of Marketing
for Siemens Energy and Automation
Inc., speaks on energy generation and efficiency.
Type: Business Plan Competition
Date: March, 2010
The I2S(Ideas 2 Serve) is for current Georgia Tech students and recent alumni who have a very early stage product/serve idea or venture concept that is focused on creating a better world. All great ventures and organizations begin with great ideas. The I2S is a competition of ideas; where creativity, imagination, and technology are applied to:
Solving community and social issues (for example reducing the effects of poverty, alleviating hunger, promoting physical and psychological health and wellness); and/or
Sustaining our environment (for example improved water management, improved air and water quality, reduction of the rate of depletion of natural resources, developing alternate sources of energy).
As ideas eventually lead to organizations, to be sustainable, the organizations themselves must be able to generate sufficient income flows to provide returns for investors (for for-profits) as well as to sustain over time the mission of the organization (for for-profits as well as non-profits). Simply put, organizations today need to be focused on the triple bottom line of return on investment economically, environmentally, and socially. In the I2S Competition, teams develop an idea/concept, an initial business model, and a feasibility analysis. The idea must be based on either an innovative approach/technology to solving a social problem or uses technology to sustain the environment.
For seven years the IMPACT Speaker Series has brought highly successful business leaders from a variety of industries to campus to share their experiences and give advice to students and other entrepreneurs on topics ranging from "building a venture around intellectual capital" to "successful entrepreneurship in large organizations."
The weekly series provides Georgia Tech students, alumni, and the Atlanta community an opportunity to network and learn from high tech entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and notable business leaders.
Date: February, 2010
Derreck Kayongo, Founder and Chairman of the Global Soap Project will speak at the Impact Speaker Series.His talk is entitled “From a War Child to a Social Entrepreneur: Crisis can mean opportunity!”
Date: 2010
A bi-semester gathering of students and professionals to discuss matters pertinent to corporate responsibility. Recent discussions have revolved around transportation and urban growth solutions.
Career services incorporates a section in our mandatory career development class that emphasizes the importance of commitment.
We tell students that once they have formally accepted a position they are committed to keeping their word and not rescinding their acceptance if something more lucrative comes along.
We target socially responsible companies who have reputation of being ethical with their employees and customers.
We encourage students to evaluate companies based on these same principals.
Business School Housing? Yes
Number of Faculty: 4
Contact Name: John McIntyre
Contact Email: ciber@mgt.gatech.edu
The GT CIBER, created in 1993, is one of the thirty-three national resource centers of excellence in international business funded by the U.S. Department of Education. It is administratively located in the Georgia Tech College of Management, and also collaborates with the Ivan Allen College.
Our mission as a CIBER is to ensure the long-term international economic competitiveness of the United States through support of research, business education initiatives, and corporate outreach activities.
GT CIBER Activities:
- Funding research in the field of International Business (IB)
- Encouraging the development of IB curricular initiatives
- Hosting conferences, colloquia, and fora related to global business
- Working with the local globally-focused business community
- Facilitating overseas educational opportunities for business students
Business School Housing? Yes
Number of Faculty: 15
Contact Name: Michael Chang
Contact Email: chang@gatech.edu
The Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems enhances Georgia Tech’s research, education, and service missions, and campus operations through leadership, communications, development, and decision making inspired and defined by the principles of susta
Pages
Recent environmental trends, including (1) an expansion of existing command and control directives, (2) the introduction of market-based policy instruments, and (3) the adoption of extended producer responsibility, have created a need for new tools to help managerial decision-making. To address this need, we develop a nonlinear mathematical programming model from a profit-maximizing firm's perspective, which can be tailored as a decision-support tool for firms facing environmental goals and constraints. We typify our approach using the specific context of diesel engine manufacturing and remanufacturing. Our model constructs are based on detailed interviews with top managers from two leading competitors in the medium and heavy-duty diesel engine industry. The approach allows the incorporation of traditional operations-planning considerations—in particular, capacity, production, and inventory—together with environmental considerations that range from product design through production to product end of life. A current hurdle to implementing such a model is the availability of input data. We therefore highlight the need not only to involve all departments within businesses but also for industrial ecologists and business managers to work together to implement meaningful decision models that are based on accurate and timely data and can have positive economic and environmental impact.
This paper analyzes the shareholder value effects of environmental performance by measuring the stock market reaction associated with announcements of environmental performance. We examine the market reaction to two categories of environmental performance. The first category includes 417 announcements of Corporate Environmental Initiatives (CEIs) that provide information about self-reported corporate efforts to avoid, mitigate, or offset the environmental impacts of the firm's products, services, or processes. The second category includes 363 announcements of Environmental Awards and Certifications (EACs) that provide information about recognition granted by third-parties specifically for environmental performance. Although the market does not react significantly to the aggregated CEI and EAC announcements, we find statistically significant market reactions for certain CEI and EAC subcategories. Specifically, announcements of philanthropic gifts for environmental causes are associated with significant positive market reaction, voluntary emission reductions are associated with significant negative market reaction, and ISO 14001 certifications are associated with significant positive market reaction. The difference between the market reactions to the CEI and EAC categories is statistically insignificant. Overall, the market is selective in reacting to announcements of environmental performance with certain types of announcements even valued negatively.
Product and waste take-back is becoming more regulated by countries to protect the environment. Such regulation puts an economic burden on firms, while creating fairness concerns and potentially even missing its primary target: environmental benefits. This research discusses the economic and environmental impacts of extended producer responsibility type of legislation and identifies efficiency conditions. It is shown that the right policy would (i) make producers responsible for their own waste to avoid fairness concerns and (ii) favor eco-design producers to create stronger environmental benefits. Furthermore, the efficiency of take-back systems is also driven by environmental classification of products, industry structure, and end-user willingness to participate in take-back programs.
Recent regulatory and market-driven environmental pressures have fundamentally impacted decision making throughout supply chain systems, from raw material sourcing through processing, use and post-use – including the logistical activities in between. In this paper, we focus on three factors – legislative, economic and social – that have introduced environment-related complexities into supply chain decisions. For each of these factors, we provide examples of how the accompanying complexities can be characterised within decision models in the form of parameters, objectives or constraints. The contribution of this work lies in highlighting that conventional supply chain decision models have to be recast and solved differently to accommodate legislative, economic and social pressures related to the life-cycle environmental impacts of products or technologies.
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) legislation focuses on the life-cycle environmental performance of products and has significant implications for management theory and practice. In this paper, we examine the influence of EPR policy parameters on product design and coordination incentives in a durable product supply chain. We model a manufacturer supplying a remanufacturable product to a customer over multiple periods. The manufacturer invests in two design attributes of the product that impact costs incurred by the supply chain—performance, which affects the environmental impact of the product during use, and remanufacturability, which affects the environmental impact post-use. Consistent with the goals of EPR policies, the manufacturer and the customer are required to share the environmental costs incurred over the product's life cycle. The customer has a continuing need for the services of the product and optimizes between the costs of product replacement and the costs incurred during use. We demonstrate how charges during use and post-use can be used as levers to encourage environmentally favorable product design. We analyze the impact of supply chain coordination on design choices and profit and discuss contracts that can be used to achieve coordination, both under symmetric and asymmetric information about customer attributes.
Remanufactured products do not always cannibalize new product sales. To minimize cannibalization and create additional profits, managers need to understand how consumers value remanufactured products. This is not a static decision and should be re-evaluated over the entire product life cycle. While managers have a responsibility to maximize profits for the firm, this is not necessarily equivalent to maximizing new product sales. A portfolio that includes remanufactured products can enable firms to reach additional market segments and help block competition from new low-end products or third-party remanufacturers.
 |
 |
 |
 |