The pandemic has challenged all industries in multiple ways. Education has been one of those industries and had to reinvent to survive. This is my experience doing Sustainable Business Strategy at Harvard Business School Online.

Sustainability is about meeting the needs of the present without compromising future generations’ ability to meet their needs.

There are 3 key pillars: environmental, social and economic. In other words, planet, people and profits.

I recommend the 10 Principles on Human Rights and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals in case you’re curious about United Nations approach.

What’s This Program?

The program was intended to become a Strategist for Sustainable Business. That is to say, acquiring the knowledge and tools to become a purpose-driven business leader.

The professor was Rebecca Henderson, a prominent economist and influential professor at Harvard. In fact, she’s one of the world’s most articulate, insightful and persuasive scholars focused on driving large-scale change. Details about Rebecca here.

There were 3 distinctive modules.

Module 1: The Business Case For Action

This was about understanding the business cases for change and what business models created shared value.

On the other hand, it was key to analyse industry disruptions and business uncertainties in addition to create scenario analysis to develop smart strategic options.

We reviewed case studies such as Unilever, Walmart and Transatomic Power.

There was an interesting optional report from the Business & Sustainable Development Commission tackling the global goals importance, opportunities, leadership, sustainable finance and renewing the social contract.

Module 2: Driving Change At Scale

The idea was to understand what purpose-driven firms were and where the success came from.

We also examined the “Wheel of Change” and how business was a key catalyst to solve large global issues such as climate change and income inequality.

Moreover, we analysed cooperative action examples to understand how and why firms cooperated and this was necessary to create change.

We reviewed case studies such as King Arthur Flour, we got the views from Joshua Greene (Faculty Expert) and then we founded a company to simulate an exercise.

Lots of optional materials such as sustainable coffee, fiduciary duty in the 21st century, the truth about palm oil and other sustainability activation toolkits.

As mentioned before, this was a very practical module as we had to create companies and we faced each other. We needed to optimise acquisitions and operations based on a number of constraints that were changing in every round in a limited time. You can imagine the decision-making process!

Our rank reflected the sum of our cash and the market value of the assets that we owned.  I started last: 7/7. I understood my strategies were not working so I adjusted and after couple of rounds I became 1st. Hence my lesson learnt here was to stop being stubborn and change when things were not working.

Module 3: Purpose-Driven Systemic Change

We analysed the investor’s role, including the role of stakeholder management, alternative governance, ESG metrics and impact investing.

On the other hand, we evaluated the role of governments and other institutions in large-scale change and understood why Systems Thinking was necessary.

We reviewed case studies such as Norks Gjenvinning, Calvert and some key notes from influential Faculty Experts such as John Ruggie, John Coates, Jane Nelson and George Serafeim.

Again, there were several optional documents to read such as ESG Corporate Financial Performance (Global Research Institute – DWS), Institutional Quality and Economic Performance of Countries and perhaps the most interesting from my perspective was the Gold’s Costly Dividend in Papua New Guinea.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I learnt multiple business models that companies could use to drive change and understood why purpose driven businesses were particularly well positioned to tackle the world’s biggest problems.

It was also clear to me how to influence management and other key stakeholders on the competitive advantages of being a purpose-driven firm.

Finally, I put a plan in place in terms of how to integrate my values into my work so that I could help transform firms into catalysts for system level change.