Managing Responsibly: Sustainability, Ethics, and Leadership

We will explore the context and importance of managing responsibly and how it relates to sustainability, responsibility, and ethics. Adopting a systemic perspective, we will also look into what kinds of competences managers might need to develop responsible management practices.

After an introduction of the roots of (un)sustainability, we will have a look at concepts of sustainability, such as social, environmental and economic dimensions, and the importance of time. We will then focus on sustainability in a business context by looking at prominent management tools, such as impact assessment, footprinting, and life-cycle management.

We will explore the roots of responsible business practices and different approaches to responsibility in organizations, such as corporate social responsibility, social entrepreneurship, or corporate citizenship. We will then look at typical management applications such as stakeholder management and corporate social performance.

We will look at behavioural ethics and moral philosophy as main approaches to business ethics. These will then be applied to address moral issues, and to develop practices for acting ethically in challenging situations. We will also learn how to apply common ethics management instruments, such as ethics hotlines, codes of ethics, or ethics training.

In this week you will self-select groups of people with similar responsible management issues and tasks to discuss coping approaches. You will also pick an area of professional interest (e.g. strategy, entrepreneurship, organization, operations, supply chain, human resources, marketing and communication, international management, accounting, finance) to further explore and to innovate responsible management practices in the professional context.

This last week of the course will be dedicated to the preparation for real-life challenges of managing responsibly and responsible innovation. We will learn how to critically reflect upon and challenge the status quo; to attend to systemic complexity, power struggles, paradoxes and inertia; and to translate these considerations into transformative action.