Management Education: How Can We Develop a Generation of Business Leaders to Act for the Common Good?

In the last decade the number of corporations that have started to pay attention to corporate social and environmental responsibility has significantly increased (Hollender and Fenichell 2004, Edwards 2005, Benioff and Southwick 2004). However, given the dimensions of our planetary challenge, there is still an insufficient number of business leaders who have shown their willingness to champion initiatives that could have a positive impact on communities and on the environment. As observed by Campbell (2006) and Waddock (2008), the drivers for introducing and implementing corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives are people, individual leaders, and not ‘organizations’.