Read the Signals: Building Your CSR Program in China

By: Omar Romero-Hernandez, Lecturer & Senior Research Advisor

Over the past year, a series of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) issues – including, but not limited to, human rights violations – have kept China in the international headlines. These incidents have served as a booster for foreign and domestic companies to expand upon or implement new CSR programs in China.

Many managers inside transnational companies are eager to develop CSR programs that can be implemented at their China-based factories, but don’t know where to start.  Perhaps they felt inspired but then became confused as to whether or not their established, North American approach to sustainability would apply in China… and then grew overwhelmed.

During a recent trip to China, I had the opportunity to interact with high-level decision makers from several industry sectors, including metal mechanics, computing, beverages, and service providers. During my visit, which was geared towards developing and incorporating insights into my Corporate Sustainability teaching at Haas, I observed that most CSR initiatives in China center around awareness-raising of issues, as opposed to sustainability as value creation (the most common US-based approach).  Not all executives in China are familiar with the term “CSR”, but herein lies the opportunity: they are all aware of the need to tackle environmental issues and avoid the human rights violations that may damage their company’s reputation and brand value abroad.

For those wanting to take action and build a strong CSR program in China, I recommend starting by asking the following basic questions:

1. Has your (US-based) company defined a differentiated CSR strategy for your global partners? Where might your China-based CSR projects align with the corporate sustainability strategies already in place?
2. Have you mapped and then engaged stakeholders to assess needs at the local level, in China? While your employees in and around Shenzen may have a high need for education, NGOs around Guangzou may emphasize the treatment of migrant workers, while local citizens of another community may be concerned about access to safe drinking water.
3. What synergies can you build between your own sustainability goals and those of the Chinese government? This is a critical question, as the government has the global influence and the cash to quickly embrace strategic projects.  Most companies I  visited reported that, to this point, they are constantly aware of government signals published in national, provincial and county level statements.

Traditionally, the government has encouraged corporate responsibility in China to revolve primarily around charitable or philanthropic projects. Last year, however, private-sector opportunities came to light as the Chinese government stated its clear goal to improve access to and quality of social services, and particularly health and education, fostering innovation, and bettering environmental conditions. This view is changing rapidly with new emphasis on human factors and capacity building.

It is clear that setting an actionable, customized and therefore strategic CSR focus in China requires a large number of qualified professionals with open eyes toward international success projects. Universities are playing a role in this movement; through my conversation with Professor Dennis Fan, Associate Dean of CUHK Business School, I learned about the school’s recent actions and was quickly brought up to speed on his perspective with this advice: “learn from the best, engage outside, get back with the recipe”. For example, 50 students were awarded scholarships to research CSR in 9 countries across 4 continents, with opportunities to study the application of CSR in different parts of the world, as well as understand its tremendous impact on numerous cultures. With the support of this scholarship program, college senior Rex Ho studied the practices of strategic CSR in US firms and aimed to introduce the CSR models to China, during his exchange studies at UC Berkeley. While this is one of the most ambitious projects, other universities are following a similar track.

Last, but not least, an important component of a successful CSR program is the amount of resources that can be applied to it and the rise of new business and financial models. I will address this topic and others in my next CRB blog post post.  For now, just remember to make sure you read the signals before engaging with CSR initiatives in China.  And for those of you out there leading the charge in these areas, please write in and tell us what’s working!

CRB Graduate Student Applies Learnings as EDF Climate Corps Fellow

By Katie DeWitt, Haas MBA ‘13

From day one, my 10-week summer internship as an Environmental Defense Fund Climate Corps fellow at National Geographic felt like an extended business school case study. The best part about this was being able to draw from what I’ve learned in various courses and projects during my first year at Haas and apply it directly to the field I hope to work in post-MBA: corporate sustainability.  It turns out the MBA toolkit – from Finance and Accounting to Organizational Behavior and Strategic CSR – comes in really handy.

Before our internships began, all 98 fellows – MBA and MPA students who would work in companies, universities and various governmental departments across the country for the summer – met in Charlotte, North Carolina for a week of intensive training on how to make the business case for energy efficiency.

For me, the new content came during deep-dive technical sessions on building operations, while the valuation tools that were introduced were very familiar from those long days studying in Haas’ “MBA core”.  What does HVAC stand for, and how does it relate to running an efficient building?  Hmmm, let me jot that down.  How do you asses energy efficiency projects in terms of NPV, payback period, kWh of electricity and CO₂ savings?  Fortunately, the idea that energy efficiency investments are low-risk and thus require a lower hurdle rate in company decision-making was already intuitive (thank you very much, Haas study-mates!).

But even with those hard core financial analysis skills top-of-mind, it quickly became apparent that my manager, the Chief Sustainability Officer, was primarily focused on creating a strategy to use sustainability as a decision tool throughout the company (as opposed to making the business case for individual energy efficiency projects – many of which the company had already invested in and completed).

This would require an array of skills and abilities that, fortunately, my first year at Haas had already equipped me with and exposed me to:

• Considering and ultimately appealing to the varying interests of a diverse set of decision-makers
• Coming up with an approach that could lead to a change corporate behaviors
• Using data to back up the argument for sustainability investments
• Delivering a succinct and cohesive final presentation that could be immediately acted upon and implemented

The first step was to identify the stakeholders who were critical for buy-in. The recurring theme through extensive best practices research and interviews of companies with prominent and innovative sustainability programs is that this has to come from the top. When senior management articulates a clear vision for social and environmental responsibility, employees and the public receive a clear signal that says, “we are serious about sustainability”. While National Geographic’s brand and mission are inherently “green,” its sustainability initiatives had previously been entirely grassroots and entirely employee volunteer-driven.

I spent the middle part of my internship trying to sit down with as many stakeholders from as many departments as possible, exploring their thoughts on key social issues and what goals would they propose as being critical for continued success. As National Geographic is primarily a nonprofit organization (with some for-profit branches such as digital media and the TV channel), no one single process drives business decisions. This made my meetings interesting, as individuals from every department – from facilities and financial planning and engineering to editing – had unique goals and incentives.

Drawing upon some of the business cases and employee engagement exercises I had studied and completed in my Strategic CSR & Projects course, as well as insights on incentivizing behavior change from my Leading People course, I was able to craft a story that would be compelling to the diverse group of individuals on the senior management team. For example, the CEO was very interested in benchmarking, so I created a comparison of sustainability initiatives among companies in the media and publishing industries. The EVP of Communications was interested in the risks associated with opening ourselves up for criticism from outside stakeholders, so I presented examples of the best and most transparent sustainability reports that National Geographic could emulate, capitalizing on its own talented graphic design and communications team.

While it was important to quantify the financial and environmental benefits of our energy, waste, water and greenhouse gas reduction strategies, the less tangible benefits were the ones drawing all the attention from upper management. In my final presentation to the National Geographic’s 15-member Executive Management Committee, the numbers seemed lost in the details as excitement over the possibilities associated with becoming a leader in sustainability – which ranged from attracting and retain the best employees to engaging subscribers to scale our impacts  – filled the room.

Thus, one of my key takeaways from this summer is how valuable the entire MBA toolkit can be in a professional setting and how complementary the “hard” and “soft” skills we learn really are. I look forward to focusing my second year at Haas on energy and environment electives but am also reminded that ‘eating my vegetables,’ so to speak (which for me means Corporate Finance or Managerial Accounting), will enhance my effectiveness as a leader and agent of change.

Ingredients for Success: Lessons in Building Industry-Wide Coalitions for Change

By Corinna Kester & Dana Ledyard (Haas MBAs ’12)

The apparel industry has been under the corporate responsibility microscope for over a decade, starting with public upsets over factory labor conditions in the 1990s. After all, supply chains are messy; the apparel production process is extremely complicated, with components of each garment often passing through up to dozens of different facilities. This complicates the implementation of sustainability practices, as each production facility works with multiple buyers and therefore faces numerous different, and often conflicting, requests. To collectively enhance social and environmental performance – in a way that can ultimately be concisely communicated to consumers – all of these buyers must align.

This is one of the goals of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC), a multi-stakeholder initiative and nonprofit organization with membership totaling over 1/3 of the global apparel market (including high profile players like Walmart, Patagonia, Nike, and Levi’s). As second years in the Berkeley-Haas full-time MBA program, we spent 6 months studying the SAC’s unique approach to collaboration. We researched how this ground-breaking organization developed a consensus set of apparel sustainability metrics (called the Higg Index) in only two years. With the Higg Index, apparel companies can align their environmental and social programs in a way that was previously unachievable; this level of consistency sends a clear sustainability message throughout the supply chain, enabling system-wide transformation.

Ready to design your own industry-wide coalition for impact? Here are a few of the SAC’s keys to success, as outlined in our case study:

1) Develop a culture where collaboration can thrive.
Interviewing 17 SAC members revealed one of the group’s most unique assets: its culture of trust, openness, and commitment. This was developed deliberately, through thoughtful and skilled facilitation (by Blu Skye Sustainability Consultants), an emphasis on a shared vision and goals, and careful selection of initial participants who would not only collaborate well, but also seek to push the envelope and strive for high sustainability standards.

2) Ensure all relevant stakeholders are in the room.
SAC’s diverse group of participants includes suppliers, brands, retailers, nonprofit organizations, academics, and government agencies. All stakeholders bring unique capabilities and perspectives and have an equal and respected voice in the proceedings, which helps ensure that the Apparel Index works in practice, not just in theory.

3) Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
After one member set the tone, stating that it would leave the group if it didn’t see concrete benefits within 12 months, the SAC adopted a rapid prototyping approach in order to deliver results with a short turnaround. In fact, the first version of the Higg Index is a combination of the best of existing tools; this “good enough” prototype was used to engage members deeply in providing feedback, and the Index was developed over the course of several iterations. This focus on continual development of the Higg Index kept up momentum among the group and allowed members to anticipate in-depth how the Index would be used in their companies and supply chains.

Consumer products companies are facing the risk of supply chain disruptions due to resource scarcity, environmental and social trade-offs in raw material sourcing, the need to enhance efficiencies in energy and water consumption, and more; as these sustainability challenges become increasingly complex, collaboration is essential to achieving change.

In an effort to bring additional industries together to address shared social and environmental problems, we encourage you and your peers to download the full case study for more information on the history of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, an in-depth description of the SAC’s unique culture, and several additional keys to its success. Please leave us a comment, and tell us what you think!

How Accountants Can Save The World — Maybe

This post appeared in Greenbiz on June 26, 2012.

By Jo Mackness, Executive Director, Center for Responsible Business

Will accountants save the world? That was one of the most provocative questions to come out of the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development last week.

While it will take some time to get an answer to that question, the fact that it’s being asked demonstrates the level of concrete involvement in sustainability issues by the business community, which was more involved — and more engaged — than at any United Nations conference in history. And at least at the city and organization levels, cross-sector collaboration was evident, declarations rampant and commitment to concrete action well underway.

Especially in the finance sector, where arguably the most opportunity exists, I heard a lot that gave me reason to hope. During my time in Rio, I talked to bankers, accountants, business leaders and academics — all of whom spoke passionately about the need to value and appropriately account for nature.

Here are five efforts that stood out as examples of the role that just about every stakeholder in the financial markets system — bankers, investors, insurers, corporations, accountants, top executives, stock exchanges, or financial analysts — can play:

1. Natural Capital Declaration (NCD)’s 39 banks, investors and insurers (see Principles for Sustainable Insurance) joining forces with more than 50 countries – including the UK, Philippines and South Africa, as well as corporations, including Unilever, Dow Chemical and Puma — to make a collective call for natural capital valuation. A strong start, but one issue is that the larger financial institutions are not yet involved. Leaders of NCD say that this is mostly due to the fact that they are concerned about where the data will come from and the lack of accounting standards (see point 2 below for a potential solution) required for integrated reporting. (This did make it into the 47^th paragraph of the official Rio+20 outcome document).  A similarly collaborative effort led by the Corporate Eco Forum and The Nature Conservancy involves more than 20 companies that are developing a methodology to assign a value to the world’s forests, freshwater and marine systems.
2. World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s new project that aspires to integrate corporate impact on ecosystems and biodiversity into accounting systems. When WBCSD’s President Peter Bakker emphatically asserted that “accountants will save the world,” he was ready to put his business coalition to the task of innovating in the area of sustainable business reporting — the next step on from WBCSD’s Guide to Corporate Ecosystem Valuation. Stay tuned for more on this project; rumor has it that already 50 companies are signed up.
3. A renewed emphasis on corporate governance, with a focus on executive compensation for sustainability performance. A growing number of companies like Intel, Alcoa and Campbell’s Soup have been lauded for paying top executives for sustainability performance. One example: According to Thomas Nagy, who leads sustainability at Novozymes, the company pays 25% of the annual bonus based on short-term financial measures, 25% on long-term financial measures, 25% on short-term sustainability measures and 25% on long-term sustainability measures.
4. A coalition of stock exchanges representing more than 4,500 companies that is banding together to promote long-term, sustainable investment in their markets. It was announced at the Sustainable Stock Exchanges (SSE) 2012 Global Dialogues, and despite being a relatively tiny group of the total global market capitalization, this commitment made by NASDAQ OMX, BM&FBOVESPA, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) and the Egyptian Exchange (EGX) is already being amplified. As George Kell, Executive Director of the UN Global Compact, said in the official press release, “We take this opportunity to call on all stock exchanges around the world to join these leading exchanges in making this potentially transformative commitment.”
5. Continued opportunities to educate financial analysts. According to Erika Karp, Managing Director of Investment Research and Head of Global Sector Research at UBS, if analysts are not “systematically integrating environmental, social and governance issues into their reports, they should be fired!” Karp and others at Rio made the call to push analysts to ask the “right” questions as part of analyst calls — for instance, those that acknowledge crisis themes (think water scarcity as it relates to an investment in an apparel company). When I sought Karp’s best thinking on how to get analysts to think this way, she emphasized the importance of educating them to raise their level of understanding (Karp reminded us, “Most people don’t know how much water it takes for creating a pair of jeans”), and then facilitating collaborations that result in more well rounded investment reports.

It is collaborations and commitments like these from the private sector that can give us hope, even while the political outcomes can be summed up as “largely a cold cup of tea.”

As Neil Hawkins, Vice President of Sustainability and Environment, Health & Safety for The Dow Chemical Company recently emphasized to me, “In order to accelerate progress on valuing nature’s services, we must approach it from all stakeholder perspectives – but the time has passed for everyone to get on the same page.  Now it is up to the most forward-thinking companies and institutions to lead the way.”

A lot of work lies ahead for all of the stakeholders. I’m not suggesting that it’s going to be easy placing a value on water, accounting for it in a financial statement and potentially creating a trading market for it — especially when we cannot yet agree on who owns it. But with some of the world’s best minds coming together and collaborating from all corners of the financial market system, companies, cities and countries will advance their understanding of the true value of our natural resources.

And with that understanding, we will surely get closer to the future we want.

Beyond Education: Activating Consumer Behavior Change

By Christina Meinberg, Associate Director, Center for Responsible Business

Despite the fact that 2/3 of consumers believe water scarcity is a serious issue, the United Nations Development Programme reports that Americans use more water in their morning shower than the average person in the world’s poorest cities uses for an entire day. Americans know there is a problem; taking action on the issue remains the real obstacle.

Suzanne Shelton, CEO of the Shelton Group, addressed this problem at the Sustainable Brands Conference in San Diego earlier this month. Well aware of our innate tendencies to stick with our usual routines, she suggests that the goal for product marketers and change agents who care about the issue, should be to move people from automatic, rote behaviors to conscious, pro-sustainability choices.

How can we create real behavior change?

Once we have an understanding about a complex global issue – whether it’s climate change or water scarcity or escalating healthcare costs and so on – it is both tempting and understandable to assume that sharing these insights with others will cause them to match our own enthusiasm for the issues and for the actions or changes they require.  The idea is simple: education and awareness = reformed consumer behavior.  If only it were that straight-forward…

When The Shelton Group decided to take on the issue of water scarcity, they took a different approach.  Rather than simply stating the facts to catalyze behavior change, they suggest that marketers place an emphasis on the following:

1. Making the problem visual.
2. Making the problem uncomfortable.
3. Providing people with simple, specific actions to take to make a difference.

Bosch and Procter & Gamble, Shelton Group clients, wanted to make consumers  aware that excessive use of water is equivalent to wasting water, and hence co-created a story around the concept that “wasting water is weird”.

This humorous and thought-provoking campaign – which consisted of short, memorable video clips – ran in over 120 markets, on nearly 300 TV and radio stations, and achieved 400 million impressions.  As a bonus, multi-millions of dollars worth of public media were leveraged for free (equaling approximately 10x the amount that was spent on paid advertising).

Most importantly, according to Suzanne, 29% of those who saw the campaign reported that it moved them to change their water habits.

Lessons Learned

Suzanne Shelton’s take-aways from the campaign are worth passing on:

1. Marketers can often make a bigger difference when they band together (in this case, several global brands partnered to provide a public service-type campaign around an issue that was material to both of their brands).
2. Visualizing the issues can help move consumers beyond their “What’s in it for me?” mentality and open their minds to the question, “What’s in it for we?”.
3. It’s OK to take creative risks, even when communicating complex issues (“Rip the drip” wasn’t exactly a recognized expert on water, but he got people’s attention).

Levers for Change

At the Center for Responsible Business, we believe that the model for the enterprise of the future will be shaped by innovative business leaders who recognize that behavior change must be scaled up rapidly in order to protect business longevity and avert some of the economic, social and environmental challenges we face.

The Shelton Group’s approach is unique in that it meets consumers where they are, giving them new ways of thinking about every-day behaviors (and acknowledging  that behavior change is anything but a rational process).

What Approaches are Working for You?

What changes has your company tried to inspire, and what are you learning from them?  Please send us your stories either by commenting here, or emailing us!   The more case studies we can generate and best practices we can share as a community, the more we as a community can develop forward-thinking and innovative approaches to behavior change.

Engage with the CRB in June

The CRB is on the road this month, attending and leading discussions at a number of local and global events. We hope to see you there!

• 6/3-6/7 – We will be attending and speaking at the following events at the Sustainable Brands conference, in San Diego:
  • 6/6, 2-3pm – Executive in Residence Tony Kingsbury participates in a panel entitled “Making Green Chemistry Marketable”.
  • 6/6, 3:30-4:30pm - Professor Kellie McElhaney leads a panel entitled, “Beyond CSR Reporting: Maximizing Value from Sustainability Communications”.
  • 6/7, 2-3pm – Executive in Residence Tony Kingsbury leads a session entitled “Are All LCA Tools Created Equal? How Design Tool Choices Influence Decision-Making and Ultimate Impact”

• 6/11-6/13 – Executive Director Jo Mackness presents on Developing Responsible Leaders: Educating & Empowering Students for a Sustainable Future at the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) Sustainability Conference in Tampa, Florida.

• 6/14 – the CRB will participate in key events for Rio+20, which will bring together the private and nonprofit sectors, academia, and governments to discuss the global sustainability agenda.  Executive Director Jo Mackness will be blogging from the Corporate Sustainability Forum and the 3^rd Global Forum for Responsible Management Education (PRME).

• 6/20-6/27 – Professor Kellie McElhaney will be teaching at Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year CEO retreat in Silicon Valley

See you soon!

-The CRB Team

How Does Your Sustainable Business Salary Size Up?

By Christina Meinberg, Marketing Manager, Center for Responsible Business

As a CRB Blog reader, there is a very high probability that you want to leverage your business skills to make a difference or are already doing so.  But whether you’re a 15-year veteran or a student seeking your first internship, you probably have questions about the state of salaries and career progression in this field, such as…

Will I make a decent salary in the sustainability field, now and over time?  Can I bring my values to work and pay off my MBA debt load simultaneously?  How will I negotiate a job offer and find industry-specific “comps”?  What career paths and options are possible over time?  What are the salary ranges that people are currently working within companies versus consulting to them?

Want to know if your salary sizes up?  Search no longer.

Sustainability Salary Survey Data

A few organizations have conducted research in this area; check out Greenbiz Group’s “2011 Salary Survey”.  A few high-level take-aways include:

• 86% of large companies now have at least one full-time person dedicated to spending all of their time on sustainability (up 4% from the previous year).
• Vice presidents of sustainability earn an average base salary of $218,409 (with a median of $225,000); 90%+ also reported receiving an additional bonus.
• In terms of gender, men dominate at the highest levels of sustainability within companies; there is also an 11% gap between a female vice president’s average pay and a male’s, and a 20% gap between female and male directors.

Another group that tracks performance and salary data, is Acre, Acona and Ethical Performance.  In their latest report, “The Corporate Responsibility Salary Survey 2010”, nearly 600 professionals were surveyed (72% in-house, 28% consultants).  Findings from the predominantly UK-focused study included:

• Consultants are generally not paid as generously as those working in-house; the spread is to the tune of $15K/year, on average (and of the 50% of consultants who reported receiving a bonus, it amounted to an average of $8K less than those who received one in-house).
• Increasing salary for sustainable business consultants often hinges upon the ability to provide management consulting versus merely technical advice and services.
• 90% of respondents arrived in their roles from similar roles (meaning that 1 in 10 have never worked in another area within the company), demonstrating strong personal conviction and dedication to corporate responsibility as well as a unique skill set and perspective that corporate responsibility professionals are able to bring to their roles.

Ready for more up-to-date stats?  Stay tuned, as the 2012 survey results are slated to go live in about two months, or July of this year.

Learn More

I encourage you to read through the aforementioned reports and also to leverage your sustainability networks and share information with one another.  Berkeley-Haas students have access to the Haas Career Management Office and CRB Career Advising Programs, and both current students and alumni may also access historic MBA employment stats.

Those of you who are in the position to hire sustainability professionals should consider benchmarking salaries by calling colleagues, just as you might if you were hiring people to work at a start-up.

Furthermore, do your part in building the data: take time to fill out information in online data-gathering places such as Glassdoor.  Other useful websites include Payscale, Salary.com, and Salary Expert.

Sharing Knowledge & Resources

Please send us your comments and post your thoughts on what other resources you are finding to be useful!  Where else can one find reputable data on sustainable business professionals’ salaries across various industries?

Going Water<Less™

By Rosalind Chu, Corporate Communications Specialist at Levi Strauss & Co. and Berkeley-Haas B.S.B.A. ‘11

I didn’t wash my jeans too often in college because I wanted to save money on laundry. But now that I’m working at Levi Strauss & Co., I wash them even less and have a new movitation…because I have come to firmly believe that “Dirty is the New Clean.”

When Levi Strauss & Co. conducted a lifecycle assessment of our two iconic products – a pair of Levi’s® 501® jeans and Dockers® Original Khakis – we discovered that consumers can reduce the climate change impact of their jeans by up to 50 percent by line drying and washing them in cold water! That’s why we started a long-term conversation with our consumers by launching Care for Our Planet, a program that educates consumers about what they can do to save water and energy after they buy a pair of Levi’s® jeans or Dockers® khakis.

But we also realized that in order to have maximum impact in our mission to address global water issues, our employees need to believe in the power of their own contributions and live this mission too.

That’s why last month, in honor of World Water Day on March 22, we challenged employees to change their laundry habits by wearing the same pair of pants for five days in a row (March 19-23)… without washing them. For a measure of accountability (and fun), employees were provided non-removable Go Water<Less™ tags made of compressed sponges to affix onto their jeans.  The trick?  The tags inflate when they are exposed to water!

As the Community Affairs lead for Asia Pacific, I helped 15 office locations in Asia activate this challenge. In the planning phases, things sounded great on paper; the challenge is easy enough, and should be perceived as a fun group activity. But then questions started to come to mind: what if my colleagues do not think the same? Would it be too much to ask employees to photograph their daily experiences, given that the challenge is  voluntary?

Turns out, employees really enjoyed themselves with this challenge. Not every office chose to participate (although over 45 did globally!) – but I still loved seeing my colleagues from around the world exercise their fashion sense and creativity through Flickr and Instagram (searchable by the #GoWaterless hashtag). And if you look, you’ll notice that as the days went by, the photos got crazier.

Some of us may have had too much fun. Take myself, for example. I spent up to 30 minutes one night cutting my dENiZEN™ jeans so that I could transform them into cut-off shorts.

By the end of the challenge, I think we accomplished our goal: to encourage employees to Go Water<Less™ in their lives…and have some fun, too! I know I did!

Check out some photos below:

So You Say You Want to Work in Sustainability?

By Katie DeWitt, First Year Berkeley-Haas MBA Student 

Coming from a nonprofit and government background (at business school we’re called “poets”), I came to Haas with the aim of getting some private sector experience in my areas of interest, social impact and environmental sustainability, and hoping that was possible.

After a year of coursework, extracurricular activities, conferences, case competitions and networking, I have come across more opportunities than I could ever have imagined existed.

The most fulfilling thing about my first year at Haas has been learning – not only by listening and studying – but also by doing. I have had the opportunity to work on two client-facing consulting projects, one assessing the feasibility of a new urban wind technology and another applying sustainability frameworks in a traditional corporate setting. I have participated and placed in three major MBA competitions: the Leading for Impact Challenge, the Department of Energy Better Building case competition, and the Global Social Venture Competition. And I have been able to connect and work with people who share similar interests through holding leadership positions in Net Impact (VP of Sustainability, a new role we created this year!) and the Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative.

Even inside the classroom, my group projects and interactive learning activities have proved challenging and stimulating. For example, in my Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility course, which is part of Haas’ flagship BILD curriculum, one of our lecture topics was about change management and pitching a sustainability projects across an organization. Instead of sitting and taking notes while Professor Romero-Hernandez told us how this works, we had to figure it out ourselves.

Through an online, real-time simulation (every minute was a day), we had 90 days to get our company’s key stakeholders on board and convert 90% of our employees from awareness to interest to adoption. We were provided background on the employees’ positions and interests, with a web illustration of how they are connected inside the organization both personally and socially, and an organizational chart. To manage change, we could publicly announce project milestones and goals, hold one-on-one meetings to explain the initiative, and so on. If we chose a good path with the correct people, we would progress, while just one misstep would cost us credibility within the company. Let’s just say we all learned fast that blast emails are not the way to go…

In my Environmental Management and Public Policy course, which is cross-listed with the Goldman School of Public Policy, I have gotten the chance to engage with students from outside of Haas who are also working on environmental issues, but from a refreshingly different perspective. Our class topics, such as Wal-Mart’s credibility as a leader in corporate sustainability, or whether Greenpeace crossed the line in attacking Shell on the Brent Spar platform, often spark a friendly and healthy debate. My main takeaway from the course is that cross-sector collaboration is a necessary – though often challenging and frustrating – piece of any impactful and lasting environmental initiative, an appropriate lesson to learn in a class populated with students from across Berkeley’s professional schools.

To be sure, I was not the only one who arrived at Haas with just a spark of a sense for what I wanted to accomplish in the world. But after my first year I am more deeply focused on building particular skills in change management and supply chain analysis with an eye toward influencing decisions that companies make to improve their environmental and social impact.

Heading into my internship with the Environmental Defense Fund this summer, I feel equipped to make informed recommendations around corporate energy efficiency upgrades and look forward to continuing to build my toolkit. The answers I will continue to press towards in my second year are not about what, but how to promote sustainable products and policies more rapidly and effectively, through more cool classes like Cleantech-to-Market and Energy and Society.

There is a wealth of resources at Haas and at UC Berkeley to be taken advantage of in the area of sustainability. The hardest part is definitely fitting them all in. If only business school were a five-year program!

How Good Business Can Lift Apple’s Share Price

This post appeared in Bloomberg on April 15, 2012.

By Kellie McElhaney, Faculty Director, Center for Responsible Business

Early this month, Adrian Kingsley- Hughes made this prediction on Forbes.com: “It seems quite possible for Apple stock to hit four digits in the next couple of years, barring any missteps.”

The author probably imagines future missteps such as overheating iPads, a possible unsuccessful foray into the television-set market, or the failure of the company’s new chief executive officer, Tim Cook, to live up to the legacy of Steve Jobs.

Yet it is easy to imagine a whole different set of problems, such as more worker suicides or deaths from explosions at Apple Inc (AAPL)’s lead sourcing factory in China, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., known as Foxconn Technology Group (FOXCGZ).

The biggest misstep, however, would be for Apple to fail to recognize that it now has an opportunity for the kind of productive sweeping self-examination that Nike Inc. (NKE) undertook in the previous decade after its reputation was tarnished by reports of poor work conditions and child labor at its manufacturing subcontractors in the developing world.

Unfortunately, I fear Apple’s executives won’t “look up” at their SR problems (which the company defines as supplier responsibility, but I define as social responsibility, to encompass environmental issues). Instead, they may continue to “look down,” as they skillfully and sometimes arrogantly have with most problems, which they try to solve through the brilliance of their design, innovation, engineering and attention to detail of their products.

It is tempting to dismiss sustainability as irrelevant to Apple’s steady ascent toward $1,000 per share. That would be a mistake: Just ask any put-out-to-pasture top executive from Nike, BP Plc, Enron Corp. or WorldCom Inc. about the linkage between corporate responsibility and corporate value.

If I were to play corporate-sustainability doctor, here is some “iRX” for Apple’s leaders:

– Approach the current challenges not simply as short-term risks, but rather as a significant business opportunity linked both to protecting current value, and to creating more. Tackle them with the same meticulous attention to detail, design brilliance, engineering prowess, market-winning aggression and customer-gripping innovation you bring to all things Apple.

– Recognize that while your current culture and strategy of secrecy, paranoia, fear, message control and arrogance work well in other areas, such as product development, pipeline and launch, they don’t serve you well when it comes to SR, no matter how you define it.

– Dedicate some — perhaps even $1 billion — of your current $100 billion cash reserve to SR programs, and broaden the scope of your action beyond your supply chain.

– Understand that a significant proportion of your employees care about making the world a better place. Engage and deploy these employees, who are one of your most powerful assets, to this purpose. They care. These days, some of them may be embarrassed by and ashamed of their employer. They may even be disengaged, unproductive, and dissatisfied.

– After engaging your employees, recruit your huge customer base in your sustainability quest. Expand your comprehensive Apple Care program to a new one called “Apple Cares,” for example. Incorporate your SR caring into your brand’s out-of-the-box experience, make it part of Siri’s knowledge bank, part of your cult-like following, part of your app world.

– Cook, the new CEO, shouldn’t try to step into his legendary predecessor’s shoes, or cultivate his aura. After announcing Jobs’s death, Cook sent out his first internal communication to employees with the introduction of a not-so- ground-breaking employee-donation-matching program. I know this because a former student of mine, who had recently joined Apple, excitedly e-mailed to tell me. He was relieved that his new employer, the world’s first $1 trillion company, might begin to move from being a laggard in sustainability to a leader.

The sustainability reputation of the company matters to this employee, as it does to the majority of his fellow Millennials. My former student took a risk by leaving a very sustainability-minded rival company in the hopes that Apple was waking up. Cook is the first Apple CEO to actually visit China and engage with Foxconn and its leadership. Fantastic start. Keep going.

– Add a new position to your executive leadership team: a senior vice president of corporate sustainability. Choose a bold, tough-minded and temperedly radical woman (since the rest of your team is male).

– With this new executive, leverage your scale, your leadership position, your design perspicuity, your global reach, your opiate-of-the-masses status, your engineering expertise, your educational-market aptitude, to develop an integrated corporate-sustainability strategy that is linked to your business objectives and core competencies, and is embedded in your business strategy and corporate culture.

– Bring your top designers to the factories and dormitories in China, and, together with Foxconn leaders, develop less socially isolated working and living conditions. Bring your top engineers over, too, and design less monotonous, more aesthetically pleasing processes, factories and villages for employees.

– Press the Chinese government — in fact, all governments — to improve laws and accountability on child labor, minimum wages, and mandated working conditions.

– Engage your education-business development unit to penetrate the digital textbook and educational markets and, in particular, the underrepresented sustainability-teaching market. There is an urgent need to develop efficient, creative and simple information on all things sustainability.

Apple is the perfect company to do it.

(Kellie A. McElhaney is the Alexander Faculty Fellow in Corporate Responsibility at theUniversity of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a contributor to Business Class. She is the author of “Just Good Business.” The opinions expressed are her own.)

Read more online from Bloomberg View.

Today’s highlights: The View editors on signs Iraq is veering away from democracy and theNational Rifle Association’s role in encouraging gun sales and use; William D. Cohan onrestoring faith in Wall Street as the key to an economic recovery; Simon Johnson on why long-term budget projections get too much attention; Albert R. Hunt on Mitt Romney’s potential vice presidential choices; Vali Nasr on positive developments in Pakistan; and Iain Begg on redefining Europe’s social safety net.

To contact the writer of this article: Kellie A. McElhaney at kmack@haas.berkeley.edu.

To contact the editor responsible for this article: Max Berley at mberley@bloomberg.net.