OVERVIEW
MANAGEMENT
PERFORMANCE
POSSIBILITIES
CAPITALS
ACTIVITIES
ACTORS
BURGESS
Peter Burgess Dialog |
|
Burgess COMMENTARY |
|
Impact Investing Forum Discussion|Poll DiscussionsMembersPromotionsJobsSearchMore... Follow Magnus Berg Which B_School has the most focus on 'sustainable finance' or 'impact investing'? Hello, Thank you all for posting lots of thorough articles and interesting thoughts. Im in a process where im considering various MBA-alternatives (in the US and West-Europe). In this context I would like to expose myself to a B-School having a reputation and evidence of courses available within the field of 'sustainable finance' or/and 'impact investing'. Does anyone have any experience on this matter? My long term ambition is to work in the intersection of 'sustainability' and finance and I got experience, among others, from a privat equity firm investing in green projects in emerging markets. Thank you! 23 days ago Like CommentUnfollow Flag More Tasnim Anwar, Mette Skjold Rotboll like this 40 comments Show previous comments Follow Dinah A. Dinah A. Koehler, ScD • whatever path you pursue, you need a systems view that combines natural systems knowledge with business systems decision-making process. A patch-work approach will only leave you confused and makes it harder to figure out a path that is aligned with systems complexity. A social enterprise that is tinkering on the fringe may not really make a difference in changing structural problems that underlie the market failure(s). So you need a working knowledge of business/finance, public policy and environmental management. Interdisciplinary/joint degree programs do a better job at this than a strict MBA. 14 days ago• Like2 Click to see who liked this comment. Follow Grace Grace Webster • I encourage you to also look at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. In addition to having the Net Impact Graduate Chapter of the Year, there are numerous opportunities to learn about impact investing/sustainability both in and out of the classroom. The CASE i3 program in particular was the first comprehensive global program at a top business school to blend academic rigor with practical knowledge in the emerging field of impact investing (see www.casei3.org). The university also recently partnered with USAID to launch a social entrepreneurship accelerator focusing on global health (SEAD). 14 days ago• Like1 Kevin Doyle Unfollow Kevin Doyle Jones • I am working with grad student interns from Stockholm University, out of their Stockholm Resilience Centre on a non profit piece of social innovation infrastructure called the Biocultural Resilience Tool. The Swedish government is funding part of it. Working with Tufts (financial modeling, etc. for a new fund at a new center they have that's pretty cool for the niche where the new fund is working) Also Monterey Institute and their Frontier Market Scouts program, which I am pretty wild about, the FM program. Quick, targeted, smart, flexible. A lot is happening at Monterey. I'm making it the center of a lot of things I'm doing and so are a lot of other people. That FM program is a great path to jobs and or market understand in order to launch your startup, but with partners you can call on and a network to be part of. They are doing it differently. The FM program is run by the folks doing Village Capital, or they are our lead into it. So it's as fast and flexible as a well run low cost high value accelerator program. 14 days ago• Like Kevin Doyle Unfollow Kevin Doyle Jones • On the issue of what sustainability is, we are using a lens devised by the 120 scientists in the network of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and productizing that as a due diligence and management tool. Glad to talk more about that if people want to. But that's not the career track this really good thread is about. Your ambition is interesting to see. 14 days ago• Like2 Follow Steve Steve Brewster • I work at Said. This link will take you to the pages of Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship based at the school and summarise how to make your MBA social centred through electives on the MBA, consulting projects and extra curriculum activities. Hope that helps and good luck. http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/centres/skoll/education/Pages/default.aspx 14 days ago• Like Follow Rob Rob Hanna • Nice to see this topic gathering so much interest. So here's a related OUCH! on advanced degrees in the Arts and Sciences. The below just came out on my LinkedIn stream from Michael Fertik, CEO of Reputation.com, on getting non-MBA masters degrees: '...on average for the nearly 80 fields we examined, there’s almost no additional money to be had from getting one. At least, not in an amount significant enough to be your primary motivation for spending two years of slog to get that degree.' http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130528135012-11281694-please-think-twice-before-getting-your-master-s So the bottom line on pursuing non-MBA masters degrees is do it to follow your bliss, cause that's about all you're going to get. 14 days ago• Like Follow Dinah A. Dinah A. Koehler, ScD • and the result of having only MBAs looking at sustainability will be? More group think I'm afraid when we need out of the box thinking to speed things along. Diversity of background and approaches are key to dealing with the 'sustainability challenge'. It's at the intersection of different disciplines that creativity is unleashed. 13 days ago• Like5 Follow Magnus Berg Magnus Berg Johansen • Hello all, Again I have to say that i'm astounished by the amount of enthusiasm shown on this topic. I deeply appreciate your feedback and it has made me do some reconsiderations. Wish you all a great sunday! Magnus 9 days ago• Like2 Follow Pete Pete Hartigan (www.SoFi.com) • Biased comment: I graduated from Stanford's Graduate School of Business in 1999. RJ Miller - former Dean (former CEO Ford, one of the 'whiz kids' out of WWII), started the Public Management Program (PMP) in the early 1970s at Stanford. His original objective was to encourage business training to enter the public sector / government jobs. Over time, the PMP mandate as evolved with student interests and market demands. The social entrepreneurship / sustainability work seeds from this origin. I found Dinah A Koehler, ScD's comments above compelling. If you want to have a material impact in sustainability, building a system level view sounds like a great approach. At Stanford, what many people do is dual degrees, customizing hybrid interests, as they become leaders into an emerging field. The entrepreneurial environment of Silicon Valley supports that general instinct. If being at the fountainhead of innovation is a match to your interests, then you may want to look at customizing your work to exactly what you want. Unbiased comment: My role at SoFi - a community student loan business has provided an interesting lens into 78 MBA schools. The school that stands out for sustainability is the Erb School / Ross Business School. I have no ties there, however, I have been very impressed on what I have learned to date. The other school which historically has a reputation in the US in this area is Yale. What I have seen / learned however, is that most schools have sustainability clubs (eg MIT-Sloan and many others), and faculty are building up in this general area, especially as the capital market has started the steps to mainstream social impact investing. It is just the beginning, and a very exciting time to come. Good luck, and I hope you do great things in this area. Find your mentor. Find the school / culture that you love, and I think you will find that your impact will come from aligning your interest with a platform / community you naturally feel comfortable within and will thrive. Cheers. -Pete 8 days ago• Like• Reply privately• Flag as inappropriate 3 Peter Burgess • This is a good discussion ... but the good that emerges from the little piece of the business school that addresses the social impact and sustainability question is drowned by the huge disservice that arises from the basic business and economic model that is being taught to the vast majority of business school students who are doing the work simply because they believe it is a key to a successful money wealth career. I had some pretty aggressive conversations at the Harvard Business School in the late 60s around the subject of business ethics. Back then, in my view the HBS had allowed financial numbers and what was legal to crowd out what was moral and ethical. Subsequently some business ethics courses came into being, but nothing was done about the core business model that was being promulgated. There has been rather little progress on this from the leadership of academia and the business community during the best part of 50 years ... and I am appalled at the current state of affairs. It is good that sustainability gets some air time ... but the basic business model and the core metrics used to measure the state, progress and performance of society are quite dysfunctional. There are new ideas emerging ... but generally not in the high profile and prestigious establishments. While I am appalled ... I am also optimistic because there is amazing technology and there are some very independent people who will sooner or later harness this for the benefit of society. Peter Burgess TrueValueMetrics 8 days ago1 Follow Dinah A. Dinah A. Koehler, ScD • Peter Burgess - I cannot agree more. Given the coursework emphasis at B-schools and the limited classes on integrated approaches I share your concerns. The lack of integrated approaches stems from the lack of professors with an integrated research agenda and background/academic grounding. There are few inter-disciplinary thinkers out there in academia because of the rewards system which emphasizes single discipline approaches. Having attended many academic research conferences economists only understand half of the story, and environmental scientists get the other half, which is not to mention the other missing 'halves'. I gave up on academia 10 years ago, because I did not fit into a single discipline nor am I interested in trying. From everything I see today, that situation has not fundamentally changed. 8 days ago• Like Follow Pete Pete Hartigan (www.SoFi.com) • Peter - Your comment is very thought provoking and I like it quite a bit. Thank you. My career mission is to see if the F-500 (at least some of it) can be reinvented - where 'helping the community / social impact' is intertwined like a double helix with maximizing shareholder profit. The key is that the comparative advantage must be is that the core differentiation within the product served to the market has a comparable advantage by helping the community (vs exploiting it). This theory I call 'Communities of Scale' (CoS) vs 'Economies of Scale' (EoS) (traditional F-500). SoFi is my initial showcase - produce a community financial firm and scale it globally. There are two assumptions in the petri dish of this career mission: (a) social media is a psychology / behavior platform. The platform has now hit critical mass at a billion people, going to 3 billion with mobile in the next 5+ years. This means nearly half the world will have a low-cost end point. It takes some creativity together to then produce a product / business in each market to aggregates people together based on affinity vs geography. At that point, the product has groups connected without borders, ie small towns based on affinity, where behavior changes (addressing moral hazard / adverse selection issues), and shifts cost curves, ie the company then has a realistic shot (however small) to become a new F-500, if lucky, the difference is 'the more you help the community being served, the more profitable the company is'. (b) My non-academic / non-rigorous view of the 'behavior norms of the small town' is next. My guide is that for 20,000 years businesses existed to help the small town. The anomoly is the the past 60+years, since WWII in the US. With the advent of Eisenhower's highways, Pan Am low cost flights, university / hotel low cost housing -- everyone knows they can move. Low cost mobility eliminated the 'behavior norms of the small town' (ie small town game theory leads to long-term / intergenerational benefits and costs to behavior). Once mobility is at low cost - people are very smart instinctually, trust at a systemic level erodes, and it leads to the optimal behavior for most being short-term gain, since at a gut level everyone knows they can make $10m of your ideas, pat your back with an 'ada-boy' and move to Japan or China, and do it again. Going forward however, with social media - it is an amazing time - as profound as the invention of the Guttenberg Press -- many markets are different going forward, if social media is viewed as a psychology / behavioral platform, that aggregates people based on affinity at low costs, shifts behavior, shifts cost curves ... and if lucky, a next generation of F-500 companies -- designed from the product / comparable core that the more you help the community the better you compete vs existing F-500 companies. CoS - theory is testing this out. It is my career mission. I believe we can now have the benefits of the behavior norms of the small town (at a product level), and the benefits of for-profit companies (ie scale) ... the new form F-500 is a 'blue ocean' (reference to that book) ... That is my career mission. The 'why now' is social media / mobile changes 'everything' ... At SoFi - we have unlocked a product within two years where we think we would have access to many billions of capital to fund student loans, for the trillion dollar existing market / problem, in this very short period of time. Over the next few years, we will know if the experiment to try and build a next generation F-500 company designed to help people / communities will work. I think this is possible in many markets. Prior to SoFi, I spoke with leaders at a $100 billion in sales / year healthcare insurance company - the opportunity existing is many markets. I am deeply interested in going 'back to the future', ie community companies however now at scale. This model aligns profit focused & social impact focused business people. Cheers. -Pete Sybille Borner • Dear all - thank you very much for your comments, Magnus is not the only one benefiting from them. However, I am not looking for professional training in the area of impact investing in order to boost my career but in order to do a better job. I have a master in economics and some experience in private equity and NGO-work and now I am looking for a way to avoid at least some of the pitfalls while launching my first impact investing projects. I will check the schools mentioned in all the previous contributions but I would be grateful for any advice on organizations that offer training for practioneers, preferably in Europe. Thank you! - Sybille 4 days ago• Like• Reply privately• Flag as inappropriate Follow Rob Rob Hanna • Hi Sybille, Might be easier to start a new discussion thread in this group. Also consider sharing a little mor detail on what you mean by 'doing a better job' and 'avoid at least some of the pitfalls' as that could be helpful to folks trying to help you. Cheers, Rob 4 days ago• Like Follow Oleg Oleg Zaikovski • Hello. Sybille. 1/ Take a look at Oxford Impact Investing Programme and try to find out about their other short-term options - http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/execed/finance/impactinvesting/Pages/impactinvesting.aspx As I told before, (modestly working in the 'field/grassroots/local and virtual communities' venture philanthropy for last 6-7 years). I definitely can point the Skoll Center as the primary (not one & only, but First & Authentic/Genuine) source, where 'impact investing' is really 'social investing', and any 'business logic' starts from social impact and business ethics. 2/ Why only in-person training? Some webinars, for example, - Impact Investing for Community Foundations Webinar Series - https://www.missioninvestors.org/tools/impact-investing-community-foundations-webinar-series-four-parts 4 days ago• Like Follow Kelly Kelly Bougere • I'm a bit late to this conversation, but want to chime in on behalf of Yale's MBA and MEM (masters in environmental management) programs. Both programs (or even better, a joint degree) offer the opportunity to combine social enterprise and finance. Curriculum includes classes like Global Social Enterprise, which gives students the opportunity to consult for enterprises in developing countries, Microfinance, and Economics of the Environment (among many others). There's a ton of student-driven activity and faculty research around these issues, and the core curriculum really focuses on a wholistic way of thinking that I think a lot of other MBA programs lack. As an alum currently working in nonprofit finance, I could not be happier with my experience there. I encourage you to check it out! 2 days ago• Like Follow Sybille Sybille Borner • Oleg, thank you very much for the links, I already started to check out these opportunities. Rob, thank you for your questions. I meant to say that I am new to the social impact investment business and rather than inventing the wheel myself again when it comes to performing a DD or other related tasks I thought it would make sense to learn from others and their experience in order not to make avoidable mistakes. As I am employed full-time I need something that brings me up to speed quickly. 1 day ago• Like Follow Rob Rob Hanna • You're welcome Sybille. I'm sure if you're specific there will be plenty of good folks here with cutting edge expertise that would be happy to share what they've got that could help. Simply ask for any DD and other templates you're looking for in context of whatever type deals you're considering. Of course there's free advice and help and then there's that which you pay for...I love learning from others' mistakes when I can and that's part of being innovative, yet risk mitigation sometimes demands others' documented opinions. Hope you avoid the avoidable mistakes. Good luck! Rob 1 day ago• Like Follow Brent Brent Sitterly • My addition would be a reference to the oft quoted, 'what doesn't get measured doesn't get managed' Magnus, sounds like you want to optimize ROI and potential for getting into impact investing. So ROI is pretty easy to get at(relatively speaking). As for increasing the chance of getting into impact investing what does success look like there? How would you measure it? My take on MBA's(I don't have one, but having been in finance as a quant this topic is a popular one) is that it's really the resources the school has that would/could be available to you. In your case I would look at professor, alumni, and general social network type info in relation to the impact investing community. I think this argument works for most grad school situation. My 2 cents. 1 day ago• Like Follow Tim Tim Goodwin • The university of Exeter scrapped its traditional MBA program in favor of a 'One Planet' curriculum. Their Net Impact chapter has achieved 'silver status' sand may be of interest. All the best with the search! 15 hours ago• Like Follow Sybille Sybille Borner • Thank you Rob, asking this group for some support is a good point - I will keep this in mind. - Best, Sybille 9 hours ago• Like |
|
|
| The text being discussed is available at http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=242187498&gid=1913772 &commentID=143608471&trk=view_disc&fromEmail=&ut=0_QdtRBQ3YGBM1 |