Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia has been burnishing its credentials as a beacon of responsible leadership and sustainable business for many years. We were in conversation with Robert Helsley, the school’s Dean, and he remains very focused on this theme.

Seeing business as a force for good, rather than just for profit, is part of the modern Western zeitgeist

Dean Helsley notes that the undergraduate and MBA cohorts are conspicuously vocal on the role the private sector can play in creating change in the wider world, “there is a real groundswell of support, especially among current students and recent graduates to do a better job of emphasizing and developing the potential for businesses and business skills and business training to contribute to positive social change” he says.

Business as Broader Force for Good

This energy for seeing business as a force for good, rather than just for profit, is very much part of the modern Western zeitgeist with the sentiment being underlined by the recent announcement from the US Business Roundtable, chaired by Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, in their August statement saying that they were ‘redefining the purpose of their businesses’ from a pure focus on shareholder return to that of a wider group of stakeholders principally including their employees and their societies they operated in.

Helsley shared with us his experience of handling negative attitudes around business, and the work that Sauder has been doing, since long before the Roundtable statement. “I’ve experienced as a dean the negative connotation that is associated with many businesses and many business practices, I think frankly that that’s a shame. I think there are real opportunities for the private sector to play important roles in addressing a whole variety of issues and concerns that everyone has, and we need to do a better job of educating students and leaders about how they can take a broader view of what they are doing in business and also consider in addition to profit, in addition to prosperity which is important, but also consider the impact that their decisions have on other people, future generations… there is a spirit on the [North American] West Coast that is entrepreneurial and very socially conscious, so it’s a good place to try to address some of those issues, but these are big challenges I think for all of us.”

Robert Helsley on technology and the future of executive education

Helsley sees that the media, as is their wont, tend to focus on bad news, so we get an unrepresentative view of how business can impact both society and the natural environment. “The many times in which the private sector does something which is pro-social or is advantageous to a group or a cause that’s not necessarily consistent with profit maximization, that doesn’t get a lot of press. And so there is this stereotype I think about rapacious business leaders doing things which are not necessarily in the public interest,” he observes. His role as the boss of a leading business school is to encourage and sow the seeds for change, and he is confident that, at Sauder, they are doing this, “I think one of the challenges for education, be it executive education or what we do more with undergraduates and graduate students, is trying to have that conversation with people about how can you use the skills that you’re acquiring when learning about business to advance other issues, to advance other causes.”

Connecting Silos and Fostering Diversity

As in all large, complex organizations – and universities are peculiarly prone to this – one of the major obstacles in changing attitudes and advancing new processes is the silos that are created and the difficulty in getting different sets of expertise to interact and share thinking. Helsley sees that business schools can play an influential role as a hub for enabling cross-functional discussion. “What one typically sees inside universities is that the business school is kind of siloed; it’s kind of on its own, and it doesn’t engage to a great degree with the other faculties at the university. I think that’s a real lost opportunity and I think we can start there by reaching across disciplines and trying to find ways for the business school, and business students, to engage with other parts of the university to develop innovative solutions to problems. So I think that’s part of it, and I think there’s a need, and demand among executives, to have an opportunity to think about how what they do has broader impacts on society and how they can do the things that they need to do better, to either minimize those impacts or in some cases make positive contributions…. one of the things that we’ve done at UBC which I think has been interesting, and fun and successful, are we’ve created a program where a student can study in almost anything as an undergraduate, at the university and get a Masters in business at the same time. the idea is to take someone who has an intrinsic interest in a field, biology or music or history, whatever it is, and get them to add some business training, so they can take that intrinsic interest and turn it into a career… It’s certainly brought a lot of interesting students into the school, and I think it’s been good for the other faculties as well to help create those kinds of relationships. The program’s only, it must be about three or four years old now and it has 800 students and so it’s been very successful in helping us bridge some of these gaps that exist across the university.”

Building on this theme, Helsley says “When I talk now to people who run the banks or the big consulting companies, they still hire MBAs obviously, but they also hire people with liberal arts backgrounds who have a particular set of skills or maybe the ability to think critically in a different way, that they find very valuable. This idea about creating a diversity of thought within the business school or a business environment, I think both of those are super important and are going to be more so in the future.”

There’s going to be an enormous need for additional adult education in the future

Upskilling and Retraining

While the business school is staking out its position in bringing diverse knowledge and interest together to foster new thinking and solutions, Helsley is also aware that the context that they prepare many graduates for is changing at an ever-increasing pace, and so the need to upskill continuously – or at least – regularly, is becoming ever more pressing. “One of the things we hear a lot about, that seems to me to be prescient for the market for executive education in the future, is that there are vast numbers of people who may be displaced by technology in different ways. And there’s a large conversation about the future of work and the need for upskilling and retraining in different ways, everything is telling us I think, that there’s going to be an enormous need for additional adult education in the future. Some of it may be at the executive level for professionals, but it may be broader than that.”

Creating a diversity of thought within the business school or a business environment

Looking to the future Helsley sees that the role of data science and technology will only increase, both in demand at the university and from the world of work but to counter-balance that, he is hopeful that Sauder students will have a broader, more human perspective that allows them to visualize business impact beyond the current narrow focus.

“I hope that in the future, we will be graduating people who will have a different perspective on what it means to be a business professional; that part of what they do is they pursue a purpose through an organization and there’s prosperity there and that’s fine, but they also are considerate of the impacts their decisions have on other people, other margins, for lack of a better word. So environmental consequences, inter-generational consequences, equity, these kinds of things.”