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The acceleration of sustainable development initiatives across the global marketplace has stimulated a variety of responses from both global companies and business schools as they race to adapt to increasingly powerful demographic, economic and technological changes.
Yet the direct relationship between companies and business schools remains uneven, both in actions and in results. This is reflected in the often ad hoc nature of their collaboration, the differing approaches to teaching sustainable development, and the burgeoning need for new skill sets among graduates.
The World Environment Center recently convened 40 thought leaders from multinational companies across a variety of sectors, as well as representatives from academia and non-governmental organizations, to examine the critical skills required of business leaders implementing sustainable development. 
Following an examination of current teaching approaches, 10 major ideas emerged around which business schools can integrate sustainable development into their teaching methodologies and curricula:
1. Understand Geo-political, Economic and Marketplace Trends Related to Sustainability
The structure of competitive relationships within the global marketplace is changing in response to a range of drivers, including population growth, rapid expansion of mega-cities, growth of the middle class in less-developed nations, and climate change. As a result, business schools must convey the importance of these factors as they relate to a company's continued survival and the sustainability of its products and practices. Students must understand these linkages and recognize their role in reshaping markets and business strategies.
2. Emphasize the Role of Science and Innovation in Advancing Sustainable Business Opportunities
Sustainability has become a catalyst for developing new products and processes that create value for business while solving a societal problem. Students that understand how scientific investment and innovation inform the product development cycle will experience a smoother transition into the private sector.
3. Demonstrate that Sustainable Business Strategies Must Ultimately Yield Profits
From an executive's perspective, sustainability is less about feeling good about your company's operations and more about how to maximize profits. Companies are increasingly modifying their product portfolios to take advantage of market opportunities introduced by sustainable development, such as alternative energy technologies, aircraft design, consulting services, green chemistry, information management services, materials design, and transportation fuels.
4. Examine the Role of Meaningful Partnerships and Opportunities for Efficiencies Along the Entire Value Chain
Sustainability encompasses the interconnectedness of players in the business world and cannot be fully achieved without considering both upstream and downstream activity. Global companies continue to experience rapid transformation in their structures, decision making processes and relationships with other companies through their value chains. Factors such as new business partners, the speed of decision making and sourcing of raw materials have become more prominent factors of success.
5. Stress the Importance of Communications Skills with Customers and Stakeholders
Given the evolution and greater transparency of civil society, combined with more product and service choices available to customers in many markets, the need for clear and effective communication at all levels of a company is essential. The ability to articulate the value that a company creates for its customers and stakeholders can expand its own flexibility in making and marketing its products and gaining access to key markets.
I beg to disagree with point
I beg to disagree with point 3. This is OLD thinking. It's a nice add-on if someone can make a financial profit by advancing sustainability, but facing a global ecological catastrophe it shouldn't be the condition for changing towards sustainable behavior. Sustainability is a MUST, no matter how much profits it can yield!
For the last 2 years, I have
For the last 2 years, I have been teaching a course called Sustainability and Responsible Leadership to 180 MBA students in China at the China Europe International Business School (http://www.ceibs.edu). A 5 month class (their longest in the curriculum), this is a require class of all students and has three components: Lectures that prepare them to understand and act as managers, group research on an issue of their choice, and practicum where they partner with an external group (profit, nonprofit/ SE, or government) or build their own business plan that would provide a scalable solution the issues they have research.
In this time, I have found that in teaching MBA students (my students are 70% Chinese/ 28-32 years old) about sustainability, and having an ultimate goal of developing them as future leaders, the issues must be presented in a way that is tangible, in a format that students will engage in, and will ultimately allow them to put what they are learning into practice.
Students are often quite passionate about the issues faced (environmental and otherwise), but what they are missing is an understanding of how those issues impact them, the core drivers of the problems we face, and how to break those driver down into pieces that are manageable.
So, I would agree with the above list of things that business schools must teach, but I would add the following to that list:
1) Do not teach sustainability, facilitate it. Sustainability means very different things to people with very different backgrounds. In China, the #1 issue for my students last year was elderly care, but this year it is food safety and air pollution. My job, is to link these issues through a process of mapping out issues, systems, stakeholders, and then providing a road to solutions that can be mimicked by students across their issues.
2) Reframe the topics of sustainability away from the environmental foundation this topic current is built on, and balance it will issues of economic development and societal/ community stability. Focusing on the environment, carbon, and cleantech is okay for an elective classes, but if the goal is to develop a broad based capacity improvement, then students have to be brought in and interested through a different framework
3) Integrate, and reinforce, the topics of sustainability across all courses, and match students to live projects with external parties as often as possible. Economics professors have to teach externalities, and operations management professors have to cover labor costs and quality control risks. These are all interlinked at the end of the day to the three pillars of the triple bottom line, and through the constant reinforcement from different subjects, students will begin learning how to see the issues for what they are and how to respond to them differently than their predecessors
4) Require it. At this point, the only management school in the world that I can find that requires ALL students exit with a course in sustainability is CEIBS, and that is just not enough. There are a lot of schools that are bringing in electives (MIT S lab, Duke, Columbia, and Stanford), and some schools have developed great dual degrees between their management and environmental schools, but this needs to be embedded into the management schools on a required level if there is to be a fundamental change in the way future business leaders will make decisions.
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http://www.collectiveresponsibility.org
If we are to seriously
If we are to seriously progress sustainability, management must also focus on invention and innovation, the core components of change.
While I absolutely agree that
While I absolutely agree that sustainable development must be incorporated throughtout the curricula of business schools, I would add something that seems missing from your list: Understanding and respecting other cultures. You can't just come in with a new idea that satisfies international law and meets with the approval of the folks in power. It has to be something that the target population can afford, desire, use and repair. It has to mesh with cultural norms or build on them.
My second caveat regarding your list is in item 3. Sustainable business can and should make a profit but I question the word "maximize." By maximizing bottom-line profit, companies often face disasters in the long-term, from oil spills to high employee turnover. Maximizing long-term return on both the monetary and environmental bottom lines is what we should be teaching, not just grab all you can at this moment in time.