JON FOSTER-PEDLEY: No more shoring up the ship of fools

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres delivered a stark warning at the COP27 climate summit in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, on Monday: “Countries across the world face a stark choice: co-operate or perish.”

While the annual summit offers world leaders and their delegates the opportunity to meet to discuss tackling climate change and cutting carbon emissions, the problem is the emphasis is on discussion, not action. There have undoubtedly been gains in the 30 years since COP was first established, but the commitments made by participating countries have for the most part not translated into the action needed to shift the course of climate change.

Despite more people and organisations concluding that the costs of profit-focused capitalism are too high, that poverty and exclusion can only end badly, the ship that is climate action appears to be running aground.

This calls for a new response. In short, everyone needs to be an activist. If the ship on which you are a passenger is headed for the rocks because the captain refuses to alter course, do you have the right — obligation even — to take control and save the ship? Would you do so even if that meant you may go to prison?

These questions apply to universities, and business schools in particular. Those of us working in this sphere are perhaps uniquely placed to lead the movement to conceive and build a new system of economics, instead of shoring up the asphyxiating monoliths and merely delaying the inevitable.

At face value the goals of a business school and those of an activist are directly at odds. While an activist is someone who works to bring about political or social change, business schools are often conservative, producing generations of leaders who served a capitalist system in which, as US economist Milton Friedman noted, the responsibility of business is only “to engage in activities designed to increase its profits”.

But when profits are measured through the benefits accrued from cutting down forests, polluting rivers and emitting billions of tonnes of CO², and when those same polluters spend billions of dollars discrediting climate science consensus, something has gone awry.

Transforming the ways business leaders organise their activities and reposition corporations from producing profits, to producing profitable solutions to the problems of the world is long overdue.

As institutions of learning we are able to do something concrete and do it quickly. We can change what we teach, what research we undertake, who we work with and how we shape and equip our graduates to lead. And with business schools across Africa collectively graduating upward of 10,000 potential change makers each year, the impact could be substantial, especially if we scale climate leadership through collaboration — as the newly launched Business Schools for Climate Leadership - Africa (BS4CL-Africa) seeks to do.

In shaping activist business leaders we will need to make sure they understand the stakes, that they have made reality their friend, and that they have the confidence and moral compass to demand to be held accountable by their staff and their communities, as well as their shareholders.

These leaders will insist that every decision that is taken is checked against the doughnut model, or a better derivative: to ensure that it breaches neither the inner nor the outer ring. And they’d need to be prepared to understand that sometimes, doing the right thing might require doing the “wrong” thing. We have to teach them that too. As Martin Luther King reminds us: there are two types of laws: just and unjust.

These are the kind of leaders we need to be producing, because they are the ones who may save our world and make it fit for all of us to live in — even if we can’t see that right now.

Of course, organisations must thrive and make profit, but profit that serves the purpose, not vice versa. We need to produce leaders who are pulling the big levers, not obsessed by quarterly key performance indicators. Leaders fearless enough to face our shadows, even when they feel like impostors in this world of change, and embrace it. Fearless enough to step up. Fearless enough to know that you don’t own a leadership position — you only borrow it — and that one day it will go, and you’ll just be you again. Fearless enough to be ordinary and have little, fearless enough to fight for a purpose. Fearless enough to be fair even if it means facing up to friends and colleagues.

Maybe we will fail. But we may have pushed the boundary back far enough for those who follow us to take the battle forward, and that is important. The success of activism is likely to be over the long term. 

A new collaborative spirit is emerging among business schools, drawn together to form an alliance to build awareness and climate action. We know that we also face a choice at this critical juncture: to maintain our holding pattern or to step into the space of activism; to build people who build the businesses that matter in the real world we face, not in a derelict dogma.

Let’s not make our children pay for our inertia, let’s get creative — and be fearless! 

• Foster-Pedley is dean and director of Henley Business School Africa and chairs the Association of African Business Schools. Business Schools for Climate Leadership – Africa was launched at the AUC School of Business in Cairo on Monday, in parallel with COP27.