KEDGE GLOBAL MBA : On the move to a more sustainable business

29/09/2022
In a short period of time, business leaders and managers have been challenged with major issues, questioning the way they operate as well as the survival of their company: price increase of raw materials including energy, need to reduce the company’s carbon footprint, integrate new regulations regarding Sustainable Development Goals (SDRs), give the company's employees a “reason to work”.  In brief, businesses face profound environmental and societal changes that challenge the usual way of creating value and growth.

Fully conscious of these challenges, we intend to support our EMBA participants to raise awareness with these issues and provide the relevant keys and tools to help them transforming those challenges into opportunities.

This support is based on a series of convictions:

  • A clear necessity for managers and leaders to review their business model in order to cope with the multiple transitions that society faces today. This fundamentally includes the energy and environmental transitions.
  • A shared sustainable model is becoming a necessity for the future of life on Earth, a legal obligation and as a consequence bear ambitious constraints (and opportunities) for all companies.
  • The principles of a contributing enterprise, i.e. the one that resynchronizes its ‘raison d'être’ with the living, are likely to be a requirement for organizations towards more sustainable business models.
  • From a managerial point of view, the usual top-down leadership approach, with an emphasis on authority, reaches its limits, and paves the way to a leadership based on trust and meaning. This will revolutionize organizational modes and call for new skills.
  • As the COVID-19 pandemic caused the largest and most far-reaching shock to the value chain in recent memory, it is only one of several disruptions to which companies must adapt to maintain performance or even survival… It challenges organizations to put in place effective strategies to be(come) resilient, being aware that it all starts with companies’ managers acquiring new mindsets.
  • At an international level, we have entered an era of tensions and profound geostrategic upheavals that are reflected in the polarization around major blocks, including China, Europe, the USA, Africa. It questions the principles of globalization. Such multi polarization and its economic decoupling consequences will ultimately challenge the way businesses grow, strategize, operate, manage supply chains and invest in markets.

For the last two years, KEDGE Global Executive MBA has started to deliver content based on these convictions.

From 2023, we will be pushing the cursor even further with the new Executive MBA intake.

Companies may be stuck with standards, legal boundaries and global logics that need to be overcome. A tangible “out of the box” starting point may be having managers’ mindsets evolving and new ecosystems emerging. KEDGE Global Executive MBA programme proposes a renewed approach, connected to the reality of day to day business.

In the meantime, KEDGE will self-apply these convictions and monitor its carbon footprint decrease and make its MBAs an inclusive one. This will start with the Executive MBA delivery mode, of which 30 % will be delivered remotely to reduce the number of travels required to complete programme.

The world is changing. It prompts us to adapt, question our way of working and “raison d’être”. This is not a matter of “should we move?” but of “how do we move?”