I recently discovered that the World Resources Institute has had a program for years to try to change the MBA education system to train students about sustainability and green issues. Checking out their website, I discovered that their ranking program “Beyond Grey Pinstripes” had listed Stanford U. School of Business as the top school recently.

I checked their website to explore how this might be evident. Although courses seemed to go by standard titles, the university had this fall hosted a Net Impact Conference with Al Gore as the keynote speaker. Most notable was their Center for Social Innovation http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/csi/index.html . One feature article in a recent CSI review “The Myth of CSR: the problem with assuming that companies can do well while also doing good is that markets don’t really work that way â€? by Deborah Dione noted that CSR lulls us in to a false sense of security, is really a “placebo, leaving us with immense and mounting challenges in globalization for the foreseeable futureâ€?.

In her report she includes the Corporation 20/20 Draft Principles (http://forums.seib.org/corporation2020/), a project to redesign the corporation. (if interested, you can still download a copy of the complete article from the CSI website).

Another, hopeful, voice is Raymond Baker of the Brookings Institute, who recently spoke at the World Affairs council and wrote “Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System”. He got an MBA from Harvard in the 60s and has spent most of his life in Africa and third world countries; noting the stability and hope of the Peace Corps heyday in the 60s, he contracts a very dangerous world now with corrupt leaders around the world and in banking institutions – like Citibank. He thinks we can clean up capitalism (tho a big job now). He deals well with social issues, but did not focus lots on environmental issues.

There seem to be a going openness to healthy criticism. Hopefully the Fred Smiths of the planet will wake up soon.

Citizens are supposed to follow the laws of the land or face the consequences. Corporations, on the other hand, are not, unless the public holds them accountable.