the sustainability skillset
Sustain SC recently held an event bringing together scholars, business owners, and human resources managers to discuss the need for emerging students’ knowledge around sustainability. They called the awareness ‘the sustainability skillset’ and defined it as a core leadership competency. This episode defines sustainability beyond its buzzword status and talks about the efforts the Moore School is making to ensure students are aware of the required skills, metrics, and vocabulary around sustainability initiatives. The Moore School’s lead on sustainability is Dr. Kealy Carter, Clinical Associate Professor of Marketing.
Moore Impact: The Darla Moore School of Business Podcast · Kealy Carter, Kasie Whitener
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Show Notes
Episode 3: The Sustainability Skillset
Host:
Dr. Kasie Whitener, Clinical Assistant Professor, Management
Guest:
Dr. Kealy Carter, Clinical Associate Professor, Marketing
episode photo courtesy of Colorado State at this link.
Conversation topics:
- Applied research: what are the big issues facing businesses today?
- Sustainability - growth in sustainably marketing products
- Is sustainability a corporate buzzword?
- No, companies have been engaging on this for 35 or 40 years
- The word itself has just seen exponential use in media and policy
- UN sustainable development goals
- Environmental, Social, Economic
- Sustainability is a global problem and requires attention and action across multiple categories of stakeholders
- Corporate
- NGOs
- Governments
- Scope 1, Scope 2, Scope 3 emissions and companies addressing their own environmental impact
- Value chain impacts: how to we influence suppliers and consumers
- 1 - the emissions of your specific activities (i.e. manufacturing)
- 2 - the emissions of your suppliers as you accessed their products (i.e. energy production and consumption)
- 3 - all the emissions throughout your value chain - from raw material growth and transport, to product disposal - much harder to affect but where many companies are focused now
- In the classroom: what businesses are we studying? What conversations are we having?
- The business case for these focused activities
- This is not philanthropy or altruism, it’s strategy.
- The triple bottom line: People, Planet, Profit
- A lot of these companies have been on this journey for decades
- Investment community started paying attention to ESG performance
- The tension between short term gains and long term investments and where sustainability lives therein
- The sustainability concentration: a 12-credit sequence that can be added on to any major in the Moore School
- Lifecycle recognition and analysis
- Carbon footprint metrics and analysis
- Reporting frameworks and their strengths and weaknesses
- Collaborative efforts in South Carolina including SC Nexus for Advanced Resilient Energy
- The functional skillset and the bigger picture understanding of sustainability: an interdisciplinary concept that requires understanding outside of the traditional business education - get the science, get the engineering, get the added components to provide a full understanding and accessible skillset.
When you learn Moore, you know more, and when you know Moore, you do more.
Thanks for listening!
Moore Impact is a product of the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. For episodes, notes, and links visit sc.edu/moore