CENTER FOR BUSINESS
AS AN AGENT OF WORLD BENEFIT

Business as an Agent of World Benefit: Leadership and the Global Agenda

This course attempts to develop leadership values and competencies in Organization (OD) within the global arena. Objectives for the course include: (1) developing an executive view of the state of the world; (2) building skills in appreciative inquiry for researching best practices of organizations to maintain sustainable economic development; (3) learning how to build organizational capacities for responding to the global agenda for change; and (4) developing a global consciousness to a larger set of global values to provide a vision for a better world and the potentials of our organizations to assist in realizing such a vision.

Building the Sustainable Enterprise

In the recent decade “sustainability”, or a way of harmonizing economic, social and ecological development, has moved from the fringes of public discourse to the covers of Fortune and Vanity Fair. Traditionally, the sustainability-prone community has been more concerned with the "what,” rather than the "how” of sustainability, whereby issues of implementation remained in a big black box. Meanwhile, the early pioneers venturing into this unknown territory discovered an ever-changing terrain, requiring innovation, adaptation, and complex solutions. This course offers an opportunity to practice the “how” of sustainability by working with organizations in need of fresh thinking and hands-on support as they build strategies, processes, products, or partnerships that enable them to live in mutual benefit with the earth's ecosystems and the world's societies. To do so, participants will work in teams assisting a client system with co-design of sustainable processes, products, or partnerships as identified with the client. The teams are asked to create a one-day event – a “Sustainability Laboratory” – that would allow for rapid design of solutions requested by the client. Furthermore, teams will develop and implement the ‘follow up’ with the client system to support the project life beyond the team’s intervention. Professional presentations and papers are developed to advance collaborative learning among participants and clients.

Sustainability for Strategic Advantage

Sustainability issues such as energy security, air quality, climate change and poverty are introducing greater levels of complexity into strategic decision-making and often have far-reaching implications for companies in today’s competitive environment. Pressing ecological and social challenges are becoming business opportunities. Stakeholder value – based on the economic, environmental, and social impacts a company has on its diverse constituents – is a rapidly growing source of competitive advantage. Taking advantage of this source, however, requires a change in the mindset of leadership and a disciplined approach to integrating stakeholder value throughout the business. Case studies of leading mainstream companies are used to analyze how value is created for a range of social and environmental initiatives. Participants will look at sustainability strategies that reduce risks, drive down costs, create new revenue streams, serve new markets, and position companies to take advantage of regulatory change. Environmental issues such as climate change are covered along with social issues such as global poverty. Participants acquire competencies required to make effective business decisions based on integrating sustainability into the core of their organizations.

Business Ethics

This course is built around two core learning tracks. The first is extended analyses of case studies, which identifies ethical problems, diagnoses import, and develops strategic programs to address them. The second learning track uses short pieces of fiction to explore issues of ethical character, leadership, and organizational responsibility. Each student keeps an ethics journal over the course of the semester to reflect on ethical issues, both inside and outside the classroom. In addition, small student groups are formed to write case studies focusing on a business ethics problem.

Economics of Developing Countries

Economics of State and Local Governments

This course uses economic analysis to gain insight in the U.S. system of state and local governments. In the case of local governments, unlike the familiar case of the U.S. government, people often display their displeasure with the government’s actions by leaving rather than by voting against the incumbents. A careful consideration of the circumstances under which people will choose “exit” (moving out) over “voice” (voting) is central to the course. We’ll also examine economic theories of why people vote and how people vote. We consider a broad range of policy issues. Among them are school finance, zoning, local government economic development policies, lotteries, and affordable housing policy. Of course, we also analyze the full range of state and local government taxes, including the property tax, personal income tax, corporate income tax, and sales tax.

Energy Economics and Engineering Solutions

This course examines the economics of markets for various energy sources, and the potential of emerging technologies to alter the market outcomes. We will look at why energy markets have historically been subject to extensive government intervention. We will analyze the effects of traditional policy measures such as price controls and regulation; and we will examine current policy issues arising from the relationships among energy use, economic growth, and the environment.

Environmental Economics

Finance, Law and Corporate Governance

Motivated by recent financial crises and by countries’attempts to remake their financial systems, financial economists and legal scholars have investigated the importance of both specific laws and of entire legal systems for the development of securities markets, banking systems, accounting standards, dispersed shared ownership, and even economic growth. Some of the research shows directly how law, ownership, boards and management compensation all play interconnected roles in corporate governance. Other strains of this research examine the importance of law for specific financial outcomes related to corporate governance, including venture capital, takeovers and corporate control, securities trading, and the value added (or destroyed) by business lawyers’ activities. This seminar course uses readings, presentations, discussion and writing to learn about these matters.

Fraud, Governance and Reporting

This course examines managerial fraud, primarily that made possible by the manipulation of accounting. This includes treatments of the motives for fraudulent behavior but focuses primarily upon the techniques of earnings management and the processes of its detection. Governance of organizations in the post-Enron, WorldCom and Tyco environment will also be studied. Regulation and the duties of those responsible for proper governance are among the topics in this portion of the course. Guest speakers from the forensic industry and materials from practice institutes will be employed.

Social and Political Environment of Management

This course is concerned with the relationship between business activities and the broader social environment. Business is a part of society and has responsibilities and obligations beyond mere profit maximization. These responsibilities and obligations are those that fall on all citizens: to contribute to the health and well-being of our democracy and civil society. In this course, we will explore and debate these responsibilities and obligations in the context of a broad array of ideas and cases. Our goal will be to make some progress toward answering the question: “What is the right ethical responsibility of business, both inside and outside the organization, and how is it correctly implemented?”

Social Ethics and Taxes

This course engages students as tax compliance volunteers for lower-income people in the Greater Cleveland area. This “hands-on” experience provides a means for managers to better understand the concerns of “rank-and-file” employees that may be affected by corporate action.

Urban Economics

Microeconomic theory as taught in principles (and even intermediate) does not usually take into account the fact that goods, people, and information must travel in order to interact. Rather, markets are implicitly modeled as if everyone and everything is at a single point in space. In the first part of the course, we will examine the implications of spatial location for economic analysis. In the second part of the class, we will use microeconomic tools to understand urban problems. Topics that we will cover include urban growth, suburbanization, land use, poverty, housing, local government, transportation, education, and crime.