Prof. Shrivastava: we need new business models that are ecologically sensible and wellbeing oriented

On November 12, 2024, the Corvinus University of Budapest inaugurated Paul Shrivastava, a world-renowned scientist in sustainability science and corporate environmental management “Doctor et Professor Honoris Causa”. Paul Shrivastava is Professor of Management at the Pennsylvania State University Smeal College of Business and Co-president of The Club of Rome. He is author of 20 books and 150 papers. His works have been cited nearly 25,000 times; his Hirsh index is 55.  

Can you summarize your view on the role and responsibility of business in the Anthropocene? 

To understand the role of business in the Anthropocene, we need to recognize that the world is changing in terms of the natural environment, technology, and social and economic environment. Businesses need to continue to be the engines of wealth production, but they cannot do it in the same way that they did in the past 50 years. The Anthropocene era presents new ecological limits and new social expectations. We cannot continue to do business as usual. The social expectations are reflected in the idea that as human beings we want our needs to be satisfied, to be able to self-actualize. In between the common well-being for Earths and all the people on it and the limit of planetary boundaries, there is a safe operating space within which businesses need to operate.  

Businesses also need to play a role in distribution of wealth in a more equitable manner. At the same time, they need to contribute to regenerating the natural ecosystems because with 10 billion people on Earth, the ecological load is going to increase. They have a responsibility for assuring that the natural ecosystems do not collapse. This requires a very different kind of business functioning. The normal business models that are largely extractive and accumulative of capital, need to be modified. 

Do you see a positive potential in business for the future of the Earth? 

The potential of business is vital because without wealth, there cannot be prosperity to be shared. We need to modify the definition of how much aggregate demand that businesses will satisfy, the pricing structure, the scale at which businesses impact the Earth. I see a very positive role for businesses, but not for businesses that represent the old model. We need to think about new business models that are more socially responsible, more ecologically sensible and less consumption oriented. 

We made a lot of progress in the last 100 years in creating businesses, but we also uncritically let businesses accumulate too much wealth and power without understanding the social consequences of it. It is a great opportunity for businesses to rethink how they can be productive and useful to society in the next 100 years. 

How can business education be renewed in response to the grand challenges of the Anthropocene? 

Business education is responsive to the needs of business. But business education needs to be responsive to the needs of society. As educators and scholars Business School Faculty are supposed to be independent thinkers. We are supposed to be doing the analysis of what the world needs, what society needs, what our communities need. Business schools need to raise the level of their research to connect it to the real-world problems outside, but also to connect it to the Earth and life sciences. We need to listen to the needs of the global society, and overcome some of the limitations that are put on by artificial barriers. The narrow focus of business education on profit-making, is not sufficient if we want to develop businesses that are responsive to the Anthropocene challenges. Many of the things that make us more nationalistic or more local might need to be reassessed by business school academics as they are doing their work. This is not easy, as business school academics are not trained to think in planetary terms. The Anthropocene requires a mind expansion exercise for business schools. 

Can you mention some good, innovative, pioneering examples of business schools? 

When I look at the curriculum of the top business schools, they acknowledge to some degree that there are challenges, but their frames are fairly traditional and inadequate to address the grand challenges of the Anthropocene. I also see some business schools that are trying to innovate, and where the faculty are more mindful and more multidisciplinary, connected to the Earth and life sciences. Some business schools have developed Green MBA programs like Bard College, the University of Vermont, Cornell University, Valparaiso University etc. Others develop courses on sustainability management and incorporating sustainability into other courses. I would like to see a change in the definition of what constitutes a good business school. The way the current rating agencies measure success is how much money a business school graduate makes after graduation. This is a wrong measure, so we need to rethink what it means a business school to be truly innovative and be responsive to needs of society. You could also see this as an opportunity for business schools to try to capture that space and become relevant to the coming years. 

What are the main projects and research priorities of The Club of Rome today? 

The Club of Rome focuses on main areas from planetary emergency to emerging new civilizations, and to youth leadership and intergenerational dialogue. Let me highlight some of our activities.  

The “Reframing Economics” activity hub is based on the presumption that the economics of the last 100 years will not survive the Anthropocene, and humanity will not survive the Anthropocene if we pursue traditional economics. We started a project on how we rethink economics for the future. The outcome of it is a Club of Rome Report called “Earth4All” (published in 2022). Earth4All is calling for five major transformations: to eliminate poverty, to empower women, to change our energy systems, to transform our food systems, and to reduce inequality among nations and among people within nations. Some of these transformations are now being implemented in several countries like Germany, Austria and Kenya.  

Another area in which we are working is  Emerging New Civilizations, with our project  “The Fifth Element”, (the fifth element represents life). How do we create life more regeneratively rather than extracting resources out of the Earth? Can we rethink ourselves as being human in ways that also contribute to the natural environment, so living more regeneratively in a kind of ‘eco-civilization’? Within that framing there are a number of smaller projects because this is a very culturally specific area. It will be implemented differently in Africa, in Europe, or in the United States. We are doing a number of studies in that space.  

We are also keen on advancing knowledge on the area of Planetary Peace. We are sitting in the midst of major international conflicts. We have ongoing wars in Ukraine, in Gaza and Israel, and the Darfur conflict in Somalia which is continuing for almost a decade now. Many of these conflicts involve nuclear armed nations. This is a very disturbing, because if we do not have peace, we cannot make progress on sustainability. The way we have been thinking about peace in the past is as an absence of conflict or absence of war. The historical peace discourse is about national security between nations. We think that in the Anthropocene, the source of mass violence is not just going to be wars, but also the crashing of ecosystems. Already we know that some ecosystem breakdowns can kill hundreds of thousands of people, and soon it is going to be in the millions of people as climate change exacerbates. So, planetary peace needs to be a protection against all existential risks that are posed by the Anthropocene: pandemics, climate change, nuclear wars, maybe even AI as a potential risk for humankind. We are developing the idea that peace needs to be built into every sphere of life. There has to be an economy of peace, a society or social or community building with peace centric processes. Education needs to make itself peace centric. Planetary peace needs to be infused into all the spheres of life.  

What is your collaboration with Corvinus? 

Corvinus professor László Zsolnai and I have been working together for over a decade. Initially it was mostly around issues of business ethics, and over the time the collaboration has evolved to include questions of sustainable business models. We started a book series at Palgrave-Macmillan with the support of the Future Earth Program that have led to 15 volumes. Intellectually what I find most interesting about our collaboration is thinking through what the future of business is going to be within the context of the Anthropocene. Trying to bring together the earth sciences, the life sciences, humanities, the arts, and spirituality that are defining the Anthropocene, into an understanding of consequences for business.  

More recently we have written about the well-being economy, and what we call “well-being organizations”. Business has not thought about well-being in a serious way. They have thought about economic productivity and efficiency, and economic and labor outputs and performance, but not about how this translates into well-being for a community or for a society as a whole. On the educational side we want to develop models whole person development. I hope that we will engage more young scholars into this conversation. My vision for our collaboration at Corvinus is to establish a place in which we show the way for the future. We should do it not only in research but also in action, by engaging businesses and community members to actually make a difference on the ground. We want to take this idea to the next level: how does a university think innovatively and then engage the community to implement those ideas. I am hoping that it is where we can take our collaboration in the future.