Managing for Resilience: Lessons from Ecology

Many business schools embrace a mission or purpose to develop leaders with a focus on values and principles. In this article, we discuss the role of the institutional mission in teaching sustainability within a business school, and illustrate how mission can be adopted as a framework for discussing and operationalizing sustainability. Specifically, we provide examples of how to adopt mission orientation within a core business course in order to achieve a deeper awareness of sustainability issues and how a single business decision can impact many stakeholders. Moreover, while several of the pedagogical methods presented draw from Jesuit tradition, the strategies discussed can be applied within secular institutions. This article describes how this framework was used to encourage students to make sound and conscientious decisions in a business setting. In addition, we suggest methods for navigating obstacles in integrating mission orientation into undergraduate and graduate level courses.