MBA in Sustainable Business at
Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI)

At 42 with 20 years of business experience from the Fortune 500 to a successful entrepreneurial solar company and as the recent founder of my own firm, I was not thinking MBA. I had looked at business programs in the past, in fact I was accepted to Harvard’s executive management program but life got in the way. Now thinking about such a program left me hollow because I didn’t think the MBA crowd was ready for my attitude that business is about more than making this months numbers. I had played the game both ways and my experience told me that the more you worry about the dollars the less business makes sense, and I had helped entrepreneurs make millions to prove it.

Then I saw Gifford Pinchot speak at a conference about sustainable business and the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI), a school he and is wife Elizabeth Pinchot helped found. BGI was formed when leading thinkers in the sustainability community who had been working to influence the curriculum at major B-schools, with some success, became exasperated with the pace of change in academia. They wanted to build a sustainable business curriculum from the core and teach how to achieve the lasting competitive advantage that would make companies more successful financially, environmentally and socially. I was enrolled for an MBA in Sustainable Business within weeks.
The program fit my values, my life style and my business goals. The material is cutting edge. Rather than an add-on classes, environmental and social responsibility is built into every part of a rigorous MBA. The program combines one long weekend per month of face-to-face class time with an on-line, distance learning environment. This format allows students from all over the country to participate and keep working. The school encourages students to use their real life circumstances as part of class work, which is not only more relevant; it helps share rich experience and real life situations among the students and faculty.

The students are mostly mid career professionals from a wide variety of businesses as well as nonprofit and social ventures. For me, the mix of experience and perspective has been an unexpected benefit, an element that is fostered by the cooperative, learning community style of the program.

In addition to a powerful core faculty, an exiting element has been visiting professors. Adjunct faculty from all over the country are seeing BGI as an opportunity to quickly develop sustainable business course material in near real time and prove to their organizations that there is a market for it. Faculty from leading programs are helping to make the BGI experience richer while achieving one of the aims of the school, influence other institutions.

I’m only half way through the 21 month program but the MBA in sustainable business has already improved my company and opened new personal opportunities. Although I’m working harder than I have in a long time, I’m working through my values to make a positive impact and achieve a goal I really believe in, in my business, at school and in my life.

5/3/04

By Kevin Hagen