Managing Responsibly: Practicing Sustainability, Responsibility and Ethics

Managers are increasingly confronted with issues of sustainability, responsibility and ethics. Managing responsibly is an integrative approach to sustainability, responsibility and ethics, which allows you as a manager to deal competently with such challenges. This course will facilitate your learning process to engage in changing practices to make them more sustainable, responsible, and ethically informed.

We will first introduce the context of the trend towards responsible management practices (week 1). We then explore the basics of each set of issues, sustainability (week 2), responsibility (week 3), and ethics (week 4). In week 5 you will work on your own responsible management issue/task and explore responsible management practices in an area of professional interest (e.g. strategy, entrepreneurship, innovation, organization, operations, supply chain, human resources, marketing and communication, international management, accounting and finance). In week 6 we will try to understand and experience what managing responsibly means in practice, including opportunities and challenges, and with a focus on transformative change. During these last two weeks you will work in a problem-oriented way, based on a challenging topic you have come across in your own management practice.

In the course we will form multicultural teams to learn about problems you bring forward. The course also facilitates the formation of peer networks that allow you to continue this learning experience after finishing the MOOC. The MOOC is an initiative in collaboration with the UN-supported Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) initiative.

Overall Learning Outcomes

1) To provide an introduction to the three constituting fields of managing responsibly: sustainability, responsibility and ethics.

2) To help apply the knowledge and insights gained from these three fields to real life problems in your own setting.

3) To identify, understand and facilitate individual action that can lead to change at the organisational and system level …to ‘act is to move’

4) To learn to appreciate and bring together different points of view, and negotiate collective solutions to pressing problems.

Who is this MOOC for? (Recommended Background)

While this course is primarily designed for executives who want to work on particular responsible management issues and create responsible management practices, also advanced business students will find it helpful.

Suggested Readings

There are no specific required texts. However, the contents and assignments of this course have been based on the following book which might be helpful as complementary materials: Laasch, Oliver, and R. Conway (2014).

Principles of responsible management: Global sustainability, responsibility and ethics, Cengage Learning: Mason.