Shift toward more-ethical values signaled by growth of MBA club

By Linda Myers

No wonder the custard pies were flying earlier this month in the atrium of Sage Hall. Donations to a community food bank bought MBA students at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management the chance to throw a pie in the face of the target of their choice.

Kim Jones, MBA '02, now a Johnson School alumni relations staff member, gets ready to hurl another pie at the cream-covered face of Samuel "Griff" Norquist, MBA '03. The Nov. 1 MBA Food Fight event in the Sage atrium, sponsored by Community Impact, raised $5,000 for a local food bank. Courtesy of Kim Jones

The event, in which student donors aimed pies at professor of finance Roni Michaely, assistant professor of accounting Eric Eisenstein and other good sports, raised $5,000 in cash and nonperishable foods for Second Harvest. The pie-in-the face event was part of a national business school food drive for the needy.

The event was one of many this semester sponsored by Community Impact. With 184 members and growing, the student club is one of the largest at the Johnson School and the only one devoted entirely to giving back to the community, said current club president Christina Reddin. "It's a leadership opportunity for any student who wants to take on a project."

Students affiliated with Community Impact run a blood drive for the American Red Cross every three months, a charity auction each spring for the Community Foundation of Tompkins County, and several co-sponsored yearly conferences open to the campus and the community, including one this fall on sustainable enterprises and another in the spring on managing nonprofits. A toy drive for the Salvation Army's Angel Tree program runs from Nov. 20 through Dec. 6 this year, with collection bins in the Sage atrium. And Community Impact supports an online listing of student volunteer consultants for community nonprofit organizations, initially developed by Johnson School students as a Park Fellows leadership service project (see www.forum.johnson.cornell.edu/students/orgs/ci/ ).

Why has the club become so popular? "If you are interested in a career in the nonprofit sector, hope to serve on the board of a nonprofit organization or work in partnership with one, or simply care about social responsibility, volunteering with Community Impact offers a unique chance to train and learn," said Reddin.

The student organization is one of 50 campus chapters nationwide of Net Impact. The national network encourages members to use the power of business to improve the world. That enlightened view is winning a broader audience among business school students in the wake of the highly publicized accounting debacles at Enron, WorldCom and other stories of unfettered corporate greed, said Reddin. "People are eager to hear about us."

Reddin and other club members attended a conference in Washington, D.C., this October where they were energized by discussions on Net Impact's philosophy, described on its web site, http://www.net-impact.org , in this way: "Business has the potential to generate lasting solutions towards a better world, and these solutions are not necessarily at odds with the purpose of creating economic wealth."

The philosophy is exemplified by people like Paul Hawken, co-founder of Smith and Hawken and the author of Natural Capitalism, a book called the Bible for the next industrial revolution. Reddin heard Hawken deliver a Park Leadership talk at the Johnson School this September at Community Impact's sustainable enterprise symposium.

"He said, in a down economy it's a challenge to say, 'I want a job and the fulfillment of making the world a better place,'" said Reddin. "He helped us realize that the opportunity of a down cycle is things are going up, and if you're going to grow a business, you might was well grow it in a good way," from the start.

Growing a business in a good way means strategic thinking that looks toward the long term, rather than the next quarter's profits, and sees a company's stakeholders in the broadest terms, not just shareholders but the community and the environment, Reddin explained. Under such an approach, "growth can be good," noted Reddin. "As one speaker at the Net Impact conference put it, a tree that grows purifies the air and adds nutrients to the soil. Growth is bad only when it's depleting its surroundings."