A year of Green Business School

Our wonderful quartet for the NYCLab management consulting course: me, Shelby, Milana, and Sakhi. 

In 2023/24 I embarked on a year of business school. Out of my year-long post-Artiphon sabbatical came a decision to do some specialized schooling and I chose Bard College's green MBA program. Bard, my undergrad alma mater, has a trio of degrees in its Graduate Programs in Sustainability: education, policy, and business. The green business school is one of the few specifically designed around environmental and social impact (Princeton Review ranked it the top green MBA program and the #2 MBA for nonprofit management – nice accolades for a program with only some 40 students per cohort).

It was humbling to return to school. I love reading, learning, solving problems, and thinking hard, but going back into the classroom and being responsible for assignments, papers, presentations, group projects, and tests was something I hadn't felt in a few decades. Indeed, at age 43 I was one of the oldest kids there.

I had considered the full MBA degree but opted for the year-long Advanced Certificate in Sustainable Busienss (the MBA full degree is either two years full-time or three years part-time). Being a part-time student was plenty demanding. I was working my "day jobs" four days a week with classes two nights a week from 7:00 to 10:00pm. Fridays and weekends I often cleared for school work (and career development) and there were many meetings and work sessions for various team projects each week. The Bard program is a hybrid format: once a month, students convene in Brooklyn for a four day weekend of back-to-back classes. This meant that on the last Thursday of each month I was on the road to NYC for a packed four days of in-person classes.

So what was contained in all this? I took courses in Accounting, Finance, Strategy, a year-long management consulting project, and I audited Marketing. There was also cornerstone course taught by a notable professor that ended in a complex meltdown, an episode that truly threw the program into months of turmoil but to my knowledge hasn't been written about publicly. More on that below.

Here's a look at the courses I took what I valued most about them.

Accounting

Accounting is taught first semester, Finance the second (prefaced by a rather grueling online MBA Math prerequisite and a quantitative crash coarse to get the numerically-rusty of us into shape).

Both courses are taught by a duo of instructors who worked together brilliantly and brought complimentary experiences and skills. Janice Shade held a senior position at Seventh Generation has served in a variety of roles in business and nonprofits, currently working on innovative community finance projects in Vermont. Jesse Gerstin, a Bard MBA himself, is more of a self-taught finance wunderkind who until recently was doing wealth management for Querty Capital, an advisory firm for gender non-binary clients, but recently became a VP at Inclusiv where he’s implementing a $1.87 billion federal fund offering grants to credit unions that give green loans in low-income communities.

The two of them taught the fundamentals rigorously but with a gentle enough touch to not make spreadsheets, formulas, and financial statements panic-inducing.

Accounting taught the basics of financial statements (balance sheet, income, cash flow), time value of money (net present value and internal rate of return), and ratios for analyzing company financials. We worked from a pretty standard Wiley textbook but had plentiful readings and guest speakers highlighting environmental initiatives in the private sector and financial markets.

I was particularly fascinated to learn about the current state of corporate environmental reporting frameworks such as TCFD (Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures) and the ISSB (International Sustainability Standards Board).

I also wrote a paper on the proposed (and highly contested) updates to the Securities and Exchange Commission reporting standards, which is considering requiring environmental reporting in all corporate 10-K financial statements. If adopted, all public companies would be required to publicly report on the greenhouse gas emissions of their business activities as well as climate change related implications for business risk, governance, outlook, and company strategy.

The world of corporate reporting on ESG (environmental, social, and governance) metrics has grown into a sophisticated and technical field, and has begun to really change the way businesses measure their performance (especially in Europe where all this is taken much more seriously).

I had to choose a public company and conduct a financial analysis and report, and I chose Kilroy Realty Corporation, an environmentally progressive real estate investment trust (REIT) that rents office buildings to the likes of Netflix and the west coast life sciences industry.

The first semester of each year also includes a "startup competition" where student teams create a concept for a venture, build a business and go-to-market plan and pitch to panels of judges. I wasn't thrilled about the exercise of launching a mock startup, but I learned a lot from the concept my team and I chose (converting vacant downtown office buildings into affordable co-housing residential apartments). The project opened my eyes to the model of co-housing, an approach to multi-family dwellings that bring residents together around shared spaces and communal activities. It gave me insight into the post-covid real estate landscape (was fascinated by a new Brookings Institution report on what it takes to convert empty office buildings into green residential). And honestly it was a good practice to run the basic financials of a new business – good to be in shape for this whether advising or launching my own projects.

Finance

Finance builds on Accounting. If accounting is about addition and subtraction, finance is about time and risk. I found this coursework similarly fascinating in terms of financial mechanics, but we got considerably deeper into the more theoretical dimensions of finance and more complex devices of the trade.

We studied public and private capital markets, mortgage calculations, bond calculations, modern portfolio theory, beta, a good bit of behavioral economics (one of my favorites), and lots more cost benefit analysis and time value of money.

The coursework was valuable both for the ways it can be applied in an institutional setting, but also very informative for managing personal finances like retirement investing, borrowing to buy a house, and evaluating the return on an investment (like adding solar panels to your roof).

Larger projects for this course included a team project to analyze a company and produce a valuation, the basis for how financial analysts estimate the investment potential of a corporation. My team chose a small(ish) publicly traded real estate firm called Veris that has undertaken environmentally progressive strategies across its residential portfolio and implemented strong diversity goals in its workforce. The valuation project involved compiling and analyzing the company's financial statements, tracking stock price, listening to earnings calls, and evaluating market trends. We also carried out calculations of the company's stock beta (a measure of share price volatility), weighted average cost of capital (WAAC), and other metrics that were all just jargon to me before taking this course.

We also designed an "ideal portfolio," an imaginary investment project for the purpose of our choosing. Projects ranged from personal retirement funds to university endowments. My topic ended up quite illuminating: I chose an endowment for The B.R.O. Experience, the education nonprofit I work with in Brooklyn. The fund was an imaginary $2M endowment that the organization would invest into values-aligned equities and private placements to generate perpetual returns that could be used to fund a portion of the organization's annual budget. Along the way I learned about a growing movement to assemble endowments for racial justice organizations that can help ensure funding, even if the whims of philanthropy shift.

Here are two recent reports on the topic: Funding Nonprofit Endowments (Center for Effective Philanthropy) Case Study: Endowment Funding as a Grantmaking Tool (The Bridgespan Group)

I appreciated that the course was realistic about teaching principles applicable to personal finance. We read the modern classic on personal investing, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, talked about stocks and bonds a lot, and got a lot of insight into investment opportunities that are aligned with environmental and social goals. Guest speakers included Alyssa Stankiewicz of Morningstar, Abbie Paris of As You Sow, Graham Singh, who is doing some beautifully complex finance magic to preserve churches as arts venues, and Yusuf George, who has been involved in some instrumental shareholder activism campaigns including with Engine Number One.

It was interesting to reflect on how, despite my dozen years in the business world (as well as owning and selling a home and investing in the stock market) I had so much to learn. I could feel my experiences in the field getting fortified by a more thorough understanding of underlying concepts. I also loved getting better at Excel, I have to admit. The course was also a reminder that even highly educated Americans tend to have very limited financial literacy. Throughout the year I had many conversations with friends and family where they confessed to understanding little about rather basic functions of their personal finances and the broader economy.

It was gratifying to turn around and apply things I'd learned into my real estate and nonprofit jobs. This week I enrolled in an online series of courses on finance for nonprofits to keep building on these skills.

Management consulting

A major piece of the year was a management consulting course called NYCLab, taught by Laura Gitman and David Korngold of BSR, one of the leading environmental and social impact consulting firms. NYCLab spans two semesters and centers on a team consulting engagement with an outside client (and ours was a remarkably moving relationship).

I loved this course as well. The fundamentals of consulting fascinated me. Our textbook and lectures on project management were joyful and I loved seeing deeper into that discipline. I loved the trainings on different forms of research. All the attention paid to the design of presentation decks was delicious. And we focused extensively on concepts like the pyramid principle, the formation of hypotheses, current state analyses, and 'Situation, Complication, Question, Answer' structures.

But the heart of the work was our client project. In teams we were assigned a client for the year and ours was a member of the Lakota Sioux tribe on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Tamara Stands and Looks Back-Spotted Tail is a Lakota leader with ambitions to build sustainable homes on her reservation to ease the vicious lack of proper housing. Rosebud sits in one of the nation's poorest counties and endures brutally cold winters. Many residents live in substandard housing, including FEMA trailers long past their intended use period, and it’s not uncommon for people to freeze to death in the winter. Tamara had started a company, Lakota Women Business, to construct homes from compressed earthen blocks, made from the soil itself, equip the homes with solar (she had worked on solar and wind infrastructure previously), and design houses with designated work studios for traditional craft-making, a business she had also been successful in.

I'd had a very moving experience the summer before visiting the Black Hills on a Zen Peacemaker Bearing Witness retreat to learn about the history and plight of the Lakota. It felt auspicious to go to business school in New York and find myself working for a Lakota reservation in the same region. The history I learned from the retreat helped a great deal with getting up to speed on projects like this with such intimate connection to Native culture, historical context, and the spiritual context with which Tamara approached her work.

My three team members brought a great set of skills and backgrounds to our project group. Shelby Mack works as Chief of Staff at Building Futures in Rhode Island that helps workers access apprenticeship programs and better employment. Milana Pakes was earning her MS in Climate Science and Policy as a double degree along with the MBA program and was interning at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. And Sakhi Ataye, a refugee from Afghanistan who fled the persecution of his ethnic group, the Hazara, fleeing the country with nothing but a backpack and a book of poetry. He'd been living in Kyrgyzstan for several years awaiting asylum in the US had arrived in the country for the first time just days before the MBA program began, moving into student housing above Penn Station, no less! Sakhi is the founder of a nonprofit, Kaaj Education, supporting girls and young women in Afghanistan, and recently took a great new position with the Yale Center for Business and the Environment.

Our cohesion was helped greatly by a process of creating a team charter (to define the contours of our working relationships) and a project charter (to clearly state our approach to the work). It articulated each role on the team (we rotated throughout the year), including project manager, team leader, client liaison, and "scribrarian" (the name we invented for the one who keeps track of notes and organizes files).

This was new to me and I loved it. Our professors emphasized how much it pays to take the time to lay this groundwork for healthy team relationships and clear workflow.

We in particular reflected a lot on how we wanted to approach a project with a population such as the Lakota. While other teams worked with clothing brands and investment banks, we wanted to ensure the utmost integrity, sensitivity, and a strong context of justice.

We quickly found how intimate the work was to Tamara, our client. All her efforts are a spiritual undertaking, and building homes from the very earth of her land was all the more so.

Our scope of work began by supporting with a grant application to the Department of Energy, which included financial modeling, long-form narrative, and a three-minute video (that I stayed up late for a week to edit myself). We then moved to the core of the project, which consisted of a package containing business modeling tools, a fundraising database, and a communications plan in the form of a long comms handbook.

We worked hard, put in late nights, juggled many meetings, and dealt with project turbulence. It was always interesting trying to interpret between east coast business school life and Tamara's world in a small rural Indian town. More than one meeting was delayed because the horses got out of her field and she needed to chase them down.

I felt a great amount of heart in the project. We built some beautiful rituals into our workflow, including opening meditations and a ceremony each month when we met in person in Brooklyn in which the current project manager would bring a poem to read. In fact, when we presented our final deliverables to our classmates and instructors (in person) and client (on zoom), we concluded with a Lakota poem. But Tamara topped us. When we'd finished our Powerpoint, she brought the room to tears by singing a traditional honor song to an awe-struck and deeply moved audience.

Strategy

In my second semester I I took Strategy with Sandra Seru, also a top BSR person and formerly at Forum for the Future. This class blended more traditional strategy principles with methods for navigating environmental and social impact. A common refrain was "business strategies for just and regenerative futures." This course was heavy on the readings, many of which were Harvard Business School case studies, both conventional and sustainable. We worked our way through traditional strategy frameworks (Porter's Forces, SWOT, PESTLE) and more sustainability focused devices such as materiality, futures, and systems thinking.

We had two group projects, The first was a case study analysis and our focused on a small Quebec education venture called Blacbiblio that designed classroom learning materials to teach Black Canadian history. The case study itself left quite of bit of detail to be desired, so one of my teammates phoned the number on the website and ended up inviting the founder to join our final presentation and take questions from the class!

Our second major project was to design a strategy for a organization of our choice. I was on a team that had chosen biodiversity as its focus area and we decided on the company NatureMetrics, a fast-growing British tech company specialized in the collection and analysis of environmental DNA. This eDNA technology can, amazingly, analyze soil and water samples from an ecosystem and deliver a detailed inventory of the life forms present, a process that is increasingly being required by governments when assessing developed or undeveloped areas of land. Our process was to dive into the company's business model, market landscape, growth potential, and potential positive impact on biodiversity, apply strategic lenses, and then present a set of strategy recommendations.

The semester was punctuated with guest speakers including Seventh Generation co-founder Jeffrey Hollender and B Lab CEO (and until recently Bard MBA faculty) Jorge Fontanez.

There were moments when I grimaced at how abstract strategy work can seem. Then there were moments when my worldview felt like it snapped into a larger perspective and I was seeing interconnecting systems with greater clarity. The most salient thing I took with me was the question of how we shift the mindsets that underpin the systems that shape the world. A simple diagram of an iceberg, a strategy concept, put this in my face.

In the iceberg model, events sit above the surface of the water, they're the things we see going on in the world. Holding those up, just below the waves, are patterns. Below those are the structures dictating the patterns. And deepest of all, the base of phenomena, are mental models. Then how, as strategists, do we influence mental models to shift? Class never got there. But the question has been catalytic for me, and turned out being one of the strongest takeaways from my year.

Principles of Sustainable Management

I also want to recount events that happened in my first semester that quite strongly shaped the course of the year. While it commanded the attention of the entire program and effectively brought the whole grad school to a stop for a period, to my knowledge it has gone undocumented in any public place. I don't claim mine is an authoritative narrative and I'll try to give as neutral an account as I can. I hesitate to air this out, but it would also be unsettling to omit it, especially since there has been so much silence outside of the community on it. And in truth it was a sizable part of my experience in this program.

The Bard MBA in Sustainability was at least to some degree co-founded by Hunter Lovins, a longtime voice in the sustainability movement. You can read her Wikipedia page and learn about her work co-founding the Rocky Mountain Institute with then husband Amory Lovins, about her many addresses to the UN and Club of Rome, and the books she's published. When my mind was first opening to environmentalism in college, her's were among the books that helped awaken me.

Since the inception of the MBA program she had taught a first year course called Principles of Sustainable Management meant to introduce a broad range of subjects and bring students into the world of sustainability and business and its many challenges. The trajectory of the course, the classroom management, and her teaching style had been the subject of a certain amount (maybe a lot) of negative feedback from students for some time, it seems, though there were also students who liked her teaching. She also advised on capstone projects and was a key faculty member in the pitch competition program I mentioned earlier.

In one evening's online class, in late September 2023, she screened a recent Apple commercial, the one where Tim Cook and his team nervously await the arrival of a visitor for an important meeting. The visitor turns out to be nature herself, come to evaluate Apple's environmental efforts. Nature is played by Octavia Spencer, and our classroom analysis of the ad turned to examining the choice of a Black woman for the role. In the course of the conversation, Lovins referred to a book titled "Why the Green [N-word]" (and she said the actual N-word). Following that, the class more or less progressed uninterrupted, though there were some surprised and concerned comments in the Zoom chat.

I had never heard of this book that Hunter referenced and I don’t think anyone else in class had either. The book was first published in 1979 (with the full title "Why the Green [n-word]?: Re-mything Genesis" by Elizabeth Dodson Gray, a scholar on topics of environmentalism and eco-feminism. The title of the book was changed soon after publishing to "Green Paradise Lost," and is still in print.

The next week an email was sent from the director of the program about the incident and included some articles about academic freedom and the use of racial expletives in educational contexts. Two days later there was an email from Hunter with an apology and an invitation to speak with students directly about what happened in class.

From there it would be hard to chronicle the number of meetings, online and in person, to try and address the shockwaves that threw the program into a near stand-still. A mediator was brought in. Senior college administrators addressed the cohort. Hunter's course ceased to meet, eventually with the director standing in for her and the course converted to pass/fail.

Hunter herself disappeared from the discourse and did not engage in any of the subsequent meetings. A Title IX case was filed within the college. Students met with the Bard College president. Emotions were very high. There were incidents of students being confrontational with each other. And a lot of class time was redirected toward the issue.

I don't think any students know exactly how Hunter's teaching position was handled, but from that point on she was not teaching in the program and we were told she would not return. "You won't be seeing her around here anymore" were the words of the program director. And we did not.

I relay all this because, A) I think this information should be out there and it currently isn’t, and B) because for me it was a large and very real part of my grad school experience, from which I probably learned as much as I would have from the course that never really happened. I can’t help but think that no journey back to a college campus could not include a wrenching clash over social issues, and I appreciated the dose of reality being part of part of a community navigating such a moment.

Reflecting

So what do I make of all this, returning to higher ed 20 years after my BA? In total, it was excellent. I think business school is underrated among those who might use its toolkit to benefit the world. I think there should be many more business school programs focused on environmental and social impact, otherwise doesn't business just get left to the pure-profit people?

The Bard program in particular, with its monthly residencies in Brooklyn, gave me the perfect excuse to stay in my beloved Bed Stuy, Brooklyn neighborhood where I'd lived for eight years before the move to Boston in 2022. In fact, each month I stayed at a friend's spare apartment just two doors down from the apartment building from which I was evicted in retaliation for tenant organizing. Couldn't have been more perfect.

Yes, I chaffed against plenty of things along the way, from questionable theories of degrowth to iffy understandings of artificial intelligence. I also struggled with what I saw to be a relatively pervasive, un-nuanced disdain for the modern economy and the free market in general – not surprising for environmentalists but also perhaps at odds with the ambition to harness the business world for good.

I also found myself frequently questioning (often quite openly) the program's official style of anti-racist pedagogy, initially laid out in a DEI intensive before the start of the program and influential in the program environment broadly. I also openly questioned the handling of the Hunter Lovins incident, and whether a professor should lose her job for what I agree was an act of extremely poor judgement. I was one of the only students to vocalize any questioning of this issue. I say all this as a person who works professionally in community-based racial justice, is in an interracial relationship with a woman from Africa, has been arrested doing civil disobedience protesting police brutality, and takes questions of racial equity with a great seriousness and dedication.

Somewhat to my surprise I felt like one of the most conservative people in the community (I don’t identify as conservative), and had more than a few moments of wondering if I'd be marginalized for questioning what I'd call modern collegiate liberal/progressive ideas and norms. I'm happy to say that despite some notable frictions I felt generally quite embraced. Perhaps it's my age, perhaps having been in the business world twenty years, or maybe my focus on critical thinking just puts me at odds with what I see as unfounded and unexamined norms. But I appreciated being in an environment where ideas could be taken seriously and debate was possible, and I believe my capacity to diplomatic dissent was strengthened.

Where it all led me

As I foreshadowed above, the focus that emerged most vividly from my time at Bard was on the role of "inner development" in efforts for scalable positive change (the program director even let me do a short capstone presentation on the topic at the end of the year, despite the fact that I wasn't officially graduating). I've been actively exploring the forms this takes in practice, but so far it has led me to spend a week at the Mind & Life Summer Research Institute (a major intersection of contemplative practices and scientific study), to writing an entry on mindfulness and sustainability for an upcoming book from SCORAI-Global (Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative), and soon to Sweden to train as an ambassador for the Inner Development Goals. White papers like these from the Mindfulness Initiative and Inner Green Deal have really opened my eyes to exploring the role that our inner capacities play in our mindsets, actions, leadership, and visions for a sustainable future. 

Why did business school lead me to this convergence of themes? Part of it is the notion that the root of the environmental crisis must be tied to our own alienation from ourselves and our social fabric. Part of it was seeing disagreements turn a group of well-meaning people against each other. Part of it was seeing how teams work best when they align deeply with one another and bring their humanity to their work. Part of it was seeing how a Lakota woman rooted her work in tireless spiritual values. Part of it was peering into the mechanics of organizational strategy and seeing that deep human mindsets are the basis. And part of it was simply reflecting on my own minuscule place in the universe and longing for a path that honors the full spectrum of what it means to be a living being.

If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading. I invite your thoughts on any of this. You can always reach me here.

The band Steely Dan went to Bard and sang “I’ll never go back to my old school.” Oh well.