Corporations are paying increasing attention to corporate social responsibility and ethics issues, due in large part to negative publicity garnered by the misdeeds of some major business leaders.

Fifty-six MBA teams from around the globe--including seven from Thunderbird--recently addressed this issue through their participation in the first annual Thunderbird Social Responsibility and Ethics Challenge.

Challenge entrants worked on a business case involving an ethical or social responsibility issue which was presented to them by event organizers in March. All teams submitted their responses via the Web and the top five teams--UC Berkeley, HEC Montreal, London Business School, UCLA and University of Kansas--were invited to compete in the final round held on Thunderbird's Glendale campus earlier this month.

UC Berkeley took home first prize, followed by UCLA in second place and London Business School in third. The top five schools beat out participating teams including Babson College, Kellogg School of Management, Kenan-Flagler, ESADE, Cornell University, Georgetown University and Northwestern among others.

Thunderbird MBA candidate and Challenge organizer Luisa Vallejo '05 feels strongly about the need for events of this nature.

"We need to spread worldwide that a corporate social responsibility mindset can create a difference in the business world today," said Luisa, who is also president of the Net Impact Club, the student group that sponsored the event. "And because there is no other competition of this kind in the corporate social responsibility field, we decided to launch it."

The business plan competition challenged MBA candidates to create socially responsible solutions to real business dilemmas. Tyco International, On Semiconductor, Salesforce.com and the CSR Group each provided a question to the event, hoping to discover usable solutions for handling their real-world ethical issues and develop ideas on how to extend the links in their corporate social responsibility chain.

The judging panel was comprised of Thunderbird faculty from the Lincoln Center for Ethics in International Management and executives from the four sponsoring companies. Participant proposals were judged on the basis of uniqueness, viability and fit for the company. The top three teams won cash prizes of $5,000, $3,000 and $1,000. But, unlike other business plan competitions, half of each prize was donated to the team's charity of choice.

"We expect to help raise Thunderbird's reputation in the corporate social responsibility and ethics field among the international business community," Vallejo said. "Thunderbird, as the number one school in international management, is the right business school to lead such a competition."

Corporations are paying increasing attention to corporate responsibility and ethics issues, in large part because of all the negative publicity garnered by the misdeeds of some major business leaders. According to a 2001 Cone Corporate Citizenship study, 91 percent of Americans said that if a company exhibited poor social responsibility they would consider switching to another company's product or service, 83 percent would refuse to buy that company's stock, and 80 percent would refuse to work at that company.

More information about the Social Responsibility and Ethics Challenge and its outcome is available at the website http://www.srchallenge.org.

Thunderbird School of Global Management

Thunderbird School of Global Management

Founded in 1946, Thunderbird is the oldest graduate management school focused exclusively on global business. It is regarded as the world's leading institution in the education of global managers and has operations in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Russia and Asia. Ranked No. 1 in international business by The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report and the Financial Times, Thunderbird is unique in that it is dedicated to the task of producing global leaders who contribute to sustainable prosperity worldwide. The schools curriculum is based on the principle that to do business on a global scale, executives must not only know the intricacies of business, but also understand the customs of other countries and be able to communicate with different cultures. More than 38,000 students have graduated from Thunderbird, and its alumni live and work in more than 140 countries.

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