Category: Leadership

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Than Moore ’20 is on a Mission to Protect Healthcare Workers

This post was written, and the interview conducted, by Taran Catania ’20.

In the fight against COVID-19, medical facilities worldwide are lacking personal protective equipment (PPE). But The Sustainable Innovation MBA’s very own Than Moore ‘20 has teamed up with several classmates to launch a new initiative, Gowns4Good, to get graduation gowns in the hands of healthcare providers who desperately need PPE.

Now part of the Gowns4Good team myself, I sat down with Than to ask him more about his mission to protect healthcare heroes on the front lines of COVID-19.

Than, before we dive into the Gowns4Good origin story, tell us a little more about yourself.

My name is Nathaniel Moore, but I go by Than. I’ve been practicing as an emergency medicine physician assistant at the University of Vermont (UVM) Medical Center for the past five years. I’m also a current Sustainable Innovation MBA student at UVM and will begin medical school at the Larner College of Medicine in the fall.

What made you first think of the idea for Gowns4Good?

As a single medical provider, I see a finite number of patients per shift. I so value my efforts to uphold the highest quality of care for my patients, but I felt like I had more to offer. There are so many individuals worldwide suffering tremendously from the effects of COVID-19. Reading countless headlines about this devastating disease, I was struck by the image of healthcare workers lacking PPE and wearing black trash bags as makeshift gowns.

While this news simmered in the back of my mind, I was also heartbroken for all the graduating seniors whose commencement ceremonies were being postponed or canceled to adhere to social distancing guidelines. Then, it clicked that there could be a helpful connection here.

So wait, graduation gowns work as PPE?

Compared to trash bags or other alternative forms of PPE, graduation gowns are more effective given their length, sleeves, and easy donning with zippered access. Although efforts are being made to increase PPE production, worldwide demand is increasing too quickly. There are so many new gowns that will go unworn as graduations are being canceled and used gowns collecting dust in people’s closets. Why not put these gowns to better use? There is no better way to honor your senior or your alma mater than to donate to desperate healthcare workers.

How did you go from this graduation gown idea to the full-fledged Gowns4Good project?

Well, it helps that I’m currently in a business school that emphasizes sustainable innovation. Like any successful project, it is only as good as your teammates. I bounced the idea off of a few medical colleagues and then turned to my classmates who shared my similar excitement. It was incredible to watch them utilize the tools from our curriculum and apply them in this real world situation. I am so impressed by their collaborative efforts and am thankful to be surrounded by a team of such talented friends. In two days, we went from a hypothetical idea to a fully functioning organization making national headlines helping those in need.

As a medical provider yourself, can you describe the significance of helping someone else have access to PPE in the fight against COVID-19?

It is scary enough for me to care for a panel of COVID patients with adequate protection, and I am devastated to imagine my colleagues practicing without proper PPE. I do not wish for anyone to feel unsupported through this pandemic. It is hard on families, friends, and strangers near and far. We are all in this together. I hope to do all I can to make an impact both within my community and beyond to provide support for those on the front lines.

Gowns4Good is just another way we can support each other. To all of the people who have believed in us and contributed to Gowns4Good thus far, we are forever grateful. Thank you for supporting our healthcare heroes. In the meantime, stay home, stay healthy, and stay safe.

To donate gowns, please go to gowns4good.net/donate-gowns. You can also support Gowns4Good by making a contribution to offset shipping costs or by recruiting your school. For any inquiries, please reach out to Gowns4Good@gmail.com. Find them on Gowns4Good.net or with #Gowns4Good on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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A Sustainable Innovation MBA Disrupts The Medicine Vortex

This post was written by Than Moore ’20. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

Before matriculating to business school, I worked full time as an emergency medicine physician assistant at the University of Vermont Medical Center. I, along with my colleagues, was solely focused on maximizing patient care. My responsibilities included diagnosing and treating patients of all ages and acuity levels. The clinical world became my home. Putting on scrubs every day to go into the hospital, I join the hundreds of other employees working towards a similar mission of delivering the highest level of patient care. The ability to practice and treat members in my community is a privilege. It is one of the greatest accomplishments with which I can relate. However, it can also monopolize your life, and is forever demanding. It becomes nearly impossible to pause and observe the system in which we operate. The pursuit of my MBA disrupted the traditional linear trajectory of my medical career and provided the time and space to refocus the lens in which I viewed the world.       

Photo by JC Gellidon on Unsplash

Medicine is a vortex. To become a doctor, one must dedicate years of commitment to the craft. You must first complete prerequisite coursework before donating countless years toward schooling, residency, and fellowship. By demonstrating academic and clinical excellence and passing more tests than one could imagine, it then becomes time to start your clinical practice. The journey is arduous, but the reward to grant another breath to a gasping loved one is worth all the effort. Medicine becomes an addiction. We are slaves to the system to glean all the knowledge we can to optimize our performance. It monopolizes our lives with long days, demanding call schedules, and tragic cases that keep us up at night. However, I was granted the opportunity to take a sabbatical from my clinical responsibilities and observe the field from the outside. 

I first learned of The Sustainable Innovation MBA (SI-MBA) program at UVM from a friend who knew of my love of academia and solving problems. Sustainable business became the perfect blend of my undergraduate analytical mathematical degree, my medical background, and my passion for the environment and society as a whole. Embedded in the curriculum are quantitative business skills such as finance, accounting, and economics, but there are also fundamental organizational skills taught through courses on corporate social responsibility, sustainable leadership, and teamwork. The focus of the coursework is to optimize a sustainable enterprise by maximizing the triple bottom line: people, profit and the planet. 

The beauty of the SI-MBA program is that one can personalize their education to incorporate individual interests. For example, I am fortunate to tailor my business research and projects towards medicine. Subsequently, I wish to highlight ways in which the triple bottom line educational model has broadened my perspective to incorporate sustainability into fundamental daily operations in both the medical community and greater society. 

People:

To begin, people are at the core of all operating systems. Our world revolves around successful human interactions. The ability to collaborate with one another stems from leadership and teamwork skills. Group work is a fundamental component in the SI-MBA curriculum. During each of the module terms, every student is designated a team. The team is responsible to execute all projects, presentations, and assignments together. Rarely, do you see employees working alone, so why should academics reflect that?

Medicine, in particular, revolves around team collaboration. With the blending of specialties and skills to navigate different disease processes, we are constantly reliant on our colleagues for their expertise. If a trauma victim presents requiring extensive resources, multiple hands are needed to gain IV access, deliver medications, perform diagnostic studies, and make life altering decisions. One could not operate alone in such a high stress environment. By maximizing team collaboration, executing impeccable leadership qualities, and maximizing the potential of all skilled team members, a team can perform at its highest capability. Medical schools are paying more attention to these traits by focusing efforts on team based learning; however, the ability to acquire these skills outside of medicine through my coursework and integrate them back into the clinic will become a critical asset in my performance as a provider. 

Continue reading “A Sustainable Innovation MBA Disrupts The Medicine Vortex”
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The Value of Soft Skills in an Increasingly Automated Workforce

This post was written by Kate Barry ’20. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

How do you stay competitive in a job market that is becoming increasingly more automated? This is a question on many people’s minds in all areas of the workforce today. Tiger Tyagarjan attempts to answer this daunting question in his article from the Harvard Business Review, “To Prepare for Automation, Stay Curious and Don’t Stop Learning.”  Tyagarajan cites a number of possibilities for workers to stay ahead of the curve when faced with an increasing automated workforce, a concept we have talked about in depth in our Sustainable Brand Marketing class this module.

When first faced with the uncertainty of job security in the future, one may have a knee-jerk reaction to fight against the development of artificial intelligence, or maybe try to out-smart it, by developing more highly-technical skills. Both of these options, I believe, will eventually be losing battles as technological advancement will roar on whether or not we are fully ready for it. Perhaps, as Tyagarjan suggests in his piece, instead of fighting the advancement of artificial intelligence, humans can differentiate themselves by embracing their “humanness” through the development of soft skills.

Soft skills are the tools someone uses to interact with others in an effective manner, a concept entirely dependent on self-awareness. They include one’s emotional intelligence, their level of empathy, ability to work in a team, etc. These are the skills that will differentiate humans from artificial intelligence in the workforce moving forward.

Thus far in The Sustainable Innovation MBA program, there has been a large emphasis on the development of soft-skills between our Teamwork for Sustained Innovation class, The Leadership Seminar, and copious amounts of group work. Some of the hesitation in regard to entering into a non-traditional MBA is the larger mix of skills learned beyond the traditional aspects of a business education.  While I have gained a great deal of value and personal development through our work so far, it’s hard to know what the business world is looking for when hiring. It is reassuring to see that the business community values the importance of soft skills, and their many applications in the workplace.

So, how do you stay competitive in a job market that is constantly becoming more automated? Lean into your humanness, strengthen your self and other-awareness, and in the words of Joe Fusco, “have a love affair with the truth.”

Photo by Owen Beard on Unsplash

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Julie Keck, Class of 2019 Class Speaker

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Sustainable Innovation MBA Class of 2019 was celebrated at their program-end Inauguration ceremony on August 17, 2019 at the Royall Tyler Theater on the campus of the University of Vermont. Julie Keck ’19 was chosen by her cohort to deliver the Class Speaker address. The text of her remarks is below.

Before I get started, it’s important to point out that this event is taking place on traditional Abenaki and Wabanaki land, and it is a privilege to have been educated on – and to now graduate within – the land that they have stewarded.

Julie Keck

I have the honor of speaking to you today because my peers voted for me. I suspect those who clicked on my name either thought I would say something funny, say something touching, or politely ‘stick it to the man.’ Those hoping for any of these three things will be satisfied. 

If you have gone through this Sustainable Innovation MBA program at the University of Vermont – or if you love us, teach us, or support us in any way – you’ll know that we completed many, many, many presentations in this program. While public speaking can be stressful for some, it was no secret in our classroom that I love a good microphone. For me, the only problem was that I had to share my presentation time with my lovely classmates.

But now – finally – the microphone’s all mine. And I Have Some Things to Say.

But first more about me: when I was little, and I was super cute when I was little, my dad would sometimes ask me a question, and I’d respond with: “Let me sing you about it.” Those who’ve come to live-band karaoke with me at Sweet Melissa’s over the past year will be relieved to know I’m not actually going to do that.

Another response I sometimes had to questions was: “I can’t know that yet.” 

I like that better than “I don’t know,” don’t you? It conveys that one might not *currently* have the knowledge to answer a question, but that the knowledge is surely on the horizon. Four-year-old ME had some insights that adult ME had lost in the ensuing years. I like to think I regained some of that intellectual optimism this past year. 

However, to be totally honest, and I consider you all my best friends, so I will always be honest with you, my pessimistic side almost kept me from applying to business school at all…

Because I’m not supposed to be here. For a few reasons.

Julie Keck, right, and partner Jess King

First, I am a woman. 

This year, there were more women on the Fortune 500 list of CEOs than ever before. Sounds like progress, right? Wanna know what the number was? 33. 33 out of 500. Let me make that clearer. Out of 500 CEOs on that list, 467 were men, and 33 were women. That’s 6.6%. That’s appalling.

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How a Janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos

Lessons from this wonderful article on the birth of a billion dollar product:

One. Innovation is how companies sustain themselves.

Two. Great ideas are almost everywhere, and can come from anywhere, or anyone.

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Reflections on Winning The Total Impact Portfolio Challenge

This post was written by Alyssa Stankiewicz ’19, and co-written by Andrew Mallory ’19

EDITOR’S NOTE: A team of five students from The Sustainable Innovation MBA program recently took first place in the Wharton-sponsored Total Impact Portfolio Challenge, beating a field of finalists from Yale, Columbia, Fordham, and Boston University. Read more here.

When I came to this program in August 2018, I had never even heard the term “impact investing.” I planned to focus my learnings on innovations in social justice and sustainable agriculture. I dreamed of founding a self-sustaining weaving center that provided support and reflection to folks through art therapy. While this is still an eventual dream of mine (stay tuned!), I realized that what really motivated me about this dream was the opportunity to help people.

The mission of The Sustainable Innovation MBA program is using business as a force for good in the world, also described as “doing well by doing good.”  Through the mentorship and encouragement I received from Dr. Chuck Schnitzlein, I began to realize that not only does the world of Finance provide this same opportunity, but I possess a natural knack for the work involved. He presented us with two extracurricular opportunities to test and demonstrate our skills and studies. The first project revolved around developing an impact strategy for the UVM Endowment (for more on that, see this article), and the second was a Wharton-sponsored impact investing competition called the Total Impact Portfolio Challenge.

The competition was stacked, to say the least. 26 teams from 19 business schools including Yale, Columbia, Booth (Chicago), and Wharton (Penn) entered the competition, and with this being just the 5th cohort of our Sustainable Innovation MBA program, our team was ecstatic to find out in March that we’d been selected as Finalists. We had spent months taking extra classes with Dr. Schnitzlein in Portfolio Management and Evaluation, researching the companies who achieved “best in class” accolades, and developing our investment philosophy and strategy in our copious free time (“copious” might be an exaggeration). When they announced we won at the live competition in Philadelphia on May 1, we were completely over the moon.

We like to think that we had a competitive advantage because each of our professors integrates sustainability holistically into every single course. We learned about Entrepreneurial Business Design, Systems Thinking, and Cost Models from a sustainability perspective, so we were more fully prepared to incorporate sustainability into every piece of our portfolio.

The Total Impact Portfolio Challenge provided us with two fictitious investor profiles from which to choose, and our team selected a Family Office who wanted to achieve multi-generational wealth and sustainable impact in line with five themes, which we matched to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our team took a unique and bold approach: we successfully invested the entire portfolio in companies and funds that are going beyond minimizing the bad; instead, each of our investments contributes to developing solutions for the greater good. We highlighted the innovations of Mary Powell at Green Mountain Power and the Reinvestment Fund’s success in the City Mission Project. We developed methods for measuring impact and adapted our findings to the unique characteristics of the various asset classes. Peter Seltzer even coined the SI-MBA Score, which goes beyond traditional ESG scoring systems to incorporate materiality. This is because, as we learned in our Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility course (and which was affirmed in this study written by Khan, Serafeim, & Yoon), companies that focus on the sustainability issues that are most material to their business actually see improved financial performance over the long term.

Where do we go from here?

I personally want to find ways to help accredited and non-accredited investors deploy their finances in ways that are more meaningful to them. I have a passion for efforts to democratize investment opportunities, and I’m working on an idea that incorporates my Linguistics background with my Finance interests to create a more effective system for financial literacy education. I look forward to exploring opportunities in place-based investing and community funding models as avenues to strengthen the resilience of local economies. Find me on LinkedIn!

Photo credit: Chris Kendig

Emily came to The Sustainable Innovation MBA program passionate about opening up venture capital investment to women and other underrepresented founders. Through projects studying everything from community capital initiatives to equity crowdfunding policy to this challenge on integrating materiality into ESG scores, she sees increasing opportunities to promote a more sustainable form of capitalism for investors and entrepreneurs. After the program, she is seeking a career in impact investing and hopes her involvement can promote responsible investment opportunities in the industry.

For Andrew, this challenge was a perfect blend of his two professional passions: finance and sustainability. Coming from a traditional finance background, he sees how important it is for impact investing and ESG integration to continue to evolve and grow, and he is encouraged by how many financial institutions are now incorporating ESG into their strategies. After graduation, Andrew is interested in pursuing public and private equity research, specifically analyzing companies who are embedding sustainability initiatives into their core operations to see how impact alpha can mitigate risk and provide long-term growth.

 Peter came to the program as a CPA with ten years of experience. Throughout his career, he has gravitated towards opportunities to support social causes, including serving on the boards of two non-profits and working for three years at The Food Trust, a Philadelphia based non-profit. While here, he discovered a passion for the Sustainable Accounting Standards Board (SASB) and began a certificate program in the fundamentals of sustainable accounting. The group utilized his research in developing the SI-MBA Score, which was a differentiating factor in our presentation. After graduation, he is pursuing opportunities where he can incorporate his SASB knowledge to help investors generate greater impact with their investments.

Maura, coming from the client services and business development side of the investment industry, saw the demand for responsible investment solutions from young investors and European clients. She hopes to use the skills developed during her SI-MBA experience and her involvement in the Total Impact Portfolio Challenge to re-enter the field and meet the needs and wants of the industry demand. Planting roots in Vermont, she looks forward to growing the responsible investing industry presence in the state.

We had great support from all of our classmates, but special acknowledgement (in no particular order) goes out to Andrew Oliveri, Alyssa Schuetz, Ryan Forman, Elissa Eggers, Caitlyn Kenney, Esteban Echeverría Fernández, Alexa Steiner, Emily Foster, Jeffrey Lue, Matt Iacobucci, and Keil Corey. In the spirit of The Sustainable Innovation MBA, this was truly a collaborative effort, and I believe that’s what ultimately gave us the competitive advantage. I’m personally looking forward to seeing where we go from here, and I wish good luck to next year’s cohort!

For other publications on this challenge and our approach, please see the initial post in the SI-MBA Review, as well as articles in CNBC, UVM, Poets & Quants, Forbes, and the Wharton Social Impact Initiative.

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Breaking News: Sustainable Innovation MBA Team Wins Wharton’s Total Impact Portfolio Challenge

A team of Sustainable Innovation MBA students has emerged from an elite group of finalists as the winners of the Total Impact Portfolio Challenge, sponsored by the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. The team was comprised of Class of 2019 students Alyssa Stankiewicz, Pete Seltzer, Emily Klein, Maura Kalil, and Andrew Mallory. Their faculty advisor and coach was Prof. Chuck Schnitzlein.

More: Read CNBC’s coverage of the Challenge, featuring our team

The Total Impact Portfolio Challenge involved creating and analyzing a portfolio that met risk, return and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) impact investing objectives. The team presented their work in Philadelphia on May 1 and 2.

The other finalists in the competition included Yale, Columbia, Fordham, and Boston University. Our group was named one of the “Final Five” back in late-March from an strong field of 25 teams that included entrants from the University of Chicago, Cornell, Georgetown, NYU, Wharton, MIT, and Northwestern.

This is a significant accomplishment, and an important milestone in the history of The Sustainable Innovation MBA program.

Beginning third from left, Emily Klein, Alyssa Stankewicz, Andrew Mallory, Maura Kalil, and Peter Setzer.
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The Future of Sustainability is Female

This post was written by Emily Klein ’19

EDITOR’S NOTE: The MBA Women for Change, a student-founded and managed group, is about to conclude its first year of existence, and scored a number of significant accomplishments in 2018-2019 aimed at bringing the issue of gender equality in the workplace to the forefront.

As a woman in my mid-twenties, I am constantly thinking about my future—crafting my next move, creating my career path, and navigating the opportunity costs of personal and professional decisions. My decision to attend business school solidified my personal statement of purpose: I am capable, confident, and powerful, and I will bring about meaningful change in the world. For me, business school was intimidating and, to be honest, sometimes I felt like an imposter; however, if there is one thing I’ll take away from the SIMBA program, it is  the idea that challenges bring about great opportunities.

We started the MBA Women for Change group to actively promote women in business leadership roles. Female leaders are and will be key drivers of sustainability efforts around the world; we see great opportunity in recognizing and capitalizing on the unique perspectives of women as we pursue sustainability and innovation in business.

MBA Women for Change has three goals in mind for our short year together: spurring deeper conversations around women in leadership and sustainability roles; organizing professional development opportunities; and building networks of support within the university and in the Vermont business community. In our first semester, we have accomplished quite a lot in pursuit of these goals:

Conversations around women in business: Serving as a support group and forum for women in the current cohort, Women for Change has encouraged discussions on topics ranging from Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” to communication and confrontation. The group has also facilitated cohort-wide conversations around gender, identity, and leadership.

Professional development: Women for Change has hosted several professional development workshops, including a session on power and leadership in conjunction with the UVM Women’s Center, lunch with guest speaker Lori Smith on organizational wellbeing, and an interactive situations workshop with our own Alexa Steiner.

Outreach: Coordinating with the Alumni MBA Women’s Group and women on the SIMBA Advisory Board, Women for Change is working to create a more tight-knit SIMBA community of female leaders. Group members have also attended community networking events with Vermont Womenpreneurs, Vermont Women’s Fund, and the New England Women’s Investor Network, and have connected with local businesses such as Generator, a makerspace in Burlington.

In pursuit of these goals, we have sparked deeper discussions, forged stronger connections, and created a more supportive and inclusive learning space. Our hope is these conversations, interactions, and networks empower women to take the lead toward a more sustainable future. By growing the pipeline of female leaders in the sustainability space, UVM and others are effecting long-term change. As many before me have said: this is not a women’s issue, it’s a human issue.

They say to be the change you wish to see in the world. The MBA Women for Change group envisions a more sustainable and equitable future; our cumulative individual efforts power a driving force within our program and beyond to achieve this vision. For the twelve months we have together in the SIMBA program, we work to change the conversation around female MBA students and leaders.

Come August 2019, we will have a powerful network of women behind us as we move into corporations and create our own companies. From finance and marketing to supply chain and social responsibility, we are the leaders we wish to see in the world. I am proud to study alongside tenacious women and supportive men – together, the 41 of us are a force to be reckoned with.

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The Sustainable Innovation MBA featured in Inclusive Business Action Network

The Sustainable Innovation MBA at the Grossman School of Business embodies a movement facilitated by the Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative to transform management education. Read more here:

https://www.inclusivebusiness.net/ib-voices/innovating-global-responsibility

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Value for All!

This post was written by Elissa Eggers ’19

A few weeks ago, during our Driving Sustainable Change course, my classmates and I were fortunate enough to chat with Andy Ruben, co-founder and CEO of Yerdle. Yerdle is a “circular economy powerhouse” driving change in the recommerce market by partnering with brands in a way that benefits consumers, companies, and the planet. For someone who came into this program looking to gain new skill sets and tools that would support me in my quest to change the fashion and retail industry for the better, it was exciting to have the opportunity to hear first-hand how Yerdle is disrupting the retail landscape.

Currently, the fashion industry produces upwards of 100 billion pieces of clothing per year despite there being just under 8 million people on the planet. On average, we consume 400x more clothing than we did 20 years ago. Clearly, we have a consumption problem. However, we also have a lack of use problem. As Andy highlighted in our conversation, a large portion of perfectly wearable clothing in the world today sits unused in people’s drawers and closets. That doesn’t even take into account the 10.5 million tons of clothes tossed into landfills each year in the United States alone when people decide it is finally time to purge. So how do we address the growing mountains of clothing taking over the planet? Extending the life of our clothing by keeping pieces in circulation longer is definitely a key piece to this puzzle.

Now, keeping clothing in use by passing it along is by no means a novel idea. Passing along hand-me-downs and buying from and selling to thrift stores are examples of ways people have long been extending the life of their clothing.  However, if we are truly to stop the current systems of production, consumption, and disposal that currently define the retail landscape and result in wasted resources, then we need to innovate and expand on our current re-sale systems.

Yerdle is doing just that. By partnering with brands to help them take control of their resale market and extract value from it in the form of profits and customer acquisition, Yerdle ensures that all stakeholders (including the brands) benefit. A key theme woven throughout our coursework in this program is the importance of expanding the pie. In other words, for a solution to be truly sustainable and innovative, it cannot simply redistribute the value created to different groupings of stakeholders. Rather, it needs to expand the pie to increase the value captured by all.

Understandably, finding a solution that truly expands the pie is easier said than done which is why listening to Andy was such a valuable experience. Ultimately, by making retail companies part of their solution and beneficiaries of it, Yerdle has created a solution that other brands would want to be part of because the expanded value created extends to them. This makes integrating recommence into their businesses seem like the smarter, more profitable option.

One of my biggest takeaways from the conversation is that as my cohort and I move out into the world and start trying to tackle these big issues, we need to remember the importance of crafting solutions that reduce friction and do not force people to make trade-offs. The fact is, we are all passionate about different things and not everyone is going to care about or be willing and able to sacrifice something for the sake of sustainability. Nor should they necessarily be expected to. Thus, building a solution that requires stakeholders (businesses or consumers) to make a sacrifice of something they value in order embrace the greener option, is simply not a realistic and scalable alternative. Instead, businesses, particularly those in retail, need to embrace and develop strategies that make things easier and better for all. Yerdle is one example of a company doing just that.

Photo by Artificial Photography on Unsplash