Is this Program Right for Me?

Today's business climate is moving with the times in a socially- and environmentally-conscious direction. Companies are actively seeking solutions for combining profitability with world betterment. If you're interested in a degree that offers rigorous instruction in core quantitative skills while taking the triple bottom line—people, planet, profit—seriously, then consider the Weatherhead MBA.

Our school-wide thematic areas of study help you to think beyond the default response, combining the right-brained tools of a designer with a solid command of business principles. Our core curriculum, like finance, economics, and supply chain management, is informed by our guiding themes, Manage by Designing and Sustainable Enterprise.

Manage by Designing

Sometimes "best practices" just aren't good enough. Design thinking imagines alternatives that have not yet made their way to the table, game-changing ideas still unformed, and fresh perspectives that could yield very different views of a problem.

We know that businesses cannot succeed by looking at every challenge through the same spreadsheet-based prism. Managers need to reach beyond one-size-fits-all solutions. Design in management consists, broadly, of observing behaviors, visualizing ideas, prototyping alternatives, and refining the best of them. The Manage by Designing approach, and the flexible, creative habits of mind that go with it, informs our curriculum and equips our graduates to consider complex, real-world challenges from a fresh and productive point of view.

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Sustainable Enterprise

A conviction that runs throughout Weatherhead's core curriculum is that today's pressing environmental and social challenges are business opportunities—chances to make a profit while making a difference. This notion has made an immediate impact outside the academy, too, as our faculty's research has helped more than 20 large businesses shift to greener, more responsible practices, from the way they source supplies to the standard of living their employees may expect.

A business can become sustainable if it seeks renewable resources and recognizes the social and environmental impact of its activities. But Sustainable Enterprise isn't just about conducting green business; it's about conducting sustainable business, in every sense of the word: creating lasting value for stakeholders in the board room, the break room, and the wider community, too. Under the umbrella of Sustainable Enterprise, Sustainable Business and Social Entrepreneurship are emerging as twin engines of commerce in the new century. Sustainable Business aims to integrate world betterment into industry supply chains and strategy development, while Social Entrepreneurship seeks to improve societal conditions through entrepreneurship and other business models. Many corporations are just starting to experiment with social responsibility, but at Weatherhead, we have long been interested in researching and teaching the triple bottom line: business viability, human well-being, and environmental sustainability.

Learn more about Sustainable Enterprise