MBAs with a conscience

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: It was a typical business school class. Students pecked away on their laptops as they absorbed classmates’ oral presentations on company business practices. One student spoke about whether Goodwill’s used-clothing exports hurt Africa’s textile industry. Another profiled the nation’s first green bank. A third explored Sony Corp.’s environmental impact.

Across the hall, students in a management class discussed which is more important to business success—competition or cooperation. Basking in the afternoon sun, economics students sat outside to thrash out how globalization affects the distribution of resources. So it goes at San Francisco’s Presidio School of Management, one of three MBA programs in the country that focuses on sustainability, or incorporating social-justice and environmental values into business. The schools say they teach students to pursue a triple bottom line: profit, people and planet.

In addition to Presidio, the schools are the Green MBA Program, currently in Santa Rosa, Calif., and Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Bainbridge Island, Wash. All started within the past few years. The three are part of a nationwide trend among MBA programs to incorporate ethics, environmentalism and social values into their curricula, propelled by such factors as the late 1990s corporate scandals and growing awareness about climate change.

MBA courses on topics like social entrepreneurship have exploded in the past few years, according to Rich Leimsider, senior associate at the Aspen Institute Business and Society Program, which produces a biennial report called Beyond Grey Pinstripes ranking MBA programs on how well they incorporate social and environmental issues into their curriculum.

The Bay Area’s two leading MBA programs, the Stanford Graduate School of Business and UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, came in at No. 1 and at No. 11, respectively. But the new batch of MBA schools say they stand out because every aspect of their programs encompasses using business as a force for positive change.

‘We built our program from scratch so that sustainability is part of the fabric of the entire program,’ said John Stayton, co-founder and program director of the Green MBA.

It is domiciled at New College in Santa Rosa, but will move to San Rafael’s Dominican University in August.