Conscious Choice Seattle: Breakthrough in Bainbridge

May 2004 | Feature Story

Breakthrough in Bainbridge

Some leading-edge thinkers are creating a whole new—and better, greener, more socially responsible—way of doing business with a sustainable MBA program

By Ellie Winninghoff

It seems like the most unlikely scene for staging a revolution: a group of mid-lifers, ages 29 to 55, huddled around laptops and working on, can you believe it, accounting problems. It’s a Friday afternoon in March at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI), which later this month will bestow the first masters in business administration or MBA degrees in the country based on environmental stewardship and social responsibility. Eight students will be graduating from the first, historic “cohort.”

Professor Craig Mayberry, 37, a former corporate finance executive at Intel, is teaching by walking around.

Students (most of whom work regular jobs) are gathered here for a three-day intensive weekend, to be followed by distance learning by computer and a couple more intensive weekends this quarter. Upstairs in this condominium development on Bainbridge Island, a Social Justice class of 12 students is sprawled out on couches and makeshift chairs in front of a makeshift blackboard in the living room of Libba and Gifford Pinchot, both 61, who, with Sherman Severin, 55, co-founded BGI two years ago.

Professor Hector Saez, 39, a Puerto Rican whose day job consists of teaching international environmental issues and economics at the University of Vermont, is explaining that the “triple bottom line” of people, profit and planet is about changing society, not business. The class is studying coffee, historically as important as petroleum in terms of world trade—until prices plummeted.

“Since all of the coffee areas in the world are near biological hot spots, organic coffee can have a very high environmental impact,” Saez says. “It represents [both] rich and poor farmers on the verge of starvation.”

It’s the perfect subject, in other words, for studying all the issues surrounding profit-making, social justice and sustainability.

But this class will not be all talk. BGI’s goal, Saez explains, is to make a difference now. At the end of the quarter, several students will travel to Costa Rica to investigate what a community there must do to set up a coffee export business.

Call BGI a biz school for activists. An innovation lab. A business incubator and support system for “eco-preneurs” and change agents who want to really green up corporations and make them more socially responsible.

Transforming business schools

For his part, Pinchot has big plans: transforming all business education to include environmental and social responsibility. He believes it is too difficult to pilot within existing educational institutions and MBA programs. The breakthroughs must be first incubated in a program like Bainbridge.

If anybody can do it, Pinchot can. Best known as the author of the l985 business classic book, “Intrapreneuring: You Don’t Have to Leave the Corporation to Become an Entrepreneur,” he is also an innovation consultant to the Fortune 100, a successful software entrepreneur and even scion of a noted conservationist. His grandfather founded the U.S. Forest Service under president Teddy Roosevelt in l905.

Why change business education? Pinchot likes to say that business, which influences everything from government to media to health care, dominates our lives far more than it did a generation ago. He became increasingly distressed when he kept running into people trained in business schools who held beliefs “counterproductive to the environment and fairness,” as he puts it.

“Business schools are acting as if business is just a small thing in society in which business is a much greater thing,” he says. “To teach that it is immoral to take responsibility when you are a leader is a prescription for disaster.”

Noblesse oblige—that’s what it used to be called.

“I had no desire to do an MBA,” says 40-something BGI student John Rae-Grant, a former Microsoft executive, management consultant and venture capitalist who had grown restless helping yet another high-tech startup ramp up.

Although he knew he wanted to “turn business into something good” after reading “Natural Capitalism,” the paradigm-shifting tome by the three co-authors Paul Hawken and Hunter and Amory Lovins, Rae-Grant didn’t know how. Then he discovered BGI.

“The core of the curriculum [represented] all the things I did not know and I wanted to learn,” he says.

At most business schools, in fact, sustainability is in the extra courses (if it’s taught at all), not the core curriculum. The rub is that few textbooks exist for BGI’s innovative curriculum, itself still changing.

But BGI has had the luxury of top-flight professors, many of them adjuncts. Noted evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris, who is developing new models for social and business organization based on a close examination of the earth’s bio-system, has taught Systems Biology and Sustainable Enterprise.

Alternative energy consultant Amory Lovins, developer of a super-efficient hyper-car, has taught Sustainable Economics. Her book, “Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use,” was adopted by the European Union as its new basis for sustainable development.

John Ehrenfeld, former director of the Technology, Business and Environment Program at MIT, has taught Operational Management and Industrial Ecology, a class incorporating “lean manufacturing.”

Student enthusiasm is palpable.

“The material is a lot richer, much deeper and much more satisfying that I anticipated,” says Kevin Hagen, 43, principal executive of Shuksan Energy, a renewable energy company.

Hagen is equally excited by his classmates: “Their backgrounds are so diverse that it really brings a richness to the conversation that I didn’t expect at all. I expected an MBA class to be a lot of people like me. And, I thought, a lot of enlightened people like me since it’s a sustainable MBA after all. But the extra dimension of social enterprises and not-for-profits—those folks bring a real perspective I never got as a mid-to-upper level business manager.”

A change in perspectives

Classmates rave about the impact of one colleague in particular: Barbara Lawrence, 37, a member of the Suquamish Tribe and single mother who has a child with birth defects due to environmental contamination.

“She has had to cope with a whole world that I was oblivious to,” says Hagen.
Next question: Would Hagen change the way he wrote his business plan at Shuksan Energy based on the perspective she brought him?

Hagen pauses, then says, “Hmmmm…. I would have tried. It remains to be seen whether it would have worked…. [She] has certainly changed the way I look at life.”

Rae-Grant is more blunt: “There’s not a day that goes by that Barbara does not open my eyes to blindness that I wasn’t aware that I had.”

Of course, BGI is about overthrowing business-as-usual in this country, where you leave your soul by the door. One course in particular can produce snickers among cynics: Creativity and Right Livelihood, a class about finding your internal compass. But Rae-Grant, for one, believes it is the “missing piece” in all education.

“I’ve done a lot of career coaching with executive teamwork and strategy,” he says. “If people aren’t doing what they want, they can’t be great in a team. But not until I was well into my career at Microsoft did I get any instruction on how to figure out what I want.”

Until that point, says Rae-Grant, his education was “here’s how to do these things.”

“It was never about reaching clarity,” says Rae-Grant. “Clarity is such a powerful force. They put that right up-front.”

Another advantage is exploring “right livelihood” in a first-year course creates a stronger bond between students.

“I think there’s value in having students go through that sort of introspection and supporting each other in it,” Rae-Grant says. “Second-year students have a different relationship with each other, partially as a result of sharing that course up-front.”

Considering the trajectory of his own career, it’s no surprise that Pinchot co-teaches this class. His own struggle to find himself began in the confines of academe during the mid-60s when he graduated from Harvard in economics. The economists there told him he was “way too social in his thinking,” that he must be a sociologist.

So Pinchot went to graduate school in sociology, where he wrote a paper on the evolution of altruism. But the sociologists told him he was a biologist. After he switched to neuro-physiology, where he became interested in consciousness, the biologists told him he was a philosopher.

“That’s when I gave up and became an organic dairy farmer and blacksmith in upstate New York,” Pinchot recalls.
He was 27 years old.

Five years later, when he encountered Mexican competition for his iron work, he sold the business and—what else?—wrote a 12-page paper. The topic this time: The conditions under which an entrepreneur like him would like to join a corporation, which he coined intrapreneuring.

From idea to Big Idea

From there, Pinchot landed a six-month gig writing correspondence courses for the Tarrytown School for Entrepreneurship and another teaching creativity and product development at a consulting firm. By then, Pinchot’s paper found its way to the London-based Economist, which published a five-page spread citing Pinchot often. Intrapreneuring became the new new thing at the time, and the rest of the press picked up the topic. Soon he wrote another piece for the Society of Mechanical Engineers, which was copied and passed around.

“I’d find fifth generation copies of it,” he recalls.

Then Harper & Row called: Would he please write a book?

After the book was published, Pinchot received 20 calls a day from Fortune 100 companies seeking his help in launching businesses, fixing cultures so intrapreneurship was possible and training senior executives to manage innovation.

“We actually thought we were engaged in a crusade to liberate people to express their values in large corporations,” Pinchot says, explaining that intrapreneurs require freedom to work on their passion rather than purely what the company wants.

But while this resulted in environmental and social progress, as expected, it kept getting undone. “We had a number of disappointments where we worked for four years in a company establishing a full-system and it would get swept away with the new CEO,” recalls Pinchot.
Ditto the next idea, which was focusing on employee rights inside corporations.

Fast forward to September 12, 2001: Pinchot was scheduled to check in at the World Trade Center for a business meeting.

Suddenly it was in fashion to think about what life is all about and how one wanted to spend the rest of one’s days.

The result of examining that internal compass yet again was, of course, BGI, which Pinchot describes as “free experiment, where we begin with a clean slate.” Although the school’s mission is to teach students how to thrive with their values intact—some as entrepreneurs, others as change agents in big companies—the ultimate goal is a technology transfer to other business schools. It’s not as farfetched as it sounds. After all, business schools around the world already teach Pinchot’s material about intrapreneurship.

Building community

There is one aspect of BGI as it now stands, however, which may be harder to replicate. “We are the founders of a culture,” says Libba Pinchot, whose job here is dean of students. She is a former board member of the Wightwood School in Bramford, Conn., with two master’s degrees (one in education, the other in psychology and organizational development). The Dean says it is her experience as a Mom with three kids that provided her strong feeling that respect is the cornerstone for creating an effective educational environment.

Respect and an enviable sense of tight community are apparent when interviewing the students, who made a provocative “contract” with each other at the beginning of their first quarter: No one left behind. One student went to great length to describe the free tutoring she’s receiving from her classmates in remedial mathematics.

“I legitimately feel I’m there to help my fellow students be educated and vice versa,” Hagen says. “I legitimately believe that passing means my classmates pass with me.”

Not exactly the makings of Donald Trump’s “Apprentice” television show.

Of course, BGI is a place where co-creation of a new business form is in process. “What’s amazing is the level of engagement of the students,” Rae-Grant says. “I get the impression the faculty feel like stuff is being pulled out of them rather than having to push it.”

It’s not seventh generation yet, but you can’t help but think that Pinchot’s progressive ancestors would approve.

Ellie Winninghoff is a Seattle-based writer who covers business and social entrepreneurship for national magazines.

For more information about Bainbridge Graduate Institute, visit www.bgiedu.org.

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