School Notes: School of Management
March/April 2007

Carbon offsets make international travel "carbon neutral"

In keeping with Yale's intention to become the "greenest" university, a group of MBA students organized a voluntary program to allow students and faculty trip leaders to purchase carbon offsets for the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from their international travel. The student organizers calculated that SOM's required International Experience resulted in over three million miles traveled, and the release of over two million pounds of greenhouse gases.

By purchasing the offsets, students hoped to counterbalance their travel-related emissions by funding carbon abatement projects. The bulk offsets were purchased from five providers, and will finance carbon abatement activities such as renewable energy development, energy conservation initiatives, tree-planting, and large-scale reforestation activities in South Africa, India, Costa Rica, and the United States. Through the collective purchases made by students, TAs, faculty, alumni, and several anonymous donors, the International Experience became "carbon neutral," and the SOM community became more familiar with climate change and carbon markets.

2007 Global Social Enterprise class and trip focuses on Brazil

This semester's course on "Managing Social Enterprises in Developing Countries" focuses on businesses and NGOs in Brazil. Led by Garry D. Brewer ’70PhD, the Frederick K. Weyerhaeuser Professor of Resource Policy and Management, and assistant professor of economics M. Keith Chen, the course aims to provide students with an overview of management techniques that can be used to help socially focused organizations in developing countries achieve sustainable growth.

As part of this course, students work in project teams to provide pro bono consulting services to enterprises based in Brazil, including a company that manufactures and sells equipment to recycle air conditioning and commercial refrigerants, a children's cardiac clinic, and an environmental organization focusing on sustainable development. The student teams plan to spend their spring break in March on client site visits. These consulting engagements will culminate in a presentation of deliverables to the client executives in Brazil, as well as a presentation on each consulting engagement to SOM faculty and students.

SOM launches ". . . on Management" lecture series

The school inaugurated a new lecture series in January designed to provide members of the SOM community with the opportunity to hear firsthand from executives, innovators, policymakers, and thought leaders from many fields of endeavor, speaking on topics devoted to the management challenges at the intersection of business and society. Among the early ". . . on Management" speakers were Martha Finn Brooks ’81, ’86MBA, the COO of Novelis, Inc., who talked about the challenges of a global start-up; and John Hueston ’91JD, a co-lead prosecutor of the Enron trial, who spoke on the corporate governance lessons to be learned from that company's collapse. The ". . . on Management" series is designed to complement the school's popular "Leaders Forum," which brings to campus corporate CEOs and other top leaders in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors.