Francisco every other weekend to
attend Wharton’s Executive MBA
program while another flies from
Dubai to Chicago with the same
frequency to be a part of the Kellogg
program at Northwestern.
IE had a student who flew in fortnightly
from New Delhi.
While these “MBA Air Warriors”
may be the exception, there
is a clear trend of leading business
schools launching programs
with modules scattered around the
globe to expose students to business
dynamics in pivotal markets.
One particularly ambitious program
takes students to ten cities
on four continents. I did a small
calculation. To participate in this
program, a London-based student
would rack up air miles resulting in
9.7 tons of CO2 emissions—almost
the entire annual per capita emissions
of a European and five times
the annual emissions of an Indian.
Are we hypocritical if we fly students
from around the world to
Brazil for a module on the economics
of rainforest conservation?
Recently, I was struck by an ad in
The Economist in which the Wharton
School proudly declared that
participants fly a total of 3.8 million
miles a year to attend its executive
education programs in Philadelphia.
Offsetting these emissions would
require about 88,000 mature trees.
Companies are using technologies
to reduce business travel so
that they can save money, minimize
staff time away from the office, and
lessen their environmental impact.
There are many reasons why business
schools should embrace technology
even more, and adjusting
to a resource-constrained world is
certainly one of them