There may be a danger of students reverting back to the traditional career course. But entrepreneurship is making sure that doesn’t happen. It is rare for an MBA to be a banker and an entrepreneur, but for St. Gallen HSG graduate Falko Paetzold, it is a dream collaboration.
The sustainability craze was waiting for him in Zurich, Switzerland, but may have seemed like an impossible dream from his corporate view at BOSCH in China. The German multinational engineering giant is not famed for its sustainability initiatives; and when it comes to the environment, the smog in China’s cities speaks for itself.
Falko was an assistant to the firms’ CEO and spent two months working at a manufacturing factory in China, the economic power-house. He was tasked with leaning-up the supply chain practices but while there, he saw the daily struggles that some workers went through.
Conditions were far from sustainable, Falko says. “Very quickly you realize the implications for the individuals who work there in bad living conditions,” he says. “Ethically, it doesn’t make sense either.”
He was introduced to a head of sustainability at an audit company and in that moment, he changed his whole career trajectory. Much like sustainability has taken the business world by storm, one trip to China was a defining moment in Falko’s life.
“That sparked my interest in the topic and I developed my whole career towards maximizing the impact of sustainability,” he says. “It just makes business sense; sustainability is really just a new level of information you integrate to optimize your processes.”
Although initiatives that focus on corporate responsibility are now fairly common, the private banking sector has yet to take up the trend. So when Falko banked a job at Bank Vontobel AG in Zurich as a senior sustainability analyst, he was hoping to provide maximum impact, he says.
“I first went to consulting and realized that you are limited to one project, but I heard that in finance you have more leverage,” Falko says. “I knew I would actually get to talk to senior management at the bank and ask them about sustainability practices.”
But those managers were not always allowed to go as far as they would like, he says. “They would say: I know I should consider sustainability topics but I can only do what investors mandate me with,” Falko explains. “I saw a lot of investors interested in sustainability but it wouldn’t feed through the layer-chain to the management.”
Private banking does remain a difficult beast to tame, although MBAs can make a killing consulting the big corporate players on sustainability initiatives. Falko set up GreenBuzz Zurich in 2010, a sector-overarching peer-to-peer community of over a thousand professionals involved in sustainability.
He wanted to unite like-minded individuals, he says. “In the past seven years or so the whole topic has become bigger in terms of companies realizing that it’s a useful topic. And sustainability has generated a lot of interest,” Falko says.
“There were platforms that are topic-specific, such as networks only for finance professionals, but Green BuzzZurich is the only sector over-arching association.”
It is a non-profit that Falko has funded for the past four years with membership payments, pay-to-enter events and corporate sponsorship. He has achieved his goals so far, but the next step is to make the association self-sustainable, he says. “I’m trying to hire more staff, all in my spare time, and the next goal is to replicate this in other cities,” says Falko.
Switzerland is a hot-spot for private banks that operate with much more secrecy than other countries in Europe. There is room for sustainability to enter the fray. And St. Gallen, based near Zurich, was the perfect entry point.
The business school and wider university has been championing the cause since 1992, when it established the Institute for Economy and the Environment. Its employees do their research, teach and counsel in the areas of sustainability management and management of renewable energies.
The school also offers an executive education programme – Diploma in Sustainable Business – and arranges internships for students to work with NGOs in India and other social entrepreneurship projects in developing countries.
Falko felt he needed credibility from the school to achieve his career goals. “I knew an MBA would be an entry ticket to jobs and this got me the job I wanted, very high up, and lots of credibility,” he says.
It also gave him the ground-work to launch a venture to promote sustainability, he adds. “It gave me the know-how to work in the job and also to set-up GreenBuzz Zurich, and it definitely helped me with the reputation to achieve all of that,” Falko says.
At the helm of his association, he is hoping to change the way the private banking sector operates. And much like what the economic crisis did for business schools, an MBA has given him the chance to tackle sustainability head-on.
Falko is currently studying a PhD focused on decision making processes in regard to sustainable investing. More education is perhaps a way to increase your influence.
IESE Business School seems to agree. The school just opened its 11th annual “Doing Good and Doing Well” conference in Barcelona – a student-run conference focused on social entrepreneurship. ESADE Business School hold similar events to promote sustainability.
In the wider business community, more MBA students have launched start-ups to do social good in emerging markets. And as economies in Africa and Asia continue to grow, that career path is more attractive for today’s graduate.
Falko’s is a tough task, but bankers too can take up the trend. And that is something that he, and GreenBuzz Zurich, wants to see happen.
His goal, he says, is for sustainability to become an integral part of private banking. “I want to have a significant contribution to sustainable investing, and to the understanding that it makes sense. I want it to become mainstream in private banking.”
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