Professor Muhammad Yunus meets the CEMS Community
The CEMS Community was honoured to receive Professor Yunus as guest speaker for a packed programme of events on Friday 3 December. His presence and participation offered students, alumni, academic members and corporate partners a privileged opportunity to hear the thoughts and ideas of one of the world’s top drivers of social business and corporate social responsibility.
The morning student interactive session topic revolved around offering accredited social business projects, having social ambassadors to champion these projects and establishing an online platform to upload social business ideas. Professor Yunus approved of the idea very much and expressed his pleasure at seeing students taking such initiative.
During the afternoon event, a large-scale symposium which also brought in top academics , corporate partner representatives and the CEOs of the first ever CEMS social partners, topics discussed focused more on the actual definition of social business, how to get business people to see past pure profit-making goals and getting people to commit to such initiatives.
This session was followed by an open exchange of views with CEMS Strategic Board members, the most senior governors within the CEMS Alliance. Profesor Yunus conveyed several strong messages to the Rectors and Deans:
- There is a new generation of students coming up whose objective is more than just making money.
- Business schools should help them achieve their goals and use their talent and curiosity by offering them teaching modules on social business via the creation of chairs or institutes.
- Business schools could encourage students to design social business projects by creating competition for the best project.
In addition, he also defended the concept of social business and microfinance against welfare and its relatively low capacity to generate employment.
Emmanuel Faber, COO at Danone, added that business schools should reconsider the paradigm currently taught that the prime objective of the firm is to maximise the shareholder value. He pleaded in favour of critical teaching. New thinking and justification should also come from the faculty.
At the end of the session, Prof. Yunus was awarded the title of CEMS Honorary Member.
