Course Curricula for Responsible Business and Management

The following courses templates have been designed by the Center for Responsible Management and practice tested in various settings. We hope these will be helpful for educators in designing their own educational offers for responsible business and management. If you are an educator, please feel free to use them wholly or partially for the design of your own courses. You might also find the post about the challenges of designing responsible business and management courses helpful.

Course template 1: “Responsible Business: Theory Practice, Change” was designed as a 8th semester required course for all bachelor students of business and engineering at the Monterrey Institute of Technology. It has now also been applied on graduate level. The course is divided into three parts. Part A (theory) illustrates historical development of responsible business, its global and local context, and management concepts. Part B (practice) illustrates the application of responsible management in strategy, operational functions, and communication. Part C (change) aims to enable students to achieve change on an individual, organizational, and systemic level. This structure is based on the textbook “Responsible Business” in support of the UN PRME. The following examplary course outline provides greater detail: Course Outline: Responsible Business : Theory, Practice, Change

Course template 2: “Introduction to Responsible Management: Sustainability, Responsibility, Ethics” has been designed as an introduction to sustainability, responsibility, and ethics management for either master programs, or as an executive primer on sustainability, responsibility, and ethics (SRE). It will also work for advanced undergraduate students. The course introduces the history and background of SRE and distinguishes both their common elements, and distinct applications. The course then focuses on the practical application of central tools, such as life-cycle and impact management, stakeholder engagement, and various ethics management instruments. The content structure corresponds to Chapters 1-5 of the first official UN PRME textbook.

Course template 3: “Responsible Management across Business Functions” has been applied as an introduction to business course for freshmen, highlighting the responsible aspects; as an in-company executive education program; and as a the introduction to business module of a specialized masters program for responsible management. The course applies sustainability, responsibility and ethics throughout main business functions from strategy, to accounting, to marketing by matching mainstream management concepts with responsible management concepts. The course contents covered correspond to chapters 6-15 of the first official UN PRME textbook. For more detail, please have a look at the course summary: Course Summary Responsible Management across Business Functions

Course template 4: “Principles of Responsible Management” combines course templates 2 and 3. Combining two courses makes this design very content-heavy. Tactics for coping with this might be to either plan for a long course, to assure that students come prepared through extensive reading, to flexibly cover contents most relevant for individual students, or all three of these. The following course outline relies on the second and third tactics: Principles of Responsible Management Course Outline

Course materials: Find more information about the available course materials here. For power point presentations, test banks, instructor manuals, and others, please feel free to get in touch with Oliver Laasch through olaasch@responsiblemanagement.net. Also, please let us know about your experience in designing responsible management and business courses and possibly application of the above.