Educating Leaders for a (more) Circular Future: How Business Schools are Driving ESG, Sustainability, and Positive Impact

Career Climbers / 2nd June 2025

Alon Rozen

With all the back-pedaling in recent months on climate, ESG and sustainability initiatives, especially in the US, I hope that I can say this – without ruffling too many feathers – that the future of business can no longer be take, make and dispose (i.e. linear). It’s hard to deny the urgency of rethinking how we produce, consume, and discard so that we extract less, produce less and consume less (or better). And yet, we are now seeing businesses paradoxically scrambling to understand ESG and sustainable accounting frameworks, on the one hand, and trying to understand why the same investors who penalized greenwashing and called for strict net zero objectives in 2024 are now backing off or reversing course, on the other. So, the trillion-dollar question that is now looming for business schools everywhere: how can we train leaders to have the competence and the confidence to tackle these challenges head-on so they are doing the right thing despite rapidly swirlingand ambiguous political winds?

Challenge accepted!

At École des Ponts Business School, we take this challenge personally—after all, we’ve been “in business to make a better world” since 1987. As the business school of the renowned French engineering school,

École nationale des ponts et chaussées – Institut Polytechnique de Paris (the ENPC), which is under the tutelage of the French Ministry of Ecological Transition, we are naturally proponents of triple bottom line accounting by which we take people, planet and profit into account. And we try to recruit participants who share our values and who want to make an impact themselves.

As this edition of CEO Magazine is dedicated to Green MBAs, please allow me to share with you some of the thinking and design that went into our LeadTech Global Executive MBA that we run together with EADA Business School in Barcelona. We have designed this program so that it sits squarely at the intersection of technology, innovation, leadership and impact (social impact, sustainability and circularity). And we don’t just pay lip service to the concept of a sustainable and circular economy: we teach it integrally, research it intensively, and encourage our students to live it authentically. Every single participant graduates not just with an MBA but with a certificate in Circular Economy. Why? Because in tomorrow’s world, it won’t just be a competitive advantage—it’ll be table stakes.

Not a nice–to–have, a better–to–have

Call it European values, but we are enamored with the core tenets of the circular economy – using assets longer (to extract and waste less), reusing assets more often (to produce less) and encouraging usership over ownership (to extract, produce and waste less). We see the circular economy as a more advanced and profitable business model that doesn’t sacrifice people, planet or profits along the way. Which means that going circular is not a nice-to-have, which generates good karma at the expense of higher costs; it is a better-to-have, which allows business to generate more positive impact together with higher profits. To read the entire article, click here!