An ongoing exercise in transformation and anticipation

Sabrina Roszak
Associate Dean of the Digitalisation Academy
SKEMA Business School

In addition to CSR regulations and a change of strategic direction instigated by management, this is an ongoing exercise in transformation and anticipation – particularly of future regulations. During the interview, Tjeerd Krumpelman used the metaphor of an oil tanker to illustrate the need for every organisation to embark on continuous CSR transformation. He explains that you shouldn’t take your foot off the accelerator after changing course because “if you want to accelerate again, it takes a huge amount of time and energy to get up to speed.”

“You can never stop. It has to be a never-ending programme. And I think that was our mistake: taking our foot off the accelerator, thinking it would move forward on its own. But once we’ve slowed down, we’re rather like an oil tanker… If you want to accelerate again, it takes a huge amount of time and energy to get up to speed. I think our foot is back on the accelerator. The engines are running and we’re slowly speeding up. But now there’s another problem on the horizon, which I really want to tackle: regulations. Meanwhile, the world has been changing. The world has continued to move forward in terms of sustainability. And what it has done, particularly in Europe, is to introduce an enormous number of regulations. If we go back to the idea of the big tanker or container ship that has just put a foot on the accelerator: at the same time, with these regulations, things are being thrown at our boat that slow us down or confuse the captain, at least.”

However, Integrated Thinking remains above all an “intellectual prerequisite” for managers and all stakeholders in general. Philippe Peuch-Lestrade believes that changing the mindset of future managers won’t happen “overnight”; it will probably take “a generation” . This brings us back to the need to rethink business school curricula by integrating specific training to develop soft skills like adaptability, open-mindedness, critical thinking and the ability to manage complexity (Aras et al., 2022; McGuigan et al., 2021). With finance courses – as suggested in Michel-Henry Bouchet’s chapter – this means, for example, combining the teaching of quantified financial techniques with a soft qualitative approach to financial transactions, in order to highlight the social consequences of freewheeling market finance.