Corvinus Symposium Conclusions
July 15, 2008 by Brian Butler | Filed under: 1, 2, 3-The Goal of the Environmental Manager
This workshop on the goals of the environmental manager focused on the concept of a unifying, or profession-wide goal for the environmental management profession. At the previous Environmental Management Leadership symposium held at RIT in May, 2008, a hypothesis was proposed that stated that environmental sustainability is the ultimate goal of the environmental manager; after the symposium concluded and the data obtained during the workshops was reviewed, environmental sustainability was replaced by ecological balance as the newly proposed ultimate goal of the environmental manager.
This concept of ecological balance was then used as the focal point of the “goals of the environmental manager” workshop at the Corvinus symposium held on June 23 & 24, 2008. The workshop format consisted of four separate questions asked one-by-one by the workshop moderator; these four questions were:
- Should the goals of the environmental manager go beyond the goals of the company?
- Is there currently a unifying goal for the environmental management profession?
- Are environmental managers ultimately striving to help their company/employer to move toward achieving ecological balance?
- Is the ultimate goal of the environmental management profession to help his or her company close the gap between poor environmental performance and ecological balance?
Ultimately, the intent of these four questions was to attempt to arrive at a consensus viewpoint regarding the goals of the environmental manager. In certain cases a general consensus was indeed reached; with regard to the first question posed, most, if not all participants felt that the goals of the environmental management profession should be held internally within the profession, regardless of the company’s goals, so long as to not go against the company; additionally, the workshop participants agreed that there is not currently one unifying goal for the environmental management profession (reasons for this suggested by workshop participants included the idea that environmental managers perform varied tasks across different industries and management levels).
The third and fourth questions, however, created more of a rift between workshop participants than did the first two questions. A consensus could not be reached with regard to whether or not the environmental manager was ultimately striving to help his/her company to move toward achieving ecological balance; some participants felt that environmental managers were helping move the company toward ecological balance, while other participants felt that the environmental manager was not bridging the gap enough (the gap between poor environmental performance and ecological balance).
The fourth and final question posed during the workshop that focused on whether or not ecological balance was the ultimate goal of the environmental management profession was met with varied degrees of resistance; some participants felt that the ultimate goal of the environmental manager should be ecological balance and that helping his or her company reach ecological balance should be an application of that ultimate goal, rather than the ultimate goal. In other words, the environmental manager’s ultimate professional goal should be his/her goal regardless of where the environmental manager is employed. In addition the this nuance regarding the ultimate goal of the profession, some additional, potential goals for the environmental manager were discussed; sustainability, reducing carbon footprint, and simply making the world a better place, in addition to ecological balance were all offered as alternative, ultimate goals of the environmental management profession.
