How Georgetown Became A Leader In Sustainability

Prashant Malaviya spoke with Poets&Quants in San Francisco recently while on a West Coast swing to meet alumni working in sustainability careers. Earlier, in Seattle, he’d met with dozens of alumni at three events; among them was Class of 2016 MBA Surabhi Agrawal, now group product manager in sustainable packaging for Starbucks.

Agrawal recalls that when she joined the McDonough MBA program in 2014, “sustainability was not what it is today in the world overall. People were not thinking and talking about it in the same way.” But as someone with a background in international relations who was living and working abroad, she saw the impact that businesses could have in the space — “if they do business right.” It’s what prompted her to go to B-school, and it’s what informed her experience at Georgetown, which at the time was beginning to invest in sustainability-focused programming.

“I was always interested in sustainability, thinking about how businesses can make an impact for the better,” Agrawal tells P&Q. “That’s what led me to Georgetown. But now they have a master’s program, they have a certificate program. Those weren’t there when I was there, but it’s amazing to see how they’re really leaned into sustainability.

“Georgetown being in D.C., I think it provides a unique nexus of understanding government. A lot of leading nonprofits are based out of there, but then it has its business school, so I feel like it has this really unique place that it brings these different aspects of society together.”

‘A UNIQUE INTERSECTION OF SCIENCE & BUSINESS’

At Starbucks, Agrawal worked in carbon and water waste reduction before her current focus on reducing plastic waste. Her team manages everything the customer walks out of the store with: the cup, the lid, the spoons, sleeves, splash sticks, bags, food bags — “anything,” she says, “the customer touches.” The central question of her job: How to make sure it’s all more sustainable, reusable, and compostable. The journey, she says, ends with getting rid of single-use plastics.

Georgetown, Agrawal says, has chosen “a really unique intersection of science and business. In my opinion, one of the key areas that’s still missing overall: We have these science-based targets that we’re all reaching towards, and when I’m working in my day to day looking at LCAs of products — life cycle assessments — and then thinking about product circularity, there’s all these words and terms that are used. But the industry as a whole is still defining it, they’re still figuring it out.

“As I’m working to reduce carbon in our coffee supply chain, the industry is thinking about, ‘Okay, if X, Y, Z, regenerative and agriculture practices are put in, it’s going to impact carbon this much’ — that scientific lens has not intersected with business before. I think it’s been ‘science does its thing and business does its thing.’ And we’re at this really interesting nexus where you need people to be knowledgeable and understand, ‘What is coming from science and how can I apply it in the best way to business?’

It’s a unique skill set that Georgetown is giving its students, she says.

“I think about where business education is, I think it’s not a feel-good moment anymore,” Agrawal says. “This is a reality of doing business in our society. Consumers are demanding it, governments are mandating it. Business before saw sustainability very much through the lens of compliance. Now it has shifted more and more to seeing sustainability through the lens of, ‘This is how we need to be relevant in society.’

“I feel like I haven’t seen that many sustainability programs in master’s pop up — Georgetown is one of the ones. I’ve only heard of a handful at this point. So I feel like business schools can do more. But I’m proud to be associated with Georgetown, which is actually leading in this space.”

A NATURAL INTEREST IN SUSTAINABILITY

Another Georgetown MBA, Class of 2013 graduate Logan Soya, is founder and executive chairman of Aquicore, an ESG data and analytics platform. Aquicore “empowers real estate to take the actions necessary to achieve net zero carbon,” providing ESG analytics for large commercial real estate owners. “Essentially what that means is, we can put sensors and other kind of ways to capture data about large commercial buildings, like the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center,” Soya tells P&Q. “We put that data together for the owners of those buildings. And then we find and recommend projects that help to reduce energy carbon or costs associated.” Aquicore’s platform is deployed across more than 1,000 buildings and 400 million square feet with leading owners and operators of real estate.

Soya founded the company shortly before beginning his MBA at the McDonough School of Business. Originally a physics undergrad who worked in the telecom industry as a software engineer, he used Georgetown as a transition point for his career. “I knew I wanted to transition to something else,” he says. “I had always been kind of passionate about energy and sustainability from an early age, and so I was fortunate enough to find my way into founding Aquicore.”

When he attended the McDonough School, Soya’s focus was on entrepreneurship. But McDonough always had a strong focus on what was then called CSR, he says. Arriving in Washington from “a sleepy town in Florida,” Soya learned “what it feels like to get out there, network, learn how to hustle. Learn how to understand what all these different disciplines are that people talk about in business. And that was super beneficial for me.

“I kind of had a built-in natural interest in sustainability. And so that was already kind of part of my ethos. And it was more of the skills that needed to get developed through starting at Georgetown that helped me launch into a bigger world from there.”

‘THERE’S GOING TO BE LOTS OF TALENT NEEDED’

Soya says the world is at a major inflection point. In the next 20 to 30 years, the world economy must transition from fossil fuels to more sustainable energy sources.

It’s a field that he’s become very familiar with over the last decade-plus.

“There was a Deloitte report that said that it’s going to take something like $80 trillion of investment to really transition the entire global economy off fossil fuels,” Soya says. “Just to give you context, the entire global economy is only $93 trillion from a GDP perspective, so that’s a huge transition. Education and business education in particular should be at the forefront of that. There’s going to be lots of talent needed in order to actually accomplish this.”

Businesses and institutions must understand how to meet this demand, Soya says. Big questions remain: What are the economics to create this transition and do so successfully? He says business education prioritizing on sustainability is “a huge opportunity.” Echoing a recent report by a major accrediting agency, he calls for B-schools to do more.

“We went from interesting to must-have status, I feel, in the last 24 months,” he says. “And so with a must-have status in the market, people are still figuring out what the disciplines are and the roles and the responsibilities that are required. And I think business schools like Georgetown taking the initiative to start to really kind of mold these programs together is a really good thing, because I need more talent at my business. Every customer that I talk to ranging from Goldman Sachs to Tishman Speyer needs more talent. The demand for ESG expertise is outrageous right now.

“There is a huge deficit of talent and employers are struggling. They don’t know where to find this talent. And so business schools are actually helping to relieve some of that pressure. They’re going to be in a great place.”