Module 6: Global Perspectives in Responsible Business – Responsible Business, Incentives, and the Discomfort of Looking Properly
One of the more interesting parts of my MBA so far has been the module on global perspectives in responsible business. Not because it introduced entirely new concepts, but because it forced a different way of thinking about organisations, leadership and accountability.
Coming from a surgical and operational leadership background, I naturally look at problems through a systems lens: identify the issue, understand the operational consequences, design a process, implement a solution. This module challenged me to add a different question.
Not just: “What is the problem?”
But: “Whose incentives are shaping it?”
That shifts the conversation considerably. For my assignment, I focused on Glencore and the tension between its ESG commitments and its operational reality. On the surface, it is easy to frame such issues as isolated failures: corruption, environmental damage, labour exploitation, governance gaps. The more useful analysis was about the incentives, power structures and stakeholder interests that allowed the gap between stated values and actual practice to persist.
One of the most useful pieces of feedback I received challenged me to think less about critique and more about implementation. It is relatively easy to identify ethical failings in large organisations. It is much harder to answer the practical questions: who actually changes the system, what resistance emerges, what trade-offs are created, and how organisations balance reform against commercial pressure.
That felt relevant well beyond the assignment. In healthcare, it is tempting to assume that good policies create accountability on their own. The module made me question that assumption, including in my own leadership. Frameworks matter, but what gives them substance is whether leaders, myself included, are willing to apply them consistently when it is difficult, costly or inconvenient to do so.
The module also encouraged more reflexive thinking than I expected. Rather than analysing organisations purely from the outside, it asked us to consider how our own values, professional experiences and leadership style shape the way we interpret problems. That was probably the most unfamiliar part academically, but arguably the most useful.
What I took away is that responsible business is not really about polished ESG statements or theoretical models. It is about whether institutions, and the people who lead them, are willing to confront uncomfortable incentives honestly, especially when doing so carries a cost.
That applies to healthcare as much as to multinational corporations. Perhaps that is why the topic stayed with me more than I expected.
