UN Global Compact PRME Award honors Andrew Hoffman for Management as a Calling course
Andrew (Andy) Hoffman, the Holcim (US) Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan, has received the 2024 Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) Faculty Teaching Award for his course, Management as a Calling. The course is one of five to be honored worldwide at schools located in the United States, Brazil, Hungary, and India.
PRME, an initiative of the UN Global Compact, presents its esteemed award for impactful pedagogical innovations that accelerate the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) across a variety of business school disciplines. Submissions were received from over 800 institutions in more than 90 countries from PRME’s extensive community of business and management schools.
Hoffman, who holds joint appointments at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business and the School for Environment and Sustainability, was selected under the management discipline for the course PRME recognized for its “profound impact on students’ personal and professional development,” and its “commitment to excellence in education [that] prepares students not only for successful careers but also for lives enriched with meaning and ethical leadership.”
“I’m very honored to receive the award,” said Hoffman, “but it’s less about me than it is about validating a course that is completely unorthodox.”
The course, inspired by Hoffman’s book, Management as a Calling (Stanford Business Books, 2021), is centered around immersive off-site retreat experiences—the first of which is held at U-M’s Biological Station—where students participate in reflective exercises, mindfulness practices, and community engagements to formulate personal mission statements.
“The retreats are designed to help students examine what kind of businessperson they want to be, what kind of legacy they want to have,” said Hoffman. “I think our students are hungry for this kind of content. Too much of business education is focused on the rational intellect and not enough on the aspirational heart.”
Hoffman related that student response to the course has been extremely positive—many describing it as one of the formative moments or experiences in their business education.
In a story featuring the Management as a Calling course in Michigan Today (January 26, 2024), former Erb student Celia Bravard MBA/MS ’23 said that the retreats and guest lectures over the past year “solidified” her goal to use “my talents and education combined with my love for science and compassion for people to aid in catalyzing solutions for the climate crisis.”
Students finding their purpose—or embarking upon the road to find them—is gratifying for Hoffman. But he acknowledges that the program’s success is “just one drop in the ocean, more of a proof of concept than any kind of measure of broad scale change.”
That is why, Hoffman says, he wrote his forthcoming book, Business Education and the Noble Purpose of the Market: Correcting the Systemic Failures of Shareholder Capitalism, which will be published by Stanford University Press. Over the past academic year, Hoffman completed the book as a visiting fellow at Harvard Business School’s Institute for Business in Global Society.
“The message is simple for students,” said Hoffman. “Number one, business education is broken. Number two, go to business school anyway. You have a tremendous power to influence society. But number three, take control over your education. You are in a resource-rich environment; draw what you need and build the program that you want. And for professors: Recognize the problems, and consider that the role of business in society is enormous. The responsibility of business education to create the kind of leaders that we need for the next century is equally enormous. Start to think about who we are as professors, what we are as a business school, and how we can properly serve the society that desperately needs our input.”