It was the "Doing Good and Doing Well" conference in 2005 - featuring Muhammad Yunus speaking on microfinance a year before he went on to win the Nobel peace prize - that made Istvan Muktambar Fülöp decide to do his MBA at IESE Business School in Barcelona.

"I was blown away," recalls the Romanian-born Hungarian-Austrian who comes to IESE by way of New York, reflecting an international mix that is fairly typical among IESE's diverse student body.

During his first year at IESE, he joined the Responsible Business student club and helped to organize last year's "Doing Good and Doing Well" - the leading student conference on responsible business in Europe. This year, he stepped into the role of director of the event that inspired him to come to IESE in the first place.

This year’s "Doing Good and Doing Well," held March 2-3, drew its most ever 350 participants, including representatives of 14 business schools from mostly Europe but also Africa. Responding to feedback from last year, breaks were extended to half an hour to allow for greater networking time, in addition to a two-hour Career Forum, all aimed at helping MBA students make professional connections for pursuing a career in the fast-rising Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) sector.

"Career Services at MBA schools are very good at offering opportunities in banking, consulting and big industry," says Muktambar, "but what are underserved are these alternative opportunities in renewable energy, microfinance, NGOs – fields that are equally interesting and equally profitable. One of the main things we’re combating with this conference is the notion that non-profit equals no profit. You can do work that really matters and fulfils you, as well as make a good salary."

The experience of one IESE alumnus bears this out. Randall Krantz (MBA '02) says his social and environmental interests were, like Muktambar, what motivated him go to business school in the first place. He recognized that simply saying "I want to do something socially responsible but I don't know what" wasn't going to get him anywhere. "I had seen many large international projects that I knew could be managed better from a social and economic point of view, but it was clear that people simply didn't know enough. For me, the MBA was a step in that direction," he says.

After graduation, Krantz worked for Intelligent Energy, exploring new markets and applications for fuel cells, and now works for the World Economic Forum on climate-change initiatives. With no such "Doing Good and Doing Well" conference taking place on campus during his time at IESE, he was delighted to be attending for the first time this year as part of a panel discussion on climate change. "This event is a huge step forward and gives today's MBA students a better chance of being successful in this field."

Krantz advises: "I would say to those seeking social or environmental solutions, for them to work, they’re going to have to be framed in terms of business, because you're going to have to have business involved in any of these solutions. In order to do that, you’re going to have to have the skills to keep going to business. An MBA is going to set you up for a top-down approach, or for working inside one of these bigger companies to change the way they work. And that’s where an MBA is perhaps a more powerful tool to change the world."

Looking to the Future…

IESE Prof. Johanna Mair, who facilitated a panel on microfinance, agrees. "For me, the highlight of this conference, which has been accumulating every year, is that CSR is no longer a marginal issue but has finally entered business reality." As evidence, she points to the fact that Booz Allen Hamilton, Deutsche Bank and Citigroup were the main sponsors of this year’s event, in addition to Charity Bank, indicating just how far this field has been embraced by the mainstream.

"Now when you talk to a large company like Unilever, for example, they say they are looking for MBA graduates who can come up with creative, innovative business models that are inclusive of the kinds of issues raised at this conference. And this is what will be needed more and more in future," she says.

And its not only that the big mainstream banks are now interested in microfinance, it's also about finding solutions to poverty right next door, Mair adds. For example, two members of her panel were implementing microfinance initiatives within poor communities in the United States. "Years ago this discussion might have focused on helping poor women in Bangladesh; now we are seeing these same concepts being practically and creatively applied to help people who are marginalized in one of the richest countries in the world."

Patrice Harduar, an MBA student from the University of Michigan doing an exchange at IESE this term, says helping on this conference has given her new determination to return home and use her newfound business knowledge to tackle poverty in her own backyard after graduation.

Reflecting industry trends, a major thread running through this year's event was the environment, with numerous panels on nuclear energy, sustainable energy, wind power, fuel cells, the hydrogen economy and climate change - issues that have been given an even greater spotlight following the recent Oscar win for An Inconvenient Truth by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who showed a sneak peek of his global-warming documentary when he spoke at IESE just over a year ago.

As final proof that "Doing Good and Doing Well" wasn't just a talking shop but was determined to help MBA students put their money where their mouth is: concerned about the "carbon footprint" left by hundreds of speakers and delegates flying in from all over the world for this event, not to mention all the energy used for the building and paper printed and processed, IESE's Responsible Business club urged everyone to follow its lead and use one of the non-profit websites like My Climate to calculate the CO2 waste they generated and then donate the monetary equivalent to certified "carbon offset" projects in the developing world.