Its first cohort of 22 students included graduates of Yale and Stanford universities. Roughly 10% of its total student and alumni population went to UC-Berkeley for undergrad, and the second- and third-most popular feeder schools are the University of Colorado-Boulder and, once again, Stanford.
But you probably haven’t heard of Presidio Graduate School, a tiny San Francisco-based institution whose MBA program has a lofty goal: producing business leaders who’ll infuse the world with justice and sustainability.
That grand plan stands in stark contrast to the school’s modest setting. It’s located in the Presidio of San Francisco (yes, that’s where the name comes from), a beautiful national park with a view of the Financial District’s skyscrapers and the Golden Gate Bridge. Every building in the park is government-owned, and many of those buildings are former military barracks. Presidio Graduate School is housed in what used to be officers’ quarters. Walking into the building feels a bit like walking into the head office of a summer camp.
Unusual location aside, no one in the school is shy about its mission. “[The students] believe, and I believe, that Presidio is right about the future,” Presidio President and CEO William Shutkin says. “That is, that one day, it will not be optional to think in systems, to consider the social and environmental impact of every product and service we build. It will no longer be an option. So those students and graduates and professionals who are already prepared to think and behave in that way will have an advantage each and every year we go forward.”
A SECTOR-NEUTRAL MBA PROGRAM
Terms like social entrepreneurship have become increasingly popular in the past five years, so it’s no surprise that virtually every elite business school has put at least some focus on social and environmental impact. To list just a few examples from schools known for being green: Michigan Ross has the Erb Institute, a partnership with the School of Natural Resources and Environment; in 2012, roughly 100 Stanford Graduate School of Business students joined together to create the Food and Agriculture Resource Management (FARM) Club; in Yale’s executive MBA program, sustainability is one of the three options for areas of focus. Even Harvard Business School hosts Green Week.
But since its founding in 2003, every week at Presidio has essentially been Green Week. The latest Net Impact guide to business schools, which measures students’ satisfaction with different MBA programs, rated Presidio #1 in social impact and #2 for environmental sustainability. When asked how much of the curriculum focuses on traditional MBA topics versus sustainability and social impact, former finance professional and current student Megan Crocker replied, “100% and 100%.”
Why is it so important to meld the two areas? Some people might argue that do-gooding is fundamentally incompatible with business. But Shutkin rejects that notion. “We are sector-neutral,” he says. “Part of my proposition to our students and to anyone who will listen is that we are evolving toward a meta-sector. One day, it really won’t matter how one is structured as a corporation—for-profit, non-profit, even the public agencies—because increasingly, we’re seeing these sectors combine and work together.”
“EVERY MBA PROGRAM ON THE PLANET SHOULD LOOK LIKE US”
Dwight Collins, associate dean of the MBA program and one of Presidio’s founding faculty members, echoes the idea. “MBA programs traditionally have an accounting track and a finance track and a marketing track, right? And a sustainability track,” he says. “It’s like one of a menu of items. For us, the only way to do business on the planet . . . is to have every one of those topics be done sustainably. Our ultimate aspiration is that every MBA program on the planet should look like us.”
Collins gives some examples of topics that have come up in his operations class. One: End-of-life manufacturing, which is about designing products for multiple lives. He also teaches students about industrial symbiosis, training them to pinpoint companies and manufacturing processes that go together so that the waste of one production process can become raw material for another. “All these things, as we figure out how to do them right, can help us make more products,” Collins says—and not necessarily more expensive products, he specifies.
Another differentiating aspect of Presidio’s curriculum is its heavy online component. (Truth be told, it’s hard to imagine the school’s building holding lots of students all the time.) It’s a typical “blended MBA program:” Students work virtually most of the time, but every month, they spend four eight-hour days in a traditional classroom setting. Students can choose to work through the coursework full-time in two years or part-time in four years. “It also allows our students a certain level of flexibility,” Shutkin says. “Most of our students are working in one capacity or another, full- or part-time.”
President and CEO William Shutkin, on-brand with a bottle of vitamin-packed juice.
PRESIDIANS: A SNAPSHOT
What kinds of students come to Presidio? Well, for starters, probably not Republicans—at least not the traditional kind. Shutkin on Bill Clinton’s first presidential win: “It was a new day—an exciting new time after 12 years of let’s call it sub-par leadership from Washington, two Reagans and a Bush.”
But that doesn’t mean Presidio students don’t have a variety of work experiences. Though Farris Galyon grew up in Northern California with what he describes as “close to that of a hippie mentality,” he joined the military right after graduating from California State University-Sacramento in 2008, enrolling in officer candidate school and becoming a first lieutenant in the Navy by 2009. He had been in a rut, and he felt that joining the military would jumpstart his career and “quench my thirst for adventure,” he says. In June 2013, he finished up his military service as an operations and administration officer in Bahrain.
When Galyon decided to apply for an MBA—to him, the ultimate vehicle for turning any interest into a real-life endeavor—he knew he wanted to focus on more than just finance and marketing. “I was sort of raised with a bias for the environment and for social justice and stuff like that,” he says. His reach school was Berkeley, but when he didn’t get in, Presidio became the clear choice, beating out the University of California-Davis, Sacramento State, and San Francisco State. A close friend had attended Presidio while he was in the military, and she “entrenched the Presidio brand in my consciousness for a long time,” he says.
THE BELLE OF THE BALL
So far, Galyon feels like he made the right choice. Presidio isn’t well-known nationally. It doesn’t make any of the most influential business school rankings by Bloomberg BusinessWeek or U.S. News & World Report. But it has a solid reputation in the Bay Area, he says. A good number of sustainability directors at Google, Facebook, and Salesforce call the school their alma mater. The cost of the two-year program for a full-time MBA student is $62,400, while part-time students can earn the degree in four years at a cost of $15,660 a year in tuition or a total of $62,640.
Galyon’s summer fellowship also showed him how he and his classmates measured up to students from bigger programs. As a climate corps fellow with the Environmental Defense Fund, he worked with the U.S. Army to reduce energy costs at Fort Bragg. Out of 117 fellows total, six were from Presidio—and this was a group that included representatives from such business schools as Yale, Duke, Columbia, and Chicago. “If I can say so, Presidio was the belle of the ball,” he says. That fellowship was by far his big fish—“it’s a very coveted role,” he explains—and his experience there bolstered his confidence in the school. “I think over time our reputation is going to precede us,” he says.
Megan Crocker, a part-time student who spent ten years working at a hedge fund, was set on Presidio from the get-go. “I didn’t even think about some of the more mainstream schools,” she says. For her, there was an element of community that was missing from them. “I think in business it’s easy for people to be hyper-competitive, and it’s hard for people to be competitive while also caring for the people they’re working with and around,” she says. She feels that Presidio strikes the right balance. Plus, the structure of the program has allowed her to balance the coursework with raising three young boys. “I was a little hesitant about the online aspect of it,” she admits, but the amount of teamwork involved has made her forget that she’s not in class most of the time.
