Contact: Linda Myers Office: 607-255-9735 E-Mail: lbm3 at cornell.edu
ITHACA, N.Y. -- What can corporate-bound MBA students learn from trainers with the Ruckus Society, which normally teaches nonviolent social action techniques to anti-corporate activists?
Apparently plenty. On Sept. 22, 40 students in senior lecturer Jan Katz's World Geopolitics class at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management spent five hours learning from three staff members of the Oakland, Calif.-based organization. The Ruckus Society, which grew out of a drive to protect federal forests from corporate interests in 1995, teaches environmental and human rights groups how to run effective social action campaigns, including such high-visibility techniques as hanging from billboards to get their message heard.
"Public interest group pressure is part of business today and has become increasingly more sophisticated," said Katz, citing as examples Nike's failure to respond to one such group's public criticism of the firm's overseas labor practices and McDonald's move to improve its slaughterhouse practices following protests by animal rights activists.
"Political risk management is growing in importance. As future managers and executives, today's MBA students need to know how to communicate with and respond to their critics publicly in an effective way," said Katz. "Sales at Nike were hurt substantially because the company didn't take social action groups seriously," she noted.
In outward appearance and dress, the trainers and the students looked almost interchangeable -- fresh faced, neatly coifed, personable and nearly all wearing the casual-clothes uniform of today's 20-somethings -- clean, well-pressed jeans, bright-colored sweaters or T-shirts and new sneakers. This was a surprise to some of the MBA students. "I expected the trainers to be people with attitudes dressed in ratty clothes," said Roland Springer, a second-year MBA student in the class. The session began with the trainers explaining what their organization does. "We give groups the tools, but we don't run the campaigns" or even share all their views, clarified Ruckus Program Director Dara Silverman, who is from Ithaca originally.
The MBA students then wrote down their expectations for the session and posted them on a board. One student expected "a different perspective to contrast with my business view." Another hoped "to understand the thought processes that motivate the actions of protesters and to learn how to communicate with people who may just want to revolt against the establishment."
In a morning discussion, students sought to define such terms as civil disobedience ("anything that challenges the status quo"), power ("who has it and how it plays out") and the difference between violent and nonviolent action, a task that seemed to get stickier as they moved from individual to community and institutional levels. Some students saw challenging the drinking age by various means as a form of civil resistance, and some termed both capital punishment and abortion as forms of institutional violence. The proposal that violence be defined as causing harm seemed acceptable until someone asked if air pollution could be put in that category, an idea that discomfited others. One student said: "You could make an argument that a protest against a store is harmful to the store owner." All seemed to agree, however, that violence arises from conflict -- which also can be responded to nonviolently.
Following a luncheon slide show of images from significant nonviolent protests over the past century, participants were asked to try to put themselves in the minds of people in the slides. One student responded: "I could never identify with the WTO protesters, but I could identify with the women suffragists."
And in one of most effective exercises of the session, Ruckus volunteer trainer Jim Ace tore into the room waving his black-gloved fists excitedly, a gas mask over his face and a red bandanna covering his mouth. As the students recoiled at the intrusion, training director Moj Azemun asked: "What would he need to do to physically de-escalate the situation?" Ace modified his look and behavior in response to calls of "Lose the mask and gloves!" "Take off the bandanna!" Stop moving and waving your arms!" "Unclench your fists and sit down!" and the students began to relax.
The lesson was telling: Dress and gestures that suggest violence are threatening and make actual dialog impossible. "When [he] walked in with his black gloves, bandanna and mask, I realized that this was like the images of protesters portrayed on television," said Kizzy Maitland, an MBA-MILR student. "It was surprising to see it firsthand and to recognize the physical responses that his appearance elicited."
A follow-up exercise involved half the students playing the roles of, well, MBA students trying to enter a building to interview with a recruiter for a well-known cigarette manufacturer, while the rest of the group played anti-tobacco protesters trying to keep them out of the building. The students seeking interviews put to good use the techniques they had learned in the earlier exercise about body language that might defuse a potentially violent situation.
After the workshop, Maitland, MBA-MILR Corinne Murphy, and Springer expressed surprise at learning how much planning goes into nonviolent social action. "I tend to think of protesting as more spur-of-the-moment and emotional," said Murphy. "I learned that the strategy behind protesting can be rational and thoughtful."
Will the students behave differently as a result of the workshop when they enter the corporate world? Springer said he'll definitely "take demonstrators more seriously." Murphy will "spend more time understanding protesting groups' goals and concerns in order to respond better to their actions." She said, "When viewed from an interests-based bargaining perspective, a meeting of the company and protestors could actually be beneficial for both parties." And Tetsushi Sasago, another second-year MBA student, said that if protesters took a cooperative approach, he'd give them an opportunity for a formal meeting.
But Jennifer Barker, who is president of the International Business Association, a student group at the Johnson School, faulted the trainers for not adequately responding to her question about whether protesters would be open to negotiation and compromise. She also suspected that her view "that corporations can be both environmentally responsible and profitable" clashed with the private view of one of the trainers, expressed to her in a post-training conversation. "I don't think you can follow Ghandi's view that everyone has a piece of the truth and his principle [of trying to see things from other people's point of view] if you're not willing to compromise or negotiate," she said.
Nevertheless, Springer said he was impressed by the training staff's professionalism, adding: "The workshop was a great mix of discussion, participation and minimal straight lecture by them."
And Maitland offered even higher praise: "The experience was enlightening. I felt that it pulled our class together in ways that none of us expected."
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