Corporate Environmental Management

Today in corporate environmental management we did an interesting exercise. The professor split the class up into two groups. He put a 6x6 grid on the white board. One team was X and one team was O. He told us that we had to maximize the number of lines of each symbol on the board. He asked for group representatives and I stood up, shook hands with the other representative and the task, not game, began. Members of each team began thinking of strategies to block the lines of the either to maximize their lines. Tom, the American-Polish student who told me about his interest in leadership and politics spoke up and explained that the point of the exercise is to maximize the collective lines, that we weren't playing a game and that we weren't on opposing teams. In his view, the best strategy led to a win-win where each group had three lines of six. What happened was that we attempted to block eachother's lines ending up with less lines than if we had worked together. The amazing thing about the exercise was that we knew the answer right away from Tom, but insisted on trying to best the other team. In the end, the game was never finished because we took to long but the other team would have ended up with more lines because I placed an X where I shouldn't have. It was a mistake, but the point was to maximize the collective lines, any mistakes after that were meaningless in my opinion (perhaps I'm just trying to justify a silly error in logic). The point was that environmental management is less about the environment and more of creating a win-win-win balance of what seem to be competing pillars of sustainable development: environmental, social, economical.

Anyways, Tom is really smart.