Business on the Edge: How to Turn a Profit and Improve Lives in the World’s Toughest Places

In this misguided report, Bartkus (Getting It Right) and Block, business professors at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Alberta, respectively, distill lessons from the successes and failures of a program they oversee that pairs MBA students with international corporations to solve problems related to operating in foreign markets roiled by unrest. Among the successes are Green Mountain Coffee, whom the authors credit for developing secure supply chains by “embedding their staff in communities of coffee growers.” Bartkus and Block take for granted that the incursion of American multinationals into foreign countries accrues benefits to their civilians and workers, even as critics of that idea linger on the edges of their own account. For instance, they describe their unsuccessful attempt to broker a partnership between an American mining company and an “international humanitarian NGO” to offer microloans in Ghana, blaming the failure on differences in the parties’ internal decision-making processes instead of the NGO’s reservations over partnering with a major player in an industry “notorious [in its] disregard for both safety and the environment.” Further raising doubts about whether the authors’ efforts actually “improve lives” is their admission that “fully half of our projects have failed to have the impact on the ground that we aspired for them.” This doesn’t convince. (July)