The Business School’s lecture, “CSR and Business Ethics”, led by Professor Gordana Kierans focuses on global sustainability issues faced by global companies aspiring to be more sustainable in an environmental and financial sense over a long period of time. These companies often encounter global sustainability challenges - and even potential ethical problems - that can turn their initiatives into corporate crises. Hence, these companies have learned to understand all their stakeholders, with the most obvious ones being employees and customers, but also the companies’ relationships with government and the wider public.

To offer students an opportunity to hear how these challenges are met in the real world, Professor Kierans invited Ms Afke Schaart, Huawei’s Senior Vice President and Chief Global Impact to address the SZTU students. Ms Schaart, who had just returned from Bahrain and was still in quarantine, joined the students in an online session. This entire online lecture was structured around the students’ questions about Ms Schaart’s work as a “Corporate Diplomat”, as she calls it. The questions ranged from how to deal with a crisis, who the biggest stakeholder is, what are some ethical issues around customer information security, what are some of the major challenges of a global company, how to encourage more young girls to improve their ICT skills, and how to support female leaders.

As Huawei is based in 170 countries, Ms Schaart’s first-hand experience and insights were very valuable for students and helped them realise how this Chinese multinational can have an impact on its environment and its stakeholders. Her career spans from her Director Public Affairs role at KPN, Member of the Parliament in the Netherlands, Senior Director at Microsoft, VP and Head of Europe, Russia and CIS in Brussels to her today’s position at Huawei. Hence, she was also able to give students valuable tips for their potential future career on the global stage. As the students are embarking on their one-semester-long internship in the next term, they clearly benefitted from the personal insights from one of the most valuable voices in the world’s IT industry.

Picture: The speaker Ms Afke Schaart

Text/Picture: Gordana Kierans