Organization mixes business, environment

MBA student Neha Kale decided she needed to be passionate about her career.
Kale sold transmissions for a major manufacturer.

“I actually loved my job,” she said. She traveled the world and meet interesting people. But she had a certain emptiness.

“What was my mark going to be? That I sold more transmissions?” Kale said.
Kale took a leave of absence from the transmission company to teach in rural South India. A photo in her apartment memorializes the time she took her students to a city three hours away, where, for the first time, they saw multi-story buildings.

Afterwards, she enrolled in the Kelley School of Business MBA program and joined Net Impact.

Now, she’s the president of the IU graduate chapter of Net Impact, a group that tries to figure out how to mix business and social responsibility, sustainability and profit.
Early on a rainy Friday, Kale sat in a chair in her apartment with her laptop and three other Net Impact board members and ticked off the meeting’s bullet points.

The members listened, offered suggestions and ate umpa — an Indian rice breakfast — figs and drank Indian tea as Kale plowed through agenda topics.

The group advocates corporate responsibility and a triple bottom line for corporations – which means measuring not just for profit, but also for the social and
environmental cost to the community.

Kale and her board members resent being called names such as “treehuggers.” That’s not an accurate depiction of the group, she said. But a lot of fellow students just don’t care either way.

“A lot of people think it’s not possible,” said Joni Lewis, the group’s vice president for internal communications.

Maximizing profits, like for-profit businesses are expected to do – and at the same time looking out for the community at large – is a challenge for organizations.
“That’s something that hasn’t been figured out,” Lewis said. “You can’t serve two masters at once.”

But it doesn’t stop Kale, Lewis and the 80 members of the IU graduate chapter from trying. Members expect to convince the companies they work for to be more socially responsible.

When Kale leaves IU, she said she wants to put her experience in the manufacturing industry to work as a consultant, hopefully for a firm that focuses on sustainability issues.

“I’m interested in making an impact, but in a consulting form,” Kale said.