Partners & Associates
Working together across institutions to advance globally responsible leadership
How we work
Inviting
Bringing diverse voices into dialogue across sectors, cultures, and generations.
Inquiring
Deepening collective understanding of what globally responsible leadership requires.
Initiating
Catalysing collaborative action through experiments, pilots, and new partnerships.
Amplifying
Sharing learning across ecosystems so ideas take root in new contexts.
Active Initiatives
BE The Tipping Point
BE The Tipping Point is a scaling strategy that aims to mobilise a critical mass of business schools to radically repurpose curricula and practice for a just and sustainable future. GRLI has helped incubate and advance this agenda by convening partners and allies around a shared goal and by contributing peer-learning mechanisms that translate aspiration into practical institutional change. The initiative operationalises a "pay it forward" model: schools that make meaningful changes support others to adapt and implement similar shifts, creating a network effect designed to reach a systemic tipping point.
Crucial Conversations
Crucial Conversations are unscripted online dialogues designed to surface "edge" topics often overlooked in mainstream business education—topics such as de-growth, toxic leadership, or structural inequality. GRLI's role is catalytic and curatorial: identifying the questions that matter, inviting a diversity of voices (including marginalised perspectives), and holding a format that supports honest inquiry rather than comfortable consensus. By providing a platform for difficult but necessary discussions, the series helps keep GRLI's strategic direction grounded in reality and responsive to emerging conditions. It also creates a growing archive of recordings and syntheses that partners can use for learning and teaching.
GRL4ST Collaborative Course
The Globally Responsible Leadership for Sustainable Transformation (GRL4ST) collaborative course connects students and faculty from multiple institutions into a shared virtual classroom tackling real-world sustainability challenges. It emerged through relationships and experimentation connected through the Deans & Directors Collective and earlier Cohort gatherings. GRLI provides the infrastructure and pedagogical framework that enables partners to co-teach across borders without relying on complex inter-institutional agreements. GRL4ST demonstrates a scalable model for borderless education: it broadens student perspective, creates international peer learning, and reduces institutional silos by making collaboration the default learning condition.
Latest thinking
Jeff Thies: Flourishing, Belonging and the Work of Shared Discernment
The Questions We Carry — Meet GRLI’s Guardians What does it mean to cultivate a global conscience when our experiences of the world are shaped by such dif…
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Stewarding Global Responsibility, Strengthening Our Partnership
An invitation to serve as a GRLI Guardian The Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative (GRLI) invites nominations from individuals affiliated with its full in…
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Beyond abolishing business schools: What are we prepared to change?
Christopher Marquis ‘s recent New York Times essay calling for business schools to be shut down has sparked an extraordinary conversation across the world…
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There are conversations to join, questions to hold, and possibilities to explore together.