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George Dyer: This is the Future of Finance. Hi everyone, welcome to the Future of Finance. I'm George Dyer and today I'm joined by Dr. Julie Anderson, who is the Director of the MS in Sustainability Management Program at the Kogut School of Business at American University in Washington, DC. Julie had a long career in asset management, working with some of the largest firms in the world in a variety of roles, and has brought all that expertise to help the next generation get the core skills and experience that they need to drive sustainability in business and create the future of finance. It was so exciting for me to hear about the focus areas that Julie and her students are working on, on what businesses are signaling to students that they need, including systems thinking, stakeholder engagement skills, and change management skills, in addition to some of the more quantitative and data-focused skills that we might think about. So I hope you enjoy it. If you or anyone you know is looking to build their sustainability expertise to advance their career, I definitely recommend checking out Julie's program at American and listening to this episode. As usual, please follow the show, share it widely, and let us know what you think by leaving a comment or review. It really helps. And with that, here's my conversation with Dr. Julie Anderson. Julie, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining me.
Julie Anderson: Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Dyer: Yeah, it's great to connect. I'm so excited to learn more about your work. So you are in academia now, but I know you've had a long career in finance with some major firms. So why don't we start with just telling us what brought you to your current role at American and some of your background?
Anderson: Yeah, sure. So I do have, as you said, a long career. It's more than 25 years in investment management, pretty much exclusively. So I've held many roles throughout my tenure. I started out in municipal bonds as an investment banker and underwriter, and then I was a trader. When I got my master's degree in applied economics, I then switched into being a U.S. economist for an asset manager, and I did that for a number of years. And that led me into the part of my career that was the biggest part, which was being an analyst and a portfolio manager for sovereign bonds. But then from there, I started managing other teams, providing the strategy for emerging markets investing. And then towards the end of my career, I would say the last 10 years, I spent managing large books of business. So creating, developing and growing mutual funds and ETFs. And that's really when sustainable investing took off. So sustainable investing started to be a part of that. How do we build products and investment teams that can invest sustainably? So I was doing that, and I had always wanted to get my PhD. So as COVID changed all of our lives, I found an opportunity. Really, we were doing a merger and acquisition at my current company at the time, and I decided to take a break, get my degree. Then I did a Fulbright on sustainable investing, came back after COVID and decided to give it one more go. So I was at BlackRock in New York when I found out about this opportunity at American University. And again, having always really wanted to sort of pivot into retirement by teaching at a university, it was just the right fit. So I jumped at the chance to come to American.
Dyer: That's awesome. Just out of curiosity, where did you do your Fulbright?
Anderson: I did it at the University of Antwerp in Belgium.
Dyer: Oh, very cool. Nice. And was that kind of, that work sustainability focused or more general investing?
Anderson: It was. It was purely sustainability focused. I was interviewing large asset managers to determine what was the utility of self-disclosed data. Back then, a lot of investors were trying to engage with companies, but they also recognized that they could either use data from a company like MSCI or S&P, or they could get data themselves. And I was shocked to find that they did value, in fact, self-disclosed data. The data is power, and they wanted all of it. And they knew that it wasn't comparable across all of the companies, but that they wanted their hands on the data. They wanted to start analyzing to see if they could find a competitive advantage through it.
Dyer: Very cool. Yeah, that's a big debate in the field for sure in terms of the quality of data and where it's coming from. So, very cool. So you are now the director of the MS in sustainability management at American. So, you know, the program has been around. Sure.
Anderson: So the program has been around since 2012. So we're in our 13th year. It's structured to provide a core education, and it's really founded on three pillars. We need to provide our students with business fundamentals. It's in the Kogod School of Business. So business is critical, but we also need them to have a fair degree of scientific literacy. And then finally, because we're based in Washington, D.C., the third pillar is the policy fundamentals. And we really do believe that in order to affect change, to get businesses to change how they're doing things, you need to have not only a seat at the table where all of those key stakeholders are present, but you need to be able to have a productive dialogue with each of them. So we get a lot of students that come in that have environmental sciences backgrounds and they're, you know, activists at heart. And really need to teach them how business is done and how they can influence business and remain an active voice with a seat at the table. So really, again, having those three perspectives is very important to moving this forward. So there's five core courses that are focused on those three pillars. And then they have five other courses that they can use for electives to dive into different areas of interest.
Dyer: Very cool. What are most of the students coming out of the program looking to do? Are they mostly going into businesses or as investors or policy or just kind of a mix of career paths?
Anderson: Yeah, the number one. So we ask them to give us their top three. I survey the students coming in and we also do an exit survey. I'm big on surveys. You'll hear that podcast. I survey for everything. So the incoming students, 85 percent of them rank management consulting in their top three. The second one is finance. That's a big one. And then it's a mix from there. But really, the consulting, I think they realize that there's a breadth of challenges that businesses face. So not only does the consultant allow, you know, it's a strategic, you enter in a company, help them with a specific problem, and then you move on. So both you're helping a company that has a very specific need related to sustainability, but also from the student perspective, a consulting job allows them to see a breadth of different issues across companies. And they can really learn a lot. Yeah. Just fast.
Dyer: And do you partner with some of the big consulting firms on this or do they, do you get them in for any of the content or?
Anderson: We do when it comes to our career and job placement fairs. Yeah. So they're a big hiring source for us. And when we need speakers for courses. But when it comes to the actual coursework, which we can get into more, our capstone class is designed as a management consultant class. And it's typically in an emerging market country. So, so this year, last year we went to Santiago, Chile, and this year we were in Panama, and we worked with 11 different companies of all sizes. So, so all the way from, from a small startup, you know, family run to a large bank or law firm. So we really do consulting at a much more personal basis when we do the capstone.
Dyer: Yeah. Very cool. And I, yeah, I saw, am I right, that a big emphasis is on experiential learning? And it sounds like they're really getting out in the world and doing things.
Anderson: Absolutely. Yeah. This, you know, when I think about how do you educate people in sustainability, I have a phrase that I always say, which is somewhat offensive. I say, you know, this isn't accounting. This isn't mathematics. It hasn't been around forever and it's not completely nailed down and structured.