The United States needs to drastically change its current patterns of consumption in order to lessen its impact on the environment, Chairman and CEO of S.C. Johnson H. Fisk Johnson ’79 said yesterday at a lecture in Statler Auditorium.

Like many students in accelerated M.B.A. programs, Katy Moyer JGSM and Dr. Patrick Collopy JGSM are extensively studying the fundamentals of business administration while worrying about finding jobs in the troubled economy. However, thanks to the Johnson School’s Management Practicum course, they will be able to add something unique to their resumes: real work experience.

Associate Dean for Corporate Relations Randy Allen developed the Management Practicum with students in order to fill a void in the accelerated M.B.A. program. Because of its intensive academic nature, students in the program are not able to complete an internship during the summer as traditional M.B.A. students do.

It has been over 50 years since Ratan Tata ’59 arrived at Cornell for freshman orientation, but on Friday, the chairman and CEO of the multinational conglomerate Tata Sons Ltd. told students and alumni that the event was still fresh in his mind.

“I was one of about 2,000 people and very frightened,” Tata reminisced. “They told us to look to your left, look to your right … One of you won’t be here in four years.”

This was only one of the things that Tata talked about in the annual Olin Lecture titled “Corporate Social Responsibility in the 21st Century” during Reunion Week.

Financing typically comes in two sizes for businesses: very large or very small. Large-scale financing caters to the needs of large businesses, while small-scale financing answers the needs of tiny enterprises. In a manner reminiscent of Goldilocks’ perfect fit, Root Capital — a nonprofit social investment fund based in Cambridge, Mass. — aims to provide much-needed capital to help such medium-sized businesses grow.

Last night, students and faculty alike gathered in the Plant Science Building for a lecture entitled “Beyond Microfinance: Finance for the ‘Missing Middle’ in Africa and Latin America” to learn more about the financing avenues made available to medium-sized enterprises through Root Capital.

The reason that the American financial system collapsed is far more fundamental than a lack of regulation, the pervasiveness of greed and irrational exuberance, or even the rewards implicit in the structure of our financial interactions. The contemporary model of business education (and more broadly, social values) should be blamed.

That’s right — as much as I’d like not to admit it — the MBA education is (extrapolating from our observation of the current financial crisis) far from sufficient in a globally interdependent 21st century economy that has never before been quite so complex. If it were, our nation’s business leaders would have seen this coming — and they would have stopped it.