This week, the Center for Responsible Business and Leadership published its Annual Activity Report. You can find the overview of our activities and impact created in 2024/2025 HERE.
Instead of using this weekly communication to report on what we have been doing (something you can quickly explore by scrolling through our Annual Report), I chose to involve our community of leaders, students, companies, and partners — so we could hear directly from them how they believe the CRBL has impacted their professional journeys. Giving them voice is not only more authentic, but also valuable to assess our real impact and continuously improve the service we offer to the students and companies we aim to support through the knowledge we generate.
We spoke with Matilde Marques, a Master's student from the courses “SDGs as Business Strategy” and “Responsible Business”, who also engaged in collaborations with the Center; Tiago Carrilho (Head of Knowledge and Training at BCSD Portugal); José da Silva Almeida (Sustainability (ESG) & Safety, Health, Environment and Quality at Mota Engil); Rita Seabra (responsible for SME training and capacity building at IAPMEI); and Adriana Ferreira (Director of Quality, Environment and Safety at Eco-oil – an SME that is part of our SDG Observatory).
We are pleased to share five main takeaways that emerged from their reflections:
1. The Center helped them perform better in their professional roles, acting as a bridge between academic theory and real-world business practic
2. Their engagement with CRBL was transformative. They report getting a more strategic, pragmatic, and up-to-date understanding of sustainability by accessing tools to act more effectively in their sustainability and leadership roles.
3. They now understand sustainability as a central issue — not a peripheral concern, but a core business strategy vital for organizations and society alike.
4. CRBL inspired them with a sense of purpose, while broadening their perspectives on issues like mental health, stakeholder engagement, and ESG, motivating them to contribute more meaningfully to their business and society.
5. They view CRBL as a trusted and strategic partner, particularly valuing the insights provided by initiatives like the SDG Observatory to inform services, policy, and ESG decision-making.
We are happy to conclude that we are fulfilling our mission to serve our stakeholders, by producing useful knowledge that inspires their action. This is a strong motivation to do more, do better, and keep innovating to serve our companies and students, so they can better serve our society and explore their full potential. As always, we keep open to strengthening our collaborations to escalate this impact, so if you have good ideas that we can deliver together, feel free to make use of our Center capabilities to do so.
Final Note:
Although August is traditionally a quieter month, we’ll be keeping things active and engaging with a series of light yet meaningful newsletters. We’ll kick off with a special edition on book recommendations to inspire your holiday reading. Then, throughout the month, we’ll launch a four-part newsletter series featuring a playful yet thought-provoking diagnosis of our readers’ profiles — to test, in full beach mode, how prepared you are to act as a Responsible Leader in today’s complex world.
Stay tuned and have a great and impactful week!
Filipa Pires de Almeida
Executive Director of the Center for Respsonsible Business and Leadership
A special thank you to this newsletter's collaborators:
Matilde Marques, Master student at CATÓLICA-LISBON
As a student, the CRBL played a transformative role in my education by providing a concrete bridge between academic knowledge and the corporate world. Through participation in interviews with leaders from different sectors, national and international benchmarking of executive programs, and contributions to real projects, I gained a more strategic, critical, and up-to-date perspective on the challenges and opportunities of the sustainable transition. This experience undoubtedly strengthened my motivation to actively contribute to a more responsible future in business.
José Silva Almeida, Mota Engil
The CRBL has played a transformative role in my journey. Through the initiatives we shared and the events I attended, I developed a new way of looking at issues that had previously seemed abstract to me — such as an organization’s purpose, mental health, or sustainability challenges. I began to approach them not only with a more pragmatic perspective, aligned with business reality, but also gained the ability to design and communicate strategy to various stakeholders more clearly and effectively. It has been a demanding but deeply rewarding journey, and CRBL has undoubtedly been one of its greatest catalysts.
Adriana Ferreira, Eco-oil
The CRBL has actively contributed to the development of my role, particularly in the area of sustainability. The constructive analytical approach it promotes allows us to improve and integrate a wide range of information in a more structured way, tailored to market demands. In my view, the CRBL has a very positive impact on the development of sustainability-related topics!
Tiago Carrilho, BCSD Portugal
I first encountered the CRBL during a training session led by Professor Nuno Moreira da Cruz. It was not only inspiring, but it also made me leave with the certainty that sustainability is not a strategy — it is the strategy. Since then, I have followed and actively participated in the Center’s activities, which serve as a source of solid, science-based information, inspiration, and — above all — proof that it is possible to do more and do differently. As a sustainability professional, I consider the CRBL to be a key player in the transformation the economy needs for a fairer and more balanced world — for companies, society, and the planet. Given the Center’s significant impact, I would like to thank the entire team for their excellent work.
Rita Seabra, IAPMEI
Our first partnership with the Center for Responsible Business & Leadership was within the scope of the SDG Observatory. Others naturally followed. But the SDG Observatory remains a key tool for IAPMEI to understand the evolution of sustainability in companies and provides valuable input for adjusting ESG-related services.