International Business Fellows explore meaning of ethical business

There was a moment while listening to a speaker during her International Business Fellows immersion experience that so captivated Anna Koeberlein (BBA ’26), she felt like her “heart was on fire.” “I'd never seen such a parallel between faith and business in someone's life story,” she said, recalling the speaker, a CEO of a Polish company, and his message. John Sikorski, assistant teaching professor in the Business Ethics and Society Program at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, said the CEO’s story was “less a progressive development of his business journey and more a witness talk about failure and success.”

These types of interactions are common for students in the International Business Fellows program. Now beginning its third year,  the program’s weekly colloquia offered over two semesters give select undergraduate students the chance to explore how perspectives of Catholic social teaching and ethical considerations might lend added dimension to business. The colloquium’s capstone is a trip to Warsaw and Kraków, Poland, a predominantly Catholic country that has operated under a free market for only 34 years. Europe's fastest growing and now fifth largest economy, Poland recently has become a massive locus of tech investment and has sheltered nearly 2 million Ukrainian refugees. It was in Warsaw that the students heard from Sergiusz Urbaniak, the former CEO of one of Poland’s largest telecommunications firms. After his rise to corporate success, Urbaniak found himself working an unmanageable schedule that was tearing his family and his marriage apart. “The message he gave was that anytime he relied on himself, he found himself failing,” Sikorski said. “But when he chose to let God lead his vision for his business and be open to the plan that unfolds, he found happiness and success.” “It was inspiring to interact with speakers who radiated joy when discussing their faith, sharing how God guided them through both successes and failures,” said Mark Metryoos (BBA ’25), a senior studying finance and history.  “This trip has helped me realize that I want my future focusing equally on career aspirations and the growth of my faith.” The trip to Poland is a culmination of a year of reading, discussions and interactions with business leaders. Throughout the fellow program’s weekly meetings, students discussed texts and cases related to business ethics in a global context with Professor Sikorski, heard from Mendoza faculty members about their research and explored themes of justice, solidarity and the dignity of the human person in the realm of business. They engaged in ethical debates about how business impacts – and is impacted by – religion, politics and economics. While core business classes present how profit margins often dictate decisions,  the International Business Fellows program asks how business leaders can integrate ethics and social responsibility into their strategies.

“We want to expose students to emerging ethical themes in business particularly through an international lens,” Sikorski said. “Everything from discussions of sustainability, to the ethics of AI, to creating person-centered workplaces, and all of these reflections inflected by and inspired by the College’s mission to grow the good in business.” Growing up as a Polish-American spending time between Poland and Texas,  Marcin Demkowicz now runs three businesses, including a tech firm in Kraków, Poland. When he spoke with the students, he spelled out his philosophy on the equilibrium between faith and work. “It shouldn't be a balance. They should be ideally the same, never be a trade off,” he said. “Everything you're doing should be completely soaked through with your faith. And that is easy when you let your faith just soak through you in the first place. “When your faith is not something separate, it's just always on. Then, not only are you not going to do things that are contradictory to your faith, but every choice you make will be reflective of those values and they, in turn, bear fruit.” “The class and the business settings were augmented by this unique aspect of prayer on the trip,” said Koeberlein. “Going into these deeply religious sites, like Wadowice, Pope John Paul II's birthplace, and praying together with [fellow students] was an enriching experience and a way to connect on a deeper level.” As an expert in the thought of Pope Saint John Paul II, Sikorski draws heavily on this thinker during the Fellows program. The first Polish pope in history, and the first non-Italian in more than 500 years, John Paul II led the church and was a global leader during the tumultuous period when Eastern Europe was wrestling with communism and emerging to embrace a free market economy.

“John Paul II was arguably the most important thinker in the Catholic magisterial tradition in the modern era. He treated the themes of work, labor, the dignity of the human person, solidarity and the way these principles and norms apply to commerce and business,” he said. John Paul II’s seminal encyclical Laborem Exercens is a meditation on labor and capital, workers’ rights and the dignity and spirituality of work. In it, the pope stressed that work is not merely a means to financial ends but a fundamental expression of human dignity and a pathway to personal and social flourishing. “It doesn’t matter how good at finance or accounting you are if you don’t take time to reflect on ethical questions and the impact that business has on society,” said Allison Willner (BBA ’26), who is studying management, marketing and history. “It’s important to take a step back and think about how these skills are actually applied and the impact they have on others. The fact that Notre Dame embraces this approach so much is exactly why I love the business school.”