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How fast are businesses adopting sustainability-driven management? The new Sustainability & Innovation Study identifies two distinct camps — ‘embracers’ and ‘cautious adopters’ — and offers a snapshot of how the management future will look.
As SAP’s first-ever chief sustainability officer, Peter Graf was prepared to lay out the business case for sustainability to stakeholders and customers of every kind. But he had to make the case to SAP’s own board of directors first.
Sustainability initiatives can’t be driven through an organization the way other changes can. The authors’ research indicates that successful sustainability initiatives tend to evolve through three distinct phases. Phase 1 involves making the case for change, Phase 2 entails translating vision into action and Phase 3 is about expanding boundaries. Each stage requires different organizational capabilities and leadership competencies.
Many companies are taking the first incremental steps toward sustainability, such as energy conservation and recycling. That’s a good start — but going further can yield significant competitive advantage.
How are sustainability pressures altering the competitive landscape, and how are businesses responding? The first annual Business of Sustainability Survey and interview project found that a strong consensus of managers believe sustainability is having and will continue to have a material impact on how companies think and act.
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Celebrated scientist, entrepreneur and sustainable business strategist Amory Lovins on how companies can seize the opportunities they’re missing.
When Interface’s Ray Anderson founded his commercial carpet company, he’d never heard of ‘sustainability.’ Now his company has turned it into a competitive advantage. Here, a timeline for how one CEO’s ‘mental model’ changed.
As sustainability-related pressures change the competitive landscape, what kinds of capabilities and characteristics will that landscape demand of companies that aim to thrive? Here’s what Business of Sustainability survey respondents and sustainability thought leaders say.
There’s a big—and getting bigger—public discussion about sustainability, but it’s not the one managers need. Here are some early findings from a different kind of inquiry.
A few words from the father of system dynamics on organizational decision making, human frailty and the reasons that managers trying to solve problems so often just make them worse.
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In surveys, customers have long claimed that they’d pay more for ethically produced goods. But is that what happens when they actually buy things? New experiments offer answers.
The moral imperative to address environmental issues like global climate change has never been stronger in the zeitgeist.
Meeting the sustainability challenge will require the kind of cross-sector collaboration for which there is still no real precedent. It must be co-created by various stakeholders by interweaving work in three realms: the conceptual, the relational and the action-driven.
Many companies now offer slick “sustainability reports” along with their annual reports as indicators of their performance. The problem is that none of this espoused benevolence creates true sustainability. The root of this problem is neither business’s misunderstanding of what’s at stake nor corporate cynicism about the sustainability cause (though these may be contributing factors). The problem really stems from management’s failure to see unsustainability as a deep-seated systems failure.
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