Big Idea: Leading Sustainable Organizations

Leverage Points for Creating a Sustainable World

Jason Jay, director of the MIT Sloan Initiative for Sustainable Business and Society, says that technology and innovation, coupled with a voluntary “limits to growth,” are key for creating a more sustainable world.

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Leading Sustainable Organizations

Corporate adoption of sustainable business practices is essential to a strong market environment and an enduring society. What does it mean to become a sustainable business and what steps must leaders take to integrate sustainability into their organization?
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Jason Jay, a lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is the director of the MIT Sloan Initiative for Sustainable Business and Society.

If there is only one world, then how are we to conceive of sustainability issues? If political and ideological boundaries really are “invisible fences in the mind,” as MIT Sloan professor John Sterman puts it, then what kind of image of how the world works will best serve us as we think about issues of economic growth?

These are some of the questions that MIT Sloan’s Jason Jay raised in a thought-provoking presentation called “Natural Capital and the Challenge of Sustainable Development” at the Dynamics of Globalization Executive Education program held at MIT on June 13-14.

A lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Jay is the director of the MIT Sloan Initiative for Sustainable Business and Society. His research generally focuses on cross-sectoral collaboration and hybrid organizations that promote more sustainable business practices, and he gets students and alumni engaged in hands-on projects with leading companies and organizations.

Jay says that MIT Sloan considers economic activity as something embedded in a larger social and environmental context, and defines sustainability as “the fundamental alignment of healthy organizations, healthy environments, healthy societies and economies that meet human needs.”

Excerpted from “Natural Capital and the Challenge of Sustainable Development,” June 13-14, 2012; adapted from the work of Herman Daly and John Sterman.

Societies, he says, can only be sustainable if they are able to meet three basic criteria: renewable resources aren’t used faster than they can be regenerated; pollution and wastes are emitted no faster than natural systems can render them harmless; and non-renewable resources are used no faster than renewable substitutes can be introduced.

So how are we doing? In a nutshell, not great. Jay shared some detailed graphics from a recent article in Nature by Johann Rockström, an interactive chart recently published by the Guardian and a recent McKinsey analysis to paint a picture of a world that looks like it’s rapidly approaching its environmental limits.

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Leading Sustainable Organizations

Corporate adoption of sustainable business practices is essential to a strong market environment and an enduring society. What does it mean to become a sustainable business and what steps must leaders take to integrate sustainability into their organization?
More in this series

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Comments (3)
another.human.factor
And of course, we cannot forget to say thanks to Jay Forrestor to help shape the field and giving us the approaches necessary to create this understanding.
another.human.factor
Hi Jason. Samuel Mann presents a collection of models for development. 

http://computingforsustainability.com/2009/03/15/visualising-sustainability/

This covers a wide gamut of thought processes and knowledge domains. For me, probably the most important component of this that is hardly mentioned is the person and how they choose to persuade or influence other people. A person who has an "environmentalist" approach and chooses to bark the importance of the environment ignores the political realities of business and working with people. Such an extreme view ignores that the business must turn a profit in order to grow and that it has different modes of business strategies that make different aspects of SD viable. I like the world healthy in your definition because that is a major goal within the sustainability concept.
Disruptive innovation and sustainable development « Value Chain Generation
[...] order. I have taken the liberty to use the figure below to depict value system order, taken from the MIT Sloan Management Review. Again, the value system order is a nested system. Ideally the sustainable value system order [...]