Corporate Sustainability, Thought Leadership and Business

Hello friends:

I wanted to post this link to a very interesting study on Sustainability from MIT Sloan Management Review... and, SUSTAINABILITY is one of the popular buzzwords worth getting educated on for potential insight into the next wave of corporate change. It is "advanced" and not mainstream thought at this point in time. It has actually been gaining momentum, however, and certainly worth consideration.

Sustainability is garnering ever-greater public attention and debate. The subject ranks high on the legislative agendas of most governments; media coverage of the topic has proliferated; and sustainability issues are of increasing concern to humankind.

However, the business implications of sustainability merit greater scrutiny. Will sustainability change the competitive landscape and reshape the opportunities and threats that companies face? If so, how? How worried are executives and other stakeholders about the impact of sustainability efforts on the corporate bottom line? What, if anything, are companies doing now to capitalize on sustainability-driven changes? And what strategies are they pursuing to position themselves competitively for the future?

To begin answering those questions, the MIT Sloan Management Review and knowledge partner The Boston Consulting Group, with the sponsorship support from business analytics provider SAS, are collaborating on a project called the Sustainability Initiative. As part of the effort, we recently launched a global survey of more than 1,500 corporate executives and managers about their perspectives on the intersection of sustainability and business strategy. (We plan to make this an annual survey.) Prior to the survey, to form hypotheses and shape its questions, we conducted more than 30 in-depth interviews with a broad mix of thought leaders. Our interviewees included executives whose companies are at the cutting edge of sustainability (including General Electric, Unilever, Nike, Royal Dutch Shell, and BP) and experts from a range of disciplines such as energy science, civil engineering and management. The insights of these two groups yielded a fascinating glimpse of sustainability’s current position on the corporate agenda – and where the topic may be headed in the future.

This report presents high-level findings from those surveys and interviews and offers interpretation and analysis of the results, along with a diagnostic tool. We hope that it provides executives food for thought as they consider how they can take their sustainability efforts to the next level.

For more abou5t this work on sustainability, including exclusive in-depth interviews and additional features, pleee the online exploration at MIT Sloan Management Review’s Sustainability Initiative Web site, http://sloanreview.mit.edu/sustainability/.

To learn more, you can also visit the Global Sourcing Council where an international set of members are considering this topic as well...


Have a great day and hope you enjoy this cutting edge business topic...

Erik