Management

Sustainability and Competitive Advantage

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Even as attention is increasingly paid to “going
green” and to the role business can play to help
solve sustainability problems, the flip side of
the business-and-sustainability relationship has
gone underexamined. Forget how management
can affect sustainability. How will
sustainability change management?
The difference between the questions isn’t
as subtle as it might sound. The first question —
how can management affect sustainability? —
can be ignored. (Maybe a company still thinks
addressing sustainability isn’t in its strategic interest,
or believes it can’t afford it.) The second
question, on the other hand, will come find you —
whether you want to be found or not. During the
research for this MIT Sloan Management Review
special report, we heard repeatedly of the varied
ways that sustainability-related issues were imposing
themselves on organizations. Even a
partial list of the mentioned impositions is long:
volatility of resource availability and price; impending
regulation; customer demands; investor
pressure; emergence of new markets and evaporation
of old ones; effects on attracting and
retaining talent; changes in financial operations;
necessity for collaboration across boundaries that
used to be inviolable; pressure from communities
and interest groups; growing economic uncertainty;
the need to cultivate resilience; and the
general hunt for strategies that could hope to succeed
over the longer term instead of just
tomorrow. The list goes on.

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Publisher

: ., 2009

Collation

1-10

Language

English

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NONE

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Subject(s)

Sustainability and Competitive Advantage

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