“Business sustainability? Embed it and forget it.” As soon as I said it, the journalist furrowed his brow. I knew the inevitable follow-up was coming. “Embed sustainability and forget it? How can you say that? Sustainability is a huge problem for business managers. You can’t just tell them to solve it and forget it.” Yes, you can. And that’s what this book is about.
Most executives have come to frame sustainability as a “journey,” a potentially endless expedition of incremental improvement. In my 2008 Harvard Business Review article, I argued that while achieving sustainability requires time and often incremental improvement, sustainability is a known destination. We know exactly what sustainability looks like because we interact with a sustainable production system every day. And the system is time and battle tested; it’s been running continuously for millennia. Refined through billions of years of trial and error, our sustainability model is the Earth’s biosphere. We’ll reach the
sustainability destination when we embed the principles that account for the biosphere’s sustainability to business practice in profitable ways. Embed it and forget it.
If you have picked up this book, you are probably already sold on the larger “business case for sustainability.” You most likely know that the benefits of greening and greater social responsibility have been largely demonstrated in theory and practice. (See Further Reading for previous publications that develop the larger business case for sustainability and its benefits.) I am not going to rehash the basic evidence that has been covered elsewhere (although a crib sheet is offered in table I-1 that managers can use to think through the potential gains). Granted, none of the observed benefits of greening are automatic. Like all good strategies, success depends on competent execution and rapid learning from missteps.However, when done right, sustainability pays. Likewise, when neglected, sustainability can cost you. Just ask Royal Dutch Shell managers who were famously blindsided by the twin Brent Spar and Nigerian crises
in 1995. Or General Electric’s decades-long entanglement over asbestos and PCB-related cleanups. Or Mattel managers who faced a 2007 firestorm for selling toys coated with poisonous lead paint. Or the hundreds of retailers furiously yanking products containing bisphenol A from their shelves in 2008. Or Florida home-builders pressured to remove corrosive drywall from customer’s homes in 2009. Undoubtedly, many companies have similar sustainability time bombs waiting for the prying eyes of activists or the press to set them off.
While answering the big question of the “business case” is absolutely necessary for managers to gain buy-in and budget to launch sustainability initiatives, it is insufficient. I’m not writing this book to create another “me too” argument for the big-picture benefits of sustainability. I’m writing because the question I now hear most often from managers trying to implement sustainability initiatives is not,“Why should we be sustainable?” but “So what do we do?”
This is a “how-to” book of environmental sustainability. That is, how companies can align their operations, products, and processes with ecology in a lasting way that not only resolves environmental conflicts, but creates value for the enterprise. Profitability is a key part of sustainability. Business initiatives that fail to deliver profit — that is, create value in excess of costs — are unsustainable, regardless of how ecofriendly they are. Luckily for profit-seeking managers, the biosphere is a value-creating, value-multiplying, and value-accumulating machine, which
bodes well for companies seeking to tap into its secrets.
To learn more, purchase your copy of Earth, Inc. today.
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Excerpted from Earth, Inc.: Using Nature’s Rules to Build Sustainable Profits (April 2010). Copyright (c) 2010 Gregory Unruh; All Rights Reserved.
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