Search results for: “sustainability”
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History Of Sustainability
Jeremy Caradonna wrote a history of sustainability in his book, Sustainability. (I read the revised edition from 2022). This work draws linkages from early ideas of sustainability and looks at where we are now. Things have moved forward, and back, on the sustainability front. There is some interesting history. As someone who lives in Georgia,…
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Tangibilizing Sustainability’s Value For Stakeholders
A major challenge in sustainable business is that many of the good things we want simply can’t be seen. The electronics equipment you are considering may have be made by people being paid a decent wage, or it may not have been. You don’t really know the difference from just looking at the product. Gregory…
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Modern Business And Sustainability
I was disappointed by Jason Hickel’s Less Is More. I had a number of concerns that fit under three headings, lack of economic/business understanding, lack of historical understanding, and divorce from political reality. Today I’ll discuss the technical business elements of my complaint about Hickel’s book. Let us discuss modern business and sustainability Modern Business…
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Design For Sustainability
Mark Shayler’s You Can’t Make Money From a Dead Planet looks at how to run a sustainable business. He talks about how sustainable businesses can make money and do better for the world. There are various pieces of advice and useful ideas. A key idea he emphasizes is that you must design for sustainability. Always…
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Mapping Corporate Sustainability Research
How has marketing strategy research focused on sustainability changed over time? This is an important question for researchers that also matters for those who use academic research but aren’t academics themselves. (Often there are not as many of these non-academic users of research as we’d like but one can always hope). To better understand marketing…
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Q&A On Sustainable Business
What Is Sustainability? The most common definition is from a United Nations report, (Our Common Future, the Brundtland Report from 1987). This informally defines sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” (https://www.un.org/en/academic-impact/sustainability). Is Sustainable Just Green? Note that the idea of meeting…
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How Can Sustainability Win Commercially?
John’s Elkington’s Cannibals with Forks is a major book in the field of sustainable business. This drove adoption of the idea of the Triple Bottom Line — managing businesses with a concern for the economic, social, and environmental consequences. Elkington, as a consultant, has a pragmatic attitude. He is all about companies winning commercially by…
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Evolutionary Psychology And Sustainability
Academic research isn’t always immediately applicable. This is not a bad thing, part of the aim of academic research is to wander into new territory. It is not surprising if often this isn’t directly applicable today. It is interesting, however, when academics try and bring their perspectives to more practical problems. Vladas Griskevicius, Stephanie M.…
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CEOs And Sustainability
Alan Murray (CEO of Fortune Media) has a book on how business is engaging more with social issues. There are a lot of good points in there that help to illustrate business in 2022. So what can he tell us about CEOs and Sustainability? First, The Bad Points Broadly speaking I am on board with…
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Greenhushing Is A Big Problem
The Economist recently highlighted the phenomenon of greenhushing. This is when firms keep quiet about their genuine sustainability achievements. This is the opposite of greenwashing — which is when firms trumpet dubious claims to sustainability. At first glance greenhushing doesn’t really seem to be a big problem. After all the firm is doing the good…
