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A Strategy for Sustainability : Challenges and Choices June 21-22, 2010 Program Overview There can be little doubt that environmental sustainability is the primary global issue facing both business organizations and individual people of the world in the coming years. The damage to our fragile environment is increasingly obvious to all but the blind, and we are fast approaching a position of “irreversibility” regarding our collective ability to resolve this crisis. What can your organization do to meet the challenge of sustainability, and what can you do personally as a leader to insure (a) that the firm has sufficiently understood the risks—including financial and political, as well as operational-- involved in this arena, (b) that a strategy to confront the issue has been developed, and (c) that other key organizational personnel are “on-board” and committed to the same goals and objectives for a resolution of the problem? The United Nations has defined sustainability as: “The ability of current generations to meet their needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs” (UN World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). When applied to organizations such as business firms, there is much that can be done towards achieving the broad mandate outlined by the UN. This typically would involve organizational action to insure that internal operations are not wasteful of scarce natural resources and that operational inputs that are harmful to the environment are either eliminated or minimized. But best practices today go beyond internal concerns, and now extend to collaboration with both organizational suppliers and customers to insure that they too are involved in the firm’s sustainability efforts. Sustainability is, in the end, a way of thinking for the 21st Century firm, and not just a set of action plans. This two-day seminar will show participants how to better understand the key factors involved in sustainability, and how to formulate and execute a strategy to deal with this critical issue. While creating a strategy in this regard is no simple matter, the true difficulty will be in its execution. And like all strategies designed to tackle difficult problems, the major impediment is organizational resistance to change. Sustainability will necessarily involve a fundamental re-think of the organization’s operations, priorities, and incentives. Utilizing the “strategy-structure-process” paradigm, this seminar will discuss not only the variables that must be included in a sustainability strategy, but more importantly it will focus on change management: what can the organizational leader do to insure that others are both committed and properly motivated to pursue the necessary steps to achieve environmental sustainability? As such, the seminar will address several topics:
Each of these areas is critical to the achievement of a successful strategy for sustainability, and each will be addressed in the program. This will be accomplished by lecture/discussion sessions, participant interaction including small-group break-out sessions and case studies, and by several participant exercises. At the conclusion of the seminar, participants should have a greatly enhanced understanding and appreciation of the issues surrounding environmental sustainability today, and a clear sense of the steps necessary for their own specific organizations to move forward towards the achievement of sustainability strategic goals and objectives. Successful examples of sustainability initiatives and strategies from a wide variety of organizations will be presented and discusses, and participants will be encouraged to share their own insights and approaches to this topic with others in the program.
For reservations or more information, please contact:
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