What Value Cycle Leadership Is & Why It Matters - Gregory C. Unruh - Harvard Business Review

Last month, I had the opportunity to collaborate with the World Economic Forum's Sustainability Initiative team on a sustainable supply chain workshop, held as part of Summer Davos. Many issues that surfaced during the workshop focused on leadership — and they are the same issues that surface in my executive education teaching. Business leaders have been talking about "closed loop, cradle to cradle" value cycling of materials for a long time. Materials in a value cycle stay inside a closed loop, revolving from the suppliers, where they originate, to the manufacturer and on to the customer, who at the end of their useful life passes them back to the manufacturer where they are reincarnated into next season's model. The vision is elegant and simple to understand, but we have only a few examples operating today. The challenge, as the WEF workshop illustrated, lies in the nature of value cycle leadership.

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Can business do well by doing good - A Guide To Sustainability: Accenture Outlook:

October 2010 Today, there probably isn’t a company anywhere in the world that does not at least acknowledge the importance of sustainability—of doing business in an environmentally and socially responsible way. Indeed, for many companies, sustainability is now as much of a strategic priority as such traditional business concerns as technology, talent and customers. The commitment to sustainability has weathered the storm of the downturn well; in some cases, it has even been strengthened by it. Meanwhile, an emerging body of research suggests that sustainable business practices correlate closely with high performance. On an operational level, however, sustainability is not yet seamlessly woven into the fabric of business. Executives still must make, almost daily, difficult trade-offs between practices that meet short-term business needs and those that will contribute to sustaining the needs of future generations.

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Five Simple Things You Can Do To Make Sustainable Design a Reality in Your Lifetime

The past few days, I have heard buzzwords being tossed around surrounding the issue of sustainable design. Words like LEED, low impact development, walkable communities, etc. These are great words. Wonderful, powerful words. But what do they mean to the average Civil Engineer today? Not a whole lot. These words remind me of giving a visualization demo for Civil 3D. Everyone gets excited. Everyone loves it. Everyone nods, claps, smiles and says its cool. But nobody sees how they can make it work in their office, for their clients, given their constraints. So they leave happy that they saw a great show, but business proceeds as normal. A year or two ago, we felt like superheroes. We were in demand. We patted ourselves on the back for being so insightful when we majored in Civil Engineering or studied CAD. In my neck of the woods, talent salaries were moving higher and faster than starter homes prices. Anyone with a P.E. and an entrepreneurial spirit was breaking off and hanging their own shingle. It was a golden time.

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Peter Senge on collaboration, sustainability and improvisations - MIT Management Review

What would it take to get rid of disposable cups? That was a question MIT Sloan senior lecturer Peter Senge raised in an interesting keynote address this morning at the MIT Sustainability Summit 2010. Senge, who is the author of well-known books such as The Fifth Discipline and The Necessary Revolution, focused on the need for collaboration among unlikely partners to achieve real progress on sustainability issues – and convert our “take-make-waste” economy into a new, more sustainable economy. Senge used the example of disposable coffee cups (a topic apparently on his mind because he came to the Sustainability Summit from a Starbucks-convened cup summit taking place down the street) to get the MIT Sustainability Summit attendees thinking about the need for collaboration in sustainability projects.

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Artists and Sustainability - A New Frame on The Vexed Question of Climate Change

Last month Edward Burtynsky featured as our visual artist and we had some great responses to his work. As a result, we decided to feature this wonderful video, made by Burtynsky and Yann Martel (author of Life of Pi) as an example of how art has the potential to make us look at climate change in a more connected way. Whether you are a climate change skeptic or not,these artists have found a way of expressing the cultural importance of the way we have created the world in which we live and in so doing ask the vital question - is this the type of progress we want and if not, how might we think about changing the outcome?