The sustainability challenge: What is sustainability really about?
According to an article by John R. Ehrenfeld in MIT Sloan Management Review, many businesses today fail to take effective, meaningful action on sustainability challenges and issues, as they do not have an adequate understanding of what sustainability actually means.
Quite often, business executives fail to realize the extent to which truly radical thinking and action are needed to move from unsustainability towards sustainability, and change the way businesses operate – they fail to recognize that sustainability is a radical idea, requiring equally radical action Tweet This!.
Reducing unsustainability, instead of promoting sustainability
Innovative solutions are required, but the global business community seems to be focused on economic development as a central theme, despite the fact that sustainability may, essentially, have nothing or little to do with economic development as such. Businesses are, thus, only concentrated on reducing the unsustainability of a defective economic development system founded on an addiction to consumption – with consumption representing a major cause of unsustainability, in both human and environmental terms.
What should be done?
Sustainability may be defined as the “possibility that all forms of life will flourish forever”. So, how can businesses contribute to achieving this vision? Below are a few steps that could be taken in such a direction:
- changing the rules of the competition, not least through voluntary, collaborative action involving business, government, advocacy and intergovernmental groups
- redefining, collaboratively, the idea of what constitutes progress, redefining profit
- critically assessing a company’s core mission and values, in terms of the sustainability or unsustainability created
- promoting, through the design of products and services, responsible, ethical behavior and choices in daily life
References:
This article was compiled using a publication by MIT Sloan Management Review. For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses but made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the publication’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original please revert to the link below: