Business and environmental sustainability are not natural bedfellows.
Business is about making money; sustainability is about protecting the planet.
Business is measured in months and quarters; sustainability often requires
significant short term costs to secure a sometimes uncertain long-term benefit.
To some activists, all executives are exploitative, selfish “1 percenters”. To
some executives, all activists are irresponsible, unyielding
extremists.
And yet engaging with the issue isn’t optional – all businesses must
have a strategy to deal with sustainability and, like any strategy, this
involves making choices.
Strategy and Sustainability encourages its readers to filter out the noise and make those
choices in a hard-nosed and clear-eyed way. Rosenberg’s nuanced and fact-based
point of view recognizes the complexity of the issues at hand and
the strategic choices businesses must make. He blends the work of some of the
leading academic thinkers in the field with practical examples from a variety of
business sectors and geographies and offers a framework with which Senior
Management might engage with the topic, not (just) to save the planet but
to fulfil their short, medium, and long-term responsibilities to shareholders
and other stakeholders.<
