How Companies Manage the Sustainability Tradeoffs
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[This article is part of a series of interviews from the MIT Sloan Management Review published on GreenBiz.com. It is adapted from "The Sustainability Tradeoffs" an interview published by MIT Sloan Management Review in July 2009. The complete interview is available here. © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009. All rights reserved. To read all of GreenBiz.com's interviews with MIT thought leaders, visit http://greenbiz.com/mitsloan.]
Let’s start by talking about how you define sustainability and how your ideas differ from those of others.
I see sustainability as continued economic development that meets environmental and social concerns. That idea can take you in many directions, from better design of a product in terms of trade-offs between energy and cost and weight all the way up to asking, “How do you run a sustainable organization?”
A “sustainable organization” will train people to be more flexible, able to change functions within the company as it evolves quickly. That’s a very different definition of sustainability, but one that could have an impact on environmental sustainability as well.