One of the complaints I've heard for years from business schools and companies alike is the dearth of good case studies on sustainable business. And not just any case studies, but those that relate to the core operations of mainstream companies.
This is ironic. As the world of sustainable business activities has grown in the mainstream business community, so has the number of examples of success stories and "best" practices. Yet, many business schools and most companies continue to struggle to learn what's worked inside leading companies, and how to harvest and leverage those learnings for the benefit of students, professionals, and executives.
As the state of the art of sustainable business continues to evolve at an increasingly rapid clip, an additional challenge is to stay current with the latest innovations and strategies -- and to do so within each relevant discipline (finance, management, operations, marketing, etc.) as well as across various sectors and geographies.
Toward that end, I'm pleased to embark on a new project -- a book of case studies on sustainable business, titled, appropriately enough, The Case for Sustainability. The project is part of a fellowship I'm beginning at the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia. As a Batten Fellow, I'll be compiling and co-editing (with Darden professor Richard Brownlee) a book designed for both students and professionals alike.
Traditional business cases have been a commonly used tool inside business schools, though the inventory of sustainability-related cases remains relatively small, with very few new cases added each year. Many case studies in the current inventory were written more than a decade ago. (You can find most of the existing sustainability-related case studies here and here.) They tend to focus on a relatively few "green" issues and are thus relegated to niche classes focusing on corporate environmental and social responsibility. Moreover, most of these cases have little value for professionals, executives, and others outside the walls of academe.
To the greatest extent possible, the case studies we'll be selecting for this project will be those appropriate for use not just in elective business courses (focusing on ethics, environmental topics, and social responsibility, for example) but also in core curriculum courses (on management, strategy, marketing, finance, operations, etc.). As such, a key goal will be to demonstrate how companies and other organizations are integrating sustainability into business operations in a manner that enhances their performance from a long-term financial standpoint, and are not being merely done as an add-on exercise with little discernable value.
As I said, another goal is to create a book that is equally useful to business students and professors as well as professionals inside companies.
In the coming weeks, we'll be issuing a request for submissions containing guidelines for authors. If you are interested in receiving a copy, please let me know.
What is challenging about sorting through all the case studies out there is trying to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Many of these cases are crisis management or dealing with problems. What I find more exciting is real innovation, i.e. MBDC's work with Kohl (?) fabrics in Switzerland where eliminating impacts lead to strategic advantage.
Posted by: Lance Funston | April 01, 2006 at 09:11 AM