Strategy and Sustainability

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.<