Sustainability Is Needed for Business Leadership

According to the Alliance for Climate Protection, the organization running the “We” advocacy campaign that former Vice President Al Gore launched this morning, “many Americans are concerned about climate change but don't know what to do about it.” Stanford author Chris Laszlo is reaching out to business leaders to show them that they can actually become more profitable by making their companies environmentally conscious.

A “clean energy economy” is one of the solutions proposed by the We campaign, which agrees with Laszlo that sustainable business practices would help the US economy:

A clean and efficient economy would “lead to over 3 million new green-collar jobs, stimulate $1.4 trillion in new GDP, add billions in personal income and retail sales, produce $284 billion in net energy savings.”

In a recent interview, Laszlo argues that the economy has fundamentally shifted so that US companies must pay attention to environmental concerns if they want to remain competitive:

What has happened is that the marketplace has changed and today if you want to make an economic profit you have to pay attention to environmental and social issues in your business… because they’ve become enablers of competitive advantage. So we’re back to just a single purpose gain. So companies have come out with products that have environmental intelligence built in. Consumers tend to prefer those products if they don’t have to pay more for them.

Laszlo’s book, Sustainable Value, not only presents his argument for the necessity of sustainable business practices, but also provides the tools necessary for leaders to move their companies along that path.

Comments

[Kevin]

I couldn't agree with you (or Laszlo) more on this topic. The business community is sitting on the most dynamic opportunity since the Internet and there is profit to be made. I recently ran across a site - www.greencollareconomy.com - that says its mission is to provide the tools and community necessary for businesses to become profitably sustainable. Nice idea...they have a huge B2B directory of sustainable businesses already.

With the American market and entrepreneurial spirit driving the change to a sustainable future (read greed), we might see some real changes more quickly than we thought we would.