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.
