The Sustainability Imperative
As organizations struggle to define a strategy that balances purpose and profit, opportunities are increasingly emerging to take the lead in sustainability initiatives. Front-line advances in areas such as net-zero emissions, AI-powered solutions for the underserved, precision agriculture, digital healthcare, and more are delivering business benefits, while simultaneously contributing to the realization of the UN’s 17 SDGs. We provide the expert thinking, debate, and guidance to help your organization reposition and transform in the era of sustainability.
Recently Published
In this Advisor, a group from Oak Ridge National Laboratory explores energy-efficiency improvement as a feasible, low-cost approach that can bring immediate industrial CO2 emissions reductions around the globe.
Transitioning from a linear to a circular space economy is not just about sustainability — it’s about preventing orbital ecocide and ensuring the long-term viability of orbital space as a resource and habitat. By embracing resource efficiency, reuse, and innovation, we can safeguard the celestial environment and preserve the final frontier for future generations.
This Advisor explores the European Commission SUMP, a consolidated methodology to help local and regional authorities improve accessibility of urban areas by providing high-quality, sustainable transport to, through, and within the urban area. Essentially, it contains actionable guidelines for comprehensive and sustainable urban mobility planning.
In this Advisor, Cutter Expert Curt Hall examines how AI, computer vision, and robotics are being implemented to optimize the plastic recycling process.
This Advisor presents the current status of mobility as a service (MaaS) and explores some interesting new mobility models.
As we explore in this Advisor, electric tractors offer both environmental and economic benefits and can play a significant role in sustainable agriculture efforts. In addition to pollution-reducing EV technology, these quiet, no-exhaust tractors use AI, robotics, and the IoT to enable autonomous operations and support precision agriculture.
The contemporary context of corporate responsibility involves a deep and wide set of concepts and tasks. Fundamentally, it involves working with multiple stakeholders and a range of disciplines. Managers then face decisions around how to take ownership of a number of company impacts throughout the value chain, including design, production, marketing, sales, and communications. And because corporate responsibility is tethered to calls for greater accountability, managers must also consider how their corporate governance framework serves to encourage, restrict, and ultimately shape the company’s relationship with society. In this issue of Amplify, we explore the conflicting pressures governments, shareholders, customers, and workforces are exerting on firms and their leaders in emerging corporate responsibility strategies involving ESG issues.
Oana Branzei, Dusya Vera, and Kimberley Young Milani take a deep dive into leadership in the eye of the “ESG storm.” The authors look at how today’s frames change tomorrow’s leaders and leadership, a critical aspect of the future of corporate responsibility. The stakes on leading responsibly have never been higher, they write, with leading business outlets warning companies about getting ESG “just right” while calling on leaders to “act purposefully.” How leaders solve this paradigm will change the future of corporate responsibility, say the authors. They then describe a framework that can help leaders see the future as the poly-activation of character dimensions and argue that as leaders activate a broader expanse of dimensions, including temperance, integrity, drive, and deep collaboration, their judgment becomes stronger, and additional futures open up. And as more character dimensions are exercised, the future’s leaders become more inclusive, collaborative, and sustainable — with or without the letters E, S, and G.