Green Business

This book provides rich new empirical evidence on green business as it examines its variation between industries and nations, and over time. It demonstrates the deep historical origins of endeavors to create for-profit businesses that were more responsible and sustainable, but also how these strategies have faced constraints, trade-offs and challenges of legitimacy. Based on extensive interviews and archives from around the world, the book asks why green business succeeds more in some contexts than others, and draws lessons from failure as well as success.

Environmental sustainability creates both tremendous business opportunities and formidable threats to established companies across virtually all industry sectors. Yet many companies tackle the issue in a superficial or passive way, rather than considering fundamental changes to their existing business models. By ignoring the opportunities of Green Business Model Transformations, companies exclude themselves from a large variety of potential means to create economic value. In addition to ordinary product and process innovations, they can change “the rules of the game” within an industry towards environmental sustainability. Green Business Model Transformations, however, are challenging ventures: New, green business models with all their uncertainties and inherent complex systemic characteristics are difficult to design, assess, and implement successfully, particularly in the context of established companies that often entail complex structures and considerable inertia. As a result, there is a great need for guidance in management practice. This publication addresses this need with a general approach to Managing Green Business Model Transformations that is based on a broad theoretical foundation, illustrated by many real-world examples from various industry sectors.

Today greenness is goodness; non-greenness is not an option. It is therefore critical to advance thinking on why and how business, consumers and policy makers can contribute to the goal of sustainable global wealth creation. This volume analyzes the strategic sustainability issues confronting contemporary business, and explores the transformation in values, strategies, and practices needed by modern businesses to attain sustainable business. It is is developed from a Global Business Symposium organized by the Centre for International Business and Management (CIBAM) at Cambridge University in February 2009, which brought together leading academics, scientists and engineers, government leaders, and business executives to consider the transformation in business values and strategies implicit in sustainability. Green Business, Green Values and Sustainability offers a concise and definitive book on the green transformation of business in major sectors including government, finance, energy, and retail. Different solutions to sustainability are explored including ethical approaches, alternative environmental strategies, corporate responsibility, and carbon reductions.

The Business of Less rewrites the book on business and the environment. For the last thirty years, corporate sustainability was synonymous with the pursuit of ‘eco-efficiency’ and ‘win-win’ opportunities. The notion of ‘eco-efficiency’ gives us the illusion that we can achieve environmental sustainability without having to question the pursuit of never-ending economic growth. The ‘win-win’ paradigm is meant to assure us that companies can be protectors of the environment whilst also being profit maximizers. It is abundantly clear that the state of the natural environment has further degraded instead of improved. This book introduces a new paradigm designed to finally reconcile business and the environment. It is called ‘net green’, which means that in these times of ecological overshoot businesses need to reduce total environmental impact and not just improve the eco-efficiency of their products. The book also introduces and explains the four pollution prevention principles ‘again’, ‘different’, ‘less’, and ‘labor, not materials’. Together, ‘net green’ and the four pollution prevention principles provide a road map, for businesses and for every household, to a world in which human prosperity and a healthy environment are no longer at odds. The Business of Less is full of anecdotes and examples. This brings its material to life and makes the book not only very accessible, but also hugely applicable for everyone who is worried about the fate of our planet and is looking for answers.

​ Green Business Process Management – Towards the Sustainable Enterprise" consolidates the global state-of-the-art knowledge about how business processes can be managed and improved in light of sustainability objectives. Business organizations, a dominant part of our society, have always been a major contributor to the degradation of our natural environment, through the resource consumption, greenhouse emissions, and wastage production associated with their business processes. In order to lessen their impact on the natural environment, organizations must design and implement environmentally sustainable business processes. Finding solutions to this organizational design problem is the key challenge of Green Business Process Management. This book- discusses the emerging challenges of designing “green” business processes,- presents tools and methods that organizations can use in order to design and implement environmentally sustainable processes, and- provides insights from cases where organizations successfully engaged in more sustainable business practices. The book is of relevance to both practitioners and academics who are interested in understanding, designing, and implementing “green” business processes. It also constitutes a valuable resource for students and lecturers in the fields of information systems, management, and sustainable development. Preface by Richard T. Watson

Better Green Business brings together practical insights and start-to-finish strategies for moving any enterprise to a higher level of environmental stewardship. Drawing on his extensive experience at IBM, Dr. Eric Olson shows how to systematically drive “win-win-win” gains: growing top-line revenue, helping customers increase efficiency, and improving the environment at the same time. Olson’s business-focused guidance covers every step of your green business program, from strategy formulation through continuous improvement. He first offers a complete framework for approaching and formulating green strategy, using case studies to identify potential opportunities and business benefits. Next, using real case studies, he demonstrates how to define initiatives, construct roadmaps for transforming vision into reality, and link each investment to business strategy, so businesses can accurately measure results. Olson introduces powerful business process transformation methodologies and technologies for increasing operational efficiency and reducing waste, including IBM’s breakthrough Green Sigma approach. He also identifies new opportunities to drive value by “instrumenting the planet,” and introduces new technologies that make this possible. Finally, Olson assesses long-term trends that will make “green business” even more crucial in the coming years.

This in-depth study of fourteen pulp manufacturing mills in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand provides the most extensive and systematic empirical examination, to date, of the reasons firms achieve the levels of environmental performance that they do.

Annotation Presenting 150 signed entries, this book provides an overview of key principles, approaches, strategies, and tools businesses have used to reduce environmental impacts and contribute to sustainability.