Setting the Business World on a Sustainable Course

It is difficult to conceive of the magnitude of the opportunities that are presented by restructuring the global economy to become sustainable, but a few visionaries have tried. Lester Brown, director of the Earth Policy Institute, states, “Restructuring the global economy so that economic progress can be sustained represents the greatest investment opportunity in history.” Stuart Hart, professor of management in sustainable enterprise at Cornell University, writing in the Harvard Business Review, echoes those sentiments: “Sustainable development will constitute one of the biggest opportunities in the history of commerce.” And finally, getting to the heart of the issue, Fisk Johnson, CEO of S. C. Johnson & Sons, Inc., says: “There is no inherent conflict between making the world a better place and economic prosperity for all.”

Business, in all its myriad forms—from the smallest mom and pop enterprise to the largest multinational corporation—is where the ultimate solutions to these deep societal problems must lie. However, as Albert Einstein cautioned, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Rather, business will need to begin to use a better, more informed kind of thinking to solve the problems that we all, collectively, face—a better and more informed kind of business thinking—green business thinking.