Green Management Matters Only if it Yieds More Green: An Economic/Strategic Perspective (original) (raw)
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Green management matters only if it yields more green: An economic/strategic perspective
The Academy of Management Perspectives, 2009
This essay was written in response to the theme of this year's Academy of Management meeting, "Green Management Matters." I assert that firms should adopt "green management" practices only if such activities complement the organization's business-and corporate-level strategies and ultimately enhance profitability or shareholder wealth. To illustrate this I outline an economic/strategic perspective on green management practices, focusing on the strategic benefits and competitive dynamics associated with this activity. I also identify specific tactics firms can employ to achieve such strategic goals as well as the functional areas affected by these decisions.
Green management: the next competitive weapon
Futures, 1992
advocates green management for the 1990s-using the environment as a focal point to change the way in which companies view themselves in order to create new competitive advantages. Based on interviews with senior management at 16 companies worldwide which are actively doing something about environmental issues, the article discusses the concept of green management, arguments in its favour, the relationships between the environment and corporate strategy, and how green management approaches can be implemented. FUTURES
Pioneering descriptions of corporate greening: Notes and doubts on the emerging discussion
Business Strategy and the Environment, 1994
This article reviews the emerging discussion on corporate greening. The pioneering authors are found to have drawn on a number of perspectives in their descriptions of the greening process. Their views emphasise the choice of an environmental strategy, reform in management systems, organisational change, cultural change and institutional change. In spite of this conceptual diversity, the first accounts almost unanimously assume that greening will be, and should be, a topdown process starting from the top management and being implemented through formal measures. This article suggest that these assumptions should be relaxed and both empirical research and managerial practice should be receptive to other varieties of greening, too. In particular, informal and autonomous bottom-up processes may be very important in such a fundamental transition which greening may in some cases prove to be. This argument is based conceptually on an institutional view on the logics of managerial action, and empirically on studies in other fields of managerial work and on a case study of environmental management in a Finnish chemicals company.
A major objective of business organizations is to out-compete their rivals at the market place and dominate it. To achieve this, a miried of strategies are applied. Most involve scanning the environment to take advantage of the changes in tastes and prefences among the customers and instituting measures to serve these tastes. In the past decade and in to the mid and long term future, proactive environmental management is becoming a major strategic issue. This is a fact firms have to deal with. Environmental conciousness is being pussed by legal pressure, customer pressure and decreasing natural resources. A major question that organizations have to contend with is wether being green is more benegitial than its costs to the firms. Due to the costs inccured in 'being green', and the often indirect nature of benefits acrued, many firms tend to lay emphasis to organizational characterists for high performance. These are innovativeness, customer orientation, quality emphasis and management. This paper will review available literature in trying to bring out the relationship between adoptions of green to the above organizational characteristics of high performing firms as a pointer that being green can be incorporated in the organizational characteristics and boost performance.
Green Business: Not Just the Color of Money
2018
Sustainable business development has moved into the social fabric of corporations alongside historical parameters of business performance such as profit margins and return on investment. The transition to envelope a mindset beyond profits has been supported by initiatives founded by the United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goals and more recently the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, sustainable business development faces challenges in both emerging and developed nations to infuse corporate social responsibility and innovation to address current environmental conditions that endanger public health. The UN suggests that to achieve these measures will require new economic paradigms, behavioral pattern changes in corporate and consumer consumption of natural resources, adaptive policy, and commitments to limit resource use. This chapter defines the evolution of sustainability and presents key components from a business perspective. Next, the impact of business environmental sustainability on public health is discussed using several examples of how corporations address important problems such as e-waste, natural habitat conservation, and employee safety and health. From there, we review management tools to assess sustainability providing insight to corporate business ventures that are best aligned with SDGs. Finally, we summarize key points of the material and present a high-level list of best practices. 10.1 Introduction Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), the Triple Bottom Line (TBL), and other sustainable business perspectives are driving the application of environmental sustainability to the core of business principles under equal consideration with traditional business performance measures such as profit margins and returns on
WHAT IS GREEN? A CASE ON SELECTED COMPANIES International Conference of Organizational Innovation
2018
More companies are going green. They believe that greening the business is their responsibility and is simply the right thing to do. It benefits not only the company but also consumers. Since the substance of the green business concept is rather ambiguous, it is difficult to evaluate whether a green claim is correct and is not a greenwash. The study tries to find out the understanding of companies conducting green practices on green business. It aims specifically to explore to what extent they know about green business and whether their practices are accordingly green. It is a case study on three Indonesian companies identified as conducting green practices. Interview to either the owner-manager or the representative of the companies was for gathering data. The study shows that understanding on green business still varies and reasons underlying their green practices are commitment of not to harm the environment. In the beginning, they did not realize if what they have done are green...
Aligning economic impact with environmental benefits: A green strategy model
2012 First International Workshop on Green and Sustainable Software (GREENS), 2012
To achieve lower energy consumption many green strategies (e.g. virtualize applications and consolidate them on shared server machines, or optimize the usage of the private cloud by opening up to external consumers) have been discussed. In practice, however, the major incentive for a company to go green is reducing costs. While green strategies often focus on technical and environmental issues, they hardly address the economic impact that they may bring. If green strategies do not lead to an explicit (and significant) reduction of costs (hence increase in revenues) they are nice but not part of the business strategy of the company. In this paper we propose a green strategy model that provides decision makers with the information needed to decide on whether to take green strategies and eventually how to align them with their business strategies. This model provides a means to codify green strategies in such a way that the link between green strategies, their economic impact and green goals becomes explicit. We applied the model in a case study to codify 132 green actions collected from Dutch data centers. This exercise further confirmed the advantage of using the proposed model and helped us identifying future improvements.