"Business is waking up to a global shortage of resources of every kind. Raw materials are running out, whether in Tokyo or Quito. While businesses have toyed with the idea of sustainability as a means to market to eco-minded consumers, this book shows that scarcity must become central to their thinking and the key driver of strategic innovation"--
We all know the proverb about teaching someone to fish, but if there are no fish left, knowing how to catch them won’t do you any good. And that’s the position businesses are in today. Resources are being depleted at an alarming rate and the cost of raw materials is rising dramatically. As a result, scholar and entrepreneur Nadya Zhexembayeva says, businesses need to make resource scarcity—the overfished ocean—their primary strategic consideration, not just a concern for their “green” division. Overfished Ocean Strategyoffers five essential principles for innovating in this new reality. Zhexembayeva shows how businesses can find new opportunities in what were once considered useless by-products, discover resource-conserving efficiencies up and down their value chain, transfer their expertise from physical products to services, and develop ways to rapidly try out and refine these new business models. She fills the book with examples of companies that are already successfully navigating the overfished ocean, from established corporations such as BMW, Microsoft, and Puma to newcomers such as Lush, FLOOW2, and Sourcemap. The linear, throwaway economy of today—in which we extract resources at one end, create products, and throw them away at the other—is rapidly coming to an end. In every industry, creative minds are learning how to make money by taking this line and turning it into a circle. Nadya Zhexembayeva shows how you can join them and avoid being left high and dry.
Get on the cutting edge of organization development Practicing Organization Development: Leading Transformation and Change, Fourth Edition is your newly revised guide to successful organization development. This edition has been updated to explore the cutting edge of change management, leadership development, organizational transformation, and society benefit. These concepts are explored through emerging and increasingly accepted strengths-based approaches such as: appreciative inquiry, emotionally and socially intelligent leadership, positive organization development, and sustainable enterprises. This edition offers both theoretical concepts and guides to practical applications, providing you with the knowledge, techniques, and tools to put organizational development to effective use in the workplace. Organization development is an evolving field focused on understanding and positively impacting the human system processes of groups, teams, organizations, and individual leaders. Thorough organization development results in increased effectiveness, improved health, and overall success. This book shows how to attain positive change by: identifying contemporary themes in organization development, executing organization development approaches, as well as elevating and extending research agenda. This book also illustrates how to influence organizational stakeholders, and how to use this influence to enact key organization development practices. This new edition is enhanced by: Updated chapter-by-chapter lesson plans, sample syllabi, and workshop agendas Revised sample exercises, a test bank, and additional case studies Expanded online appendices that cover regional organization development concepts from around the globe, as well as overviews of additional special issues Organization development is quickly becoming an important aspect of MBA curricula. Practicing Organization Development: Leading Transformation and Change, Fourth Edition gives graduate and doctorate program participants a comprehensive overview of organization development, the resources to learn the field, and the tools to apply their knowledge.
Teaching and Learning for a Sustainable Future: Innovative Strategies and Best Practices delves into the critical global challenges of sustainability and the indispensable role of education in forging a sustainable future for generations to come. This interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral endeavor embraces themes ranging from climate change and biodiversity loss to social justice, poverty reduction, and sustainable development. By integrating environmental, social, and economic dimensions, the book offers a holistic approach to teaching and learning for sustainability, presenting innovative strategies and best practices that can be adapted across diverse disciplines, levels of education, and contexts. Drawing upon a rich tapestry of pedagogical approaches, the book illuminates experiential learning, inquiry-based learning, problem-based learning, and project-based learning as powerful tools for addressing sustainability challenges and opportunities. Additionally, it showcases cutting-edge teaching tools and technologies, including online platforms, social media, virtual and augmented reality, and gamification, revolutionizing the dissemination of sustainability education. The book serves as a platform for educators, academics, researchers, policy makers, and students to share experiences, insights, and best practices, propelling the evolution of sustainability education.
During the pandemic, Naveen & Sudhakar were exploring the possibilities of interacting with the students, like we were doing in normal times. They realized that having an opportunity to interact with the current generation using digital platforms. It would reach out to a larger audience across geographies and time zones and create a platform not only to share knowledge and have the opportunity to interact with specialists to share their experiences. They started The Guiding Voice. It is now listed in the top 3% of motivational and inspirational podcasts. This book is a collection of experiences shared by experts on The Guiding Voice Platform, TGV. We have also taken a few references from their social media. From hundreds of interviews on TGV, we have selected a few for this volume. These people have excelled in their domains and have life experience which would be helpful to people at any stage of their careers. The people you would meet in this book could be the Movers and Shakers of our society; they could be Influencers or Entrepreneurs. These are the people who are inspiring us with their determination, persistence, perseverance, vision, hard work, and passion. We have captured some of the essences of their charismatic and multifaceted personalities in this book. There is a lot more than one can emulate from them. Hence, we have included a section called “Inspiring Lives” with their profiles for our readers’ ease of connecting with them. This book also hopes to bring mentoring moments to the lives of its readers. To make referencing easier, the book is divided into four sections. These sections are focused on: 1. Self-Development 2. Career Growth 3. Leadership 4. Social Awareness & Sensitivity Each section has chapters that would help an individual in any specific sphere of their life. This book could be read in sequence, or any chapter can be referred to in any order as per the reader’s choice or need. The intent is to help an individual in their holistic growth. The topics range from deep introspection of emotions to practical implementation of ideas in reality.
Amidst rapid and fundamental shifts in the economic, geo-political, technological, and societal landscape, this cutting-edge book makes the timeless case that research can be informed by problems in the ‘real world’ and make important contributions to theory and practice.
Twenty-nine leading scholars and executives provide a visionary look at the future of business, propelling past damaging industrial-age values to uncover the key ingredients of humanistic, ecologically sustainable, and intergenerational prosperity. Through the exploration of robust cases and stories packed with deep insight and vital science, this extraordinary collection explores how we can adapt our notions of value, markets, and models of cooperation and collective action to create a world where economies and businesses excel, all people thrive, and nature flourishes. In part I, “The Business of Business Is Betterment,” the contributors show how enterprises today are further developing-and even taking a quantum leap beyond-the multistakeholder logic of “shared value creation.” Part II, “Net Positive = Innovation's New Frontier,” is focused on what companies can and are doing to move away from “doing no harm” to playing an active role in solving environmental, social, and economic problems. The final section, “Ultimate Advantage: A Leadership Revolution That Is Changing Everything,” looks at new leadership paradigms-characterized by unexpected qualities like virtue, love, compassion, and connection-that are crucial to creating engaged, empowered, innovative, and out-performing enterprises. This book is designed to galvanize change and unite a global community of inquiry and action. It establishes the conceptual cornerstones for a new kind of business practice that will lead the way to an equitable, sustainable, and flourishing future.
Value-creation in Middle Market Private Equity by John A. Lanier holistically examines the ecosystem relationships between middle market private equity firms and their portfolio companies. Small business is the job creating engine in the US economy, and consequently is a prime target market for private equity investment. Indeed, private equity backs over six of each 100 private sector jobs. Both the small businesses in which private equity firms invest, and the private equity firms making the investments, face inter- and intra-company fiduciary leadership challenges while implementing formulated strategy. The architecture of each private equity firm-portfolio company relationship must be uniquely crafted to capitalize on the projected return on investment that is memorialized in the investment thesis. Given the leveraged capital structure of portfolio companies, the cost of a misstep is problematic. Individual private equity professionals are typically members of multiple investment teams for the firm. Not only may each investment team have its own unique leadership style, but its diverse members have to assimilate styles for each team in which they participate relative to a specific portfolio company. Acquisitions and their subsequent integrations add exponential complexity for both private equity investment and portfolio company leadership teams; indeed, cultural integration ranks among the most chronic acquisition obstacles. Accordingly, the stakeholders of private equity transactions do well to embrace leadership best practices in applying value-creation toolbox best practices. The perspectives of both the private equity investment team and the portfolio company leadership team are within the scope of these chapters.
Companies know how to meet the demands of shareholder value: years of managerial excellence testify to this achievement. Many also know how to create stakeholder value – through traditional approaches such as CSR and philanthropy which predictably lead to trade-offs and added costs. What remains elusive is discovering is how to meet both shareholder and stakeholder requirements in the core business – without mediocrity and without compromise – creating value for the company that cannot be disentangled from the value it creates for society and the environment. What if sustainability was embedded into the DNA of your organization? How can you incorporate environmental, health and social value into its very core? Many companies, despite their best intentions, "bolt on" sustainability as an afterthought to their core strategies. They trumpet green initiatives and social philanthropy which lie at the margins of the business, with symbolic wins that inadvertently highlight the unsustainability of the rest of their activities. Today's ecological and social pressures require a different business response – one that existing strategy frameworks fail adequately to address. In Embedded Sustainability, authors Chris Laszlo and Nadya Zhexembayeva explain and predict how companies can better leverage global challenges for enduring profit and sustained growth. They introduce the marquis concept of embedded sustainability: the incorporation of environmental, health, and social value into the heartbeat of the product life-cycle with no trade-off in price or quality – no social or green premium. This book helps readers to comprehend and implement the notion of embedded sustainability. At its best, embedded sustainability is invisible, similar to quality. In addition to delivering socially and environmentally conscious products for consumers, it is capable of considerably motivating employees. Most of all, it enables smart companies to create even more value for both their shareholders and stakeholders.
