Track: B
Date: 31.08.2018
Time: 2:00 – 3:00pm
Room: Checkpoint Charlie
Workshop 9: Integrating Sustainability Considerations with Business Strategy
Workshop Organizer: Sanjeevan Bajaj, FICCI; Ashok Menon
When we talk about policy, it should not always mean policy making by State actors. Policy of business organizations is a subject of study in the Management discipline. With today’s dominant business paradigm of profit-maximization, deeper transformations are needed in how business organizations set their own goals and align them with what human societies of today need the most.
Despite the advent of green business, green entrepreneurship, ecopreneurship, and the like, there is little uptake of sustainable development considerations at the business policy level. Most success stories about sustainability are about being good business talk of cost reductions through materials/energy saving, or customer loyalty through sustainability posturing.
To enable a paradigm shift, business policy development must generate and evaluate strategic options of domain selection (what business to be in) and domain navigation (how to compete in this business) in line with sustainability imperatives. Faced with intense competition in the market place, business leaders choose the most attractive industries and/or influence industry structures to make them attractive for themselves. This workshop will discuss basic tools from a typical Strategic Management course curriculum and show how ‘Sustainability-as-a-Strategy’ success stories can help to integrate sustainability into business policy fundamentals.