What is Essential? This is a question my family and I have asked many times in recent weeks, as Covid-19 forces us to reconsider both the meaning of that word, and the values that drive different people’s answers. Collectively, as a society, asking this question has led to us facing some fairly uncomfortable truths about…
As the Covid-19 threat started to hit home in the United States, I was just preparing to begin teaching my Strategies for Sustainability course. I usually begin each class session with a broad question to prime the ensuing discussion; for that opening class I used two: (1) why do businesses need to address sustainability issues?…
Good ol’ rugged individualism. We are in control of our own fates. Masters of our own domain. Yadayayada. Problem is, another’s rugged individualism can screw it up for all of us. Though you and I may be doing the right thing, if another unconstrained iconoclast is not, we can still be harmed. We are at…
As you may know, some of my work surrounds scenario planning. Primarily, that work surrounds strategizing for climate change, but scenario planning is a versatile strategic planning method for navigating uncertainty. Others in this forum have provided excellent suggestions about what to do now. My focus is to help organizations come out of COVID-19 with…
As many of you know, I research resilience, that is, the capacity of individuals, organisations and communities to recover from substantial adversity. In this essay, I offer some of my own experiences and observations, and hope that they can contribute to tackling major global challenges such as the Covid-19 health emergency and climate change. I…
In this short essay, I would like to explain why a behavioral perspective on corporate social responsibility (CSR) is useful in helping us understand and possibly also offer solutions for some of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and, more generally, other natural environmental disasters and stressors. Our research over the past 15+ years…
This note is both a call for immediate action and hopefully also inspiration for companies to act against the COVID-19/Coronavirus outbreak in the form of rapid responsible innovation — innovation developed in a short period of time in a state of emergency with the hope of protecting people and saving lives. The current global pandemic…
Coronavirus has slowed down economic activity and temporarily reduced China’s carbon emissions. However, there is a deeper implication for climate policy: decarbonization depends on global supply chains for inputs required for electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines. In 2015, solar and wind contributed to about 7% of global electricity. Their salience is projected to increase…
Is it possible for businesses to manage such a seemingly “unmanageable” problem as COVID-19? We have been researching multinational enterprises’ responses to natural disasters and political risks for two decades now and the answer is a qualified yes. A key finding of our research is that local knowledge (e.g, community or regional knowledge about available resources…
The events of the past few weeks have given us a glimpse into what the future of life in the Anthropocene might look like. The global community has been faced with a collective crisis, one that requires that we work together to address a problem that we have globally created. When the Spanish flu killed…