Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development Joseph Fiksel. Second Edition. New York Chicago San Francisco Lisbon London Madrid Mexico City Milan. The Sustainability Imperative The Idea in Brief The Big Idea Business history is marked by periods of relative stability punctuated by fundamental shifts in the competitive landscape that create inescapable threats and game changing opportunities. Sustainability is an emerging business megatrend, like electrification and mass production, that will profoundly affect companies competitiveness and even their survival. The argument Understanding how leaders competed in previous megatrendsspecifically, the quality movement and the rise of ITcan help companies craft the strategies theyll need to gain advantage in this one. A better approach The road map is clear Create a vision that moves systematically through four stages of value creation, starting with defensive tactics and then moving to offensive strategies. Then establish and integrate execution capabilities in five key areas leadership, assessment, strategy development, management integration, and reporting and communication. Most executives know that how they respond to the challenge of sustainability will profoundly affect the competitivenessand perhaps even the survivalof their organizations. Yet most are flailing around, launching a hodgepodge of initiatives without any overarching vision or plan. Thats not because they dont see sustainability as a strategic issue. Rather, its because they think theyre facing an unprecedented journey for which there is no road map. GB/Opening-the-door-to-new-sustainability-opportunities-Rabobank-joins-WBCSD_opengraph.jpg' alt='Eco-Efficiency The Business Link To Sustainable Development Pdf' title='Eco-Efficiency The Business Link To Sustainable Development Pdf' />But there is a road map. Our research into the forces that have shaped the competitive landscape in recent decades reveals that business megatrends have features and trajectories in common. Sustainability is an emerging megatrend, and thus its course is to some extent predictable. The 18th conference of the European Roundtable for Sustainable Consumption and Production Society. Understanding how firms won in prior megatrends can help executives craft the strategies and systems theyll need to gain advantage in this one. The concept of megatrends is not new, of course. Businessman and author John Naisbitt popularized the term in his 1. Our focus is on business megatrends, which force fundamental and persistent shifts in how companies compete. Such transformations arise from technological innovation or from new ways of doing business, and many factors can launch or magnify the process of change. Business megatrends may emerge from or be accelerated by financial crises, shifts in the social realities that define the marketplace, or the threat of conflict over resources. Autocad Mac Keygen For Mac. The geopolitics of the Cold War, for example, drove the innovations that launched both the space race and rapid developments in the field of microelectronicsultimately unleashing the information technology megatrend. Electrification, the rise of mass production, and globalization were also megatrends, as was the quality movement of the 1. The common thread among them is that they presented inescapable strategic imperatives for corporate leaders. Why do we think sustainability qualifies as an emerging megatrend Over the past 1. Globalized workforces and supply chains have created environmental pressures and attendant business liabilities. The rise of new world powers, notably China and India, has intensified competition for natural resources especially oil and added a geopolitical dimension to sustainability. Externalities such as carbon dioxide emissions and water use are fast becoming materialmeaning that investors consider them central to a firms performance and stakeholders expect companies to share information about them. Over the past 1. 0 years, environmental issues have steadily encroached on businesses capacity to create value for customers. These forces are magnified by escalating public and governmental concern about climate change, industrial pollution, food safety, and natural resource depletion, among other issues. Consumers in many countries are seeking out sustainable products and services or leaning on companies to improve the sustainability of traditional ones. Governments are interceding with unprecedented levels of new regulationfrom the recent SEC ruling that climate risk is material to investors to the EPAs mandate that greenhouse gases be regulated as a pollutant. Further fueling this megatrend, thousands of companies are placing strategic bets on innovation in energy efficiency, renewable power, resource productivity, and pollution control. See the sidebar Fueling the Megatrend. What this all adds up to is that managers can no longer afford to ignore sustainability as a central factor in their companies long term competitiveness. Learning from the Past Quality and ITMegatrends require businesses to adapt and innovate or be swept aside. So what can businesses learn from previous megatrendsConsider the quality movement. The quality revolution was about innovation in the core set of tools and methods that companies used to manage much of what they do. Quality as a central element of strategy, rather than a tactical tool, smashed previous cost versus fitness for use barriers, which meant the table stakes were dramatically raised for all companies. The information technology revolution was about tangible technology breakthroughs that fundamentally altered business capabilities and redefined how companies do much of what they do. Digital technologies deeply penetrated corporations in the 1. IT made its way into the daily lives of workers and consumers with the advent of desktop computing and the internet. In both the IT and quality business megatrendsas in others weve studiedthe market leaders evolved through four principal stages of value creation First, they focused on reducing cost, risks, and waste and delivering proof of value. Second, they redesigned selected products, processes, or business functions to optimize their performancein essence, progressing from doing old things in new ways to doing new things in new ways. Third, they drove revenue growth by integrating innovative approaches into their core strategies. Fourth, they differentiated their value propositions through new business models that used these innovations to enhance corporate culture, brand leadership, and other intangibles to secure durable competitive advantage. The quality story. The economic downturn of the late 1. Many industries were transformed, perhaps none more dramatically than the automotive sector. Of course, the seeds of change had been planted earlier. In the years after World War II, Japan had rebuilt its industrial infrastructure on a model of high volume, low cost factories that mass produced goods of questionable durability and quality. Made in Japan was not considered a brand asset. By the mid 1. 97. Japanese government and business leaders had seized upon the ideas of Edwards Deming and others who stressed quality as a core value. This incremental, process oriented approach to systematic improvement fit well with Japanese executives views on how to drive change to compete effectively in the global market. Leading firms including Toyota and Honda embraced Total Quality Management TQM methods, fundamentally shifting their value propositions. Quality methods called into question the assumptions managers had relied on for decades, namely that high quality and affordability were mutually exclusive.