Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Saeed Rahman, Natalie Slawinski, and Monika Winn examine how pioneering companies in agriculture, agri-food, and other sectors can build and leverage ecological knowledge (knowledge about the very ecosystems they rely on) to develop innovative practices that help regenerate social and natural systems. In doing so, these companies can reap benefits for their business and help turn our unsustainable agricultural systems into systems that sustain a growing human population without severely degrading or destroying ecological systems necessary for agriculture and other industries.

P.J. Stephenson and Judith Walls call for a “new biodiversity paradigm for business.” They show that current corporate guidelines for engaging on biodiversity are inconsistent and confusing, leaving companies unable to manage nature-based risks, capture nature-based opportunities, and prevent disruptive climate change. To correct these inconsistencies, they identify fundamental issues that businesses and other actors must resolve in the links between market systems and the nature systems that generate biodiversity.

This issue explores how to make needed changes happen by examining three systems change topics. First, how can we use the linkages between environmental and economic systems to change market structure and, consequently, how actors compete? Second, how do we redefine waste to alter how market actors impact the natural environment through producing and disposing of materials? Third, what system changes can we accomplish through innovation or by using technologies like IT, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain to address unsustainable practices?

We believe that a radical shift in MBA education is needed. Instead of transmitting existing knowledge or developing a set of functional skills, students must become comfortable with the process of thinking based on America’s unique contribution to the history of philosophy: pragmatism. 

Companies continue to explore DEI and implement initiatives to create a culture of acceptance and understanding, while carrying out their missions and remaining profitable. But building an effective DEI strategy calls for a new mindset among business leaders if current and future initiatives are going to succeed. This Executive Update offers four “mini-starters” to explore the DEI issue in more depth.

The inner-leader journey will help you see reality more as it truly is and give you the insight, wisdom, and courage to share it with others. I believe it is critical for our teams and team members to make this shift in order to thrive and achieve success in a turbulent world.

In this Executive Update, we explore taking a process perspective to show how concepts such as sustainability and the circular economy look in the physical world. Making these concepts concrete reveals a singular criterion for achieving a circular economy: every output generated by every process should have a consumer who uses it productively. This criterion provides managers with actionable steps and ways to measure their organization’s progress toward sustainability.

Helen Chen brings our focus on process and mechanisms to the domain of market-based social activism (MbSA), in which a business seeks to align its activities with moral principles to drive positive change at the society scale. Chen presents the Pyramid of Forces for Good framework that can be used to better organize MbSA to develop a “market for virtue” in which morally sound business activities outcompete those that are morally questionable. A market for virtue applied to green performance is based on three building blocks: (1) valid and reliable green-performance measurement, (2) fair and equitable green-performance valuation, and (3) efficient and scalable green-value apportionment. Establishing a market for virtue would make green practices economically profitable, fundamentally changing the economic system that currently makes unsustainable practices more economically profitable than green practices.