Article

Karen Linkletter

Karen E. Linkletter explores contemporary and historical perspectives on assessing and developing leadership character. She delves into the question of whether or not character can be learned by examining the viewpoints of philosophers and management gurus. She also explores the liberal arts ideal, which emphasizes education and self-development, contrasting it with modern frameworks such as the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS) and the Ivey Leader Character Framework (ILCF). Linkletter highlights the shift in focus from virtues like integrity and prudence to decision-making capabilities in contemporary character models.

Article

Barbara Carlin

Barbara A. Carlin connects character and ethics by delving into sneaky problems commonly faced by managers. She uses two cases to illustrate the often-obscured moral dimensions of business choices and explains how nonmonetary transactions, framing effects, and ill-conceived goals can contribute to ethical lapses. Carlin proposes remedies such as awareness, collaboration, and fostering an ethical organizational culture. She notes that virtues like humility, collaboration, integrity, and courage can help managers recognize and address the ethical nuances of strategic decisions, ultimately fostering a culture of ethical decision-making within organizations.

Article

Muhammed Shaahid Cassim, Fatima Hamdulay

Muhammed Shaahid Cassim and Fatima Hamdulay explore the concept of heartfelt leadership through the lens of the Islamic Sufi tradition, focusing on tasawwuf, the science of character excellence. Grounded in the belief that the heart is the seat of emotion, spirit, and morality, the authors delve into the Sufi perspective on good character and its role in leadership. They emphasize three considerations (intentionality, entrustment, and sincerity) that govern the heart and its decision-making.

Article

Corey Crossan, Mary Crossan, Bill Furlong

The authors cover the strategic impact of character development in the public and private sectors. They advocate a shift from mere awareness to integrating character development into organizational practices, with an emphasis on the interconnected nature of character dimensions. Introducing the Virtuosity mobile app as a practical tool for character development, the authors propose a strategic embedding process model for sustained change. They highlight the crucial relationship between individual and organizational systems and emphasize the need for alignment. The article concludes with a call to action, asserting that the tools and understanding necessary for achieving lasting impact are readily available.

Article

Dusya Vera, Ana Ruiz Pardo

There are three main themes in this issue. The first is the importance of embedding character dimensions within leadership processes and frameworks, whether through paradigm shifts, Sufi traditions, ethical decision-making, historical perspectives, or education. The second theme is the interconnectedness of individual and organizational systems. The third theme is recognizing that leadership responsibility extends beyond traditional performance metrics. Leaders need to recognize their accountability to communities, the broader world, and long-term societal and environmental considerations.

Advisor

Myles Suer

As we move into an era of “hyper-enterprise connectivity,” most businesses will need to manage an ecosystem — a complex web of interdependent relationships aimed at creating and allocating business value. In this Advisor, Myles Suer offers his thoughts on a new book that can help enterprise architects and digital business strategists tackle these complex ecosystems with AI to build enterprises of the future.

Advisor

Curt Hall

Organizations are developing new AI and data visualization tools that can potentially transform the way we address the challenges of sea level rise. The goal is to make more accurate predictions about future climate conditions that can affect sea levels, project how sea level change will impact the environment and society, and present the findings in ways that can be easily interpreted and shared among stakeholders. This Advisor takes a look at some of these tools.

Advisor

David McKee, Tim O'Callaghan

The world’s chances of avoiding the worst effects of climate change are rapidly decreasing due to our failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We can only reach the emissions levels necessary if every business, city, and region moves rapidly toward its net zero obligations. Digital twins can become a key tool in this mission. This Advisor introduces a project by a UK town that is utilizing digital twin technology to facilitate its transition to net zero.

Article

Thorsten Kramer

LEAG CEO Thorsten Kramer offers a first-person account of his company’s plan to transform from a coal-based electricity producer in eastern Germany to one of Europe’s largest providers of green energy. Kramer is honest about the Herculean effort this plan will require, particularly in light of recent fears about his country’s electricity supply. But the German government decreed that energy producers must phase out coal by the end of 2038 at the latest, and Kramer believes that: (1) green energy is the only direction worth taking and (2) if you’re going to go green you must go big. He describes the ambitious project in detail, gives us a glimpse into the changes his company is already experiencing, and previews his strategy for coping with the changes still to come.

Article

Michael Kruse, Luis del Barrio Castro, Florence Carlot, Oliver Golly

In this issue of Amplify, we measure how far we’ve come on our decarbonization journey, look at several obstacles to progress, and present ideas for how they can be overcome. The articles demonstrate the complexity of topics involved in the journey to decarbonization. They also highlight multiple approaches that can be adopted, providing business leaders with inspiration to accelerate their efforts and successfully deliver on their commitments.

Article

Senthil Kumar Sundaramoorthy, Dipti Kamath, Sachin Nimbalkar, Christopher Price, Thomas Wenning, Joe Cresko

Senthil Sundaramoorthy, Dipti Kamath, Sachin Nimbalkar, Christopher Price, Thomas Wenning, and Joseph Cresko from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) examine strategies for industrial decarbonization, particularly for the six most energy-intensive industries. Almost three-quarters of all industrial GHG emissions in the US come from manufacturers, and the bulk of those come from iron and steel, chemical, food and beverage, petroleum refining, pulp and paper, and cement. Sundaramoorthy et al. assert that “Energy-efficiency improvement is a feasible, low-cost approach that, in most cases, does not require any major change to industrial processes and can bring immediate emissions reductions.” Along with statistics from the US Department of Energy (DOE) about potential emissions reductions, the authors describe how strategic energy management, system efficiency, material and lifecycle efficiency, smart manufacturing, and combined heat and power can bring both short- and long-term reductions in carbon emissions.

Article

Martin Dix, Oliver Golly

Martin Dix and Oliver Golly examine how CCUS technologies can bridge the gap between current policies and decarbonization targets. Dix and Golly say CCUS offers a range of business opportunities: capture (designing and building CO2 capture infrastructure as well as operating and maintaining these facilities), transport (via pipeline, truck, or ship), storage, usage (providing CO2 to customers instead of storing it), and CCUS as a service (managing the upstream, midstream, and downstream lifecycle). They detail the key players in the CCUS value chain and describe which players are well positioned to succeed at which market segment. According to Dix and Golly, “CCUS can act as a bridge to the developing hydrogen economy, reducing short-term emissions while infrastructure and capacity mature and providing a long-term solution in areas where hydrogen will not deliver effective emissions reduction.”

Article

Enrique Castro Leon

Enrique Castro-Leon advocates for using carbon offsets (COs). He acknowledges the challenges (including several accounting issues) and reminds us that the CO market is immature, making it difficult to compare offerings. Castro-Leon says IT can be leveraged to maintain real-time inventories of carbon assets and could be used to create a system designed to meet specific GHG-mitigation goals. He describes the Scalable Carbon Offset Open Platform (SCOOP) specification currently under development at OptimiLabs, which creates a digital twin that’s essentially a computer model of the physical carbon store asset. This allows CO suppliers to easily place their offsets in the carbon market of choice and demand-side entities to discharge their carbon liabilities by either paying a premium buying offsets or paying a broker to carry out a discharge on their behalf. This type of system, says Castro-Leon, establishes a formal linkage between carbon stores, carbon sources of emissions, and trading mechanisms toward global net zero goals.

Article

Ani Melkonyan Gottschalk, Maximilian Palmié

Ani Melkonyan-Gottschalk and Maximilian Palmié recommend focusing decarbonization efforts on urban areas. Urban infrastructures cover only about 2% of Earth’s surface, but they consume roughly 75% of the world’s resources and 70% of global primary energy while emitting 50%-60% of the world’s GHG. Melkonyan-Gottschalk and Palmié describe the role of urban transportation systems in the decarbonization process and outline a comprehensive strategy designed to increase their overall sustainability. This includes integrating mitigation and adaptation tactics into a unified strategy, prioritizing strategies that go beyond technological improvements, optimizing the performance of multimodal logistics chains by prioritizing energy-efficient modes, and investing in the public-private cooperation necessary for decarbonization to enter a deep societal transformation process.

Advisor

Jim Highsmith

Modern management emphasizes empowerment, flexibility, collaboration, and innovation. But what should we call it? While there are a number of labels thrown around for modern management, none have stuck as much as “command-control” (used to describe traditional management practices). In this Advisor, Cutter Fellow Emeritus Jim Highsmith offers a new label for today’s emerging management practices: agile-adaptive leadership.

Advisor

Alex Saric

To achieve a circular economy, companies must first develop a comprehensive view of emissions data across their extended supply chain. Developing such a baseline at the supplier and category level is essential to identifying the greatest opportunities and developing an effective action plan.

Advisor

Horst Treiblmaier

Blockchain, a complex technology, and sustainability, an abstract concept, have two things in common: they are (1) fairly comprehensive, and (2) vaguely defined. To understand how the former can impact the latter, core terms and existing trade-offs must be properly explained, and all positive or negative blockchain sustainability implications must be carefully evaluated.

Advisor

Paul Clermont

People made decisions for many millennia without the benefit of IT, and it’s not self-evident that we make our really big decisions in the computer age consistently better than before. Smaller decisions in relatively information-rich situations are another matter. As this Advisor explores, IT has been and will continue to be important to decision makers in critical ways.

Advisor

Greg Smith, Michael Bateman, Remy Gillet, Eystein Thanisch

Modern large language models (LLMs) require huge amounts of computing power to churn through huge amounts of data. In this Advisor, we analyze the carbon footprint of these LLMs and its impact on the environment.

Advisor

Curt Hall

In a recent survey, we asked organizations about the primary challenges hindering them from carrying out their GenAI plans. This Advisor explores some of their major concerns.