ABSTRACT
Many leaders of our largest and most impactful global corporations believe that humanity is confronted with ecological limits and societal challenges that threaten the sustainability of our current beliefs, behaviors, and institutions. In response, they have proposed a range of solutions, including carbon taxes, sustainable practices, and global collaborations, intended to alter the trajectory of our unfolding global economy. At the same time, scholars are painting alternative future scenarios and describing how they are likely to compete for management attention along the evolutionary path toward sustainability. We argue that organization design concepts represent important levers for leaders implementing these solutions and the keys to this evolutionary process. Organization design concepts describe how sustainability will become embedded in both the corporation and its ecosystem as well as how organization agility will help to achieve sustainable effectiveness.
113 Scientific or technological “solutions” which poison the environment or degrade the social structure and man himself are of no benefit, no matter how brilliantly conceived or how great their superficial attraction. Ever-bigger machines, entailing ever-bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever-greater violence against the environment do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom.
E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, 1973 Chief Economic Advisor to the United Kingdom’s National Coal Board
There are no … limits to the carrying capacity of the Earth that are likely to bind any time in the foreseeable future. There isn’t a risk of an apocalypse due to global warming or anything else … The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error and one that, were it ever to prove influential, would have staggering social costs.
Larry Summers, 1991 Former Chief Economist at the World Bank and former Clinton Administration Secretary of the Treasury
