ABSTRACT
We emphasized in Chapter 6 the critical role of strategic leadership in transforming global corporations into agents of positive change toward a sustainable world that supports a healthy human habitat. Ultimately, the success of strategic managers in leading their firms toward sustainable organizational management depends on their ability to design and implement strategic management processes capable of integrating the firm’s economic, social, and ecological responsibilities. Collectively these processes are referred to as sustainable strategic management (SSM) (Stead and Stead 2008). SSM is a recent outgrowth of strategic management, which itself emerged out of the concepts of business policy and strategic planning in the 1980s in response to an increasingly complex and turbulent business environment. Via strategic management corporations can continuously adapt their organizational capabilities to environmental turbulence and change. Whereas, traditional strategic management is based on the perception that the economy is a closed system, SSM is based on the perception that the economy is an open subsystem of the larger social and ecological systems in which it is embedded. Thus, SSM encourages the development and implementation of strategic visions in organizations that reveal how firms can perpetuate themselves by contributing to the preservation of a sustainable world. Thus, SSM constitutes a complete mental shift regarding the role of corporations on today’s small planet Earth.
