WEEK 4: Leading Change Toward Sustainability, pgs. 7-56.

This book has a lot of insight on helping leaders facilitate transition in their organisations. The idea of a Green Business is often met with lack of support and uncertainty from the employees and management, but with effort and persistence, they begin to understand and appreciate the need for a more sustainable way of carrying out the organisation’s activities.

In the past 200 years, human beings have caused temperatures and sea levels to rise due to global warmin.

Businesses view today’s challenges as opportunities and strive to make industry more sustainable. They are faced with the challenges of how to change and yet still thrive; how to transform their organizations from top to bottom so that their vision of sustainability drives everyday decision-making and defines success. Design can celebrate positive aspirations and create a wholly positive human footprint.

The levers of successful change toward sustainability, (such as altering the thinking, assumptions, beliefs, the way planning and decision making occurs) are complex and require a lot of time and resources to put into place and to accomplish. This means that it has got to start sooner than later to be able to meet the target – decarbonisation. Stakeholders’ expectations in the area of sustainability and AstraZeneca’s desire to manage its reputation were some reasons why the company reduced its emissions drastically. This shows that companies may not necessarily be ‘believers’ in Going Green but they do it to save their face, cut costs, increase profitability and stay in business. The “Take-Make-Waste” production system is one that leads to depletion of our natural resources as opposed to the “Borrow-Use-Return” system which ensures that used energy is returned to nature where it can be re-used for renewed growth. This therefore means that Recycling is one main way of ensuring that our resources last long enough to sustain the future generation.

The story of the Emricks shows the power of initiative and persistence. It doesn’t take too many people to make a difference and bring change to the environment.