Course Preview | Sustainability Strategies from Stanford Graduate School of Business
4:29 min
851
Hello, my name is Joseph Piotroski. I'm a Professor of Accounting at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and I'd like to welcome you to this executive education program on sustainability. As the Faculty Director of this course, I'm delighted to share this journey with you. Over the coming weeks, my colleagues and I will be delivering a course designed to transform both you and your organization in the context of sustainability. Our sessions have been carefully curated to help you understand the value and impact of sustainability trends in business, to envision a new sustainability-oriented business strategy for your organization, to conceptualize innovative solutions in response to climate change and other environmental and social challenges, and ultimately to develop proactive leadership skills that will empower you to become an agent of change. Each professor will bring his or her own unique teaching style and expertise to the program, and each will challenge you to think in different ways about the topic of sustainability. The course will start with a deep dive into the world's most pressing sustainability challenge, climate change.
Throughout the course, we will frequently use carbon emissions and climate change as a lens to demonstrate how to analyze, develop and manage a sustainability-driven strategy. To that end, Professor Erica Plumbeck, Professor of Information, Operations and Technology at the GSB, will start the course by providing background on the science behind climate change and by highlighting the challenges organizations and society face with respect to mitigating and reversing the effect of cumulative carbon emissions. She will be followed by Professor Haim Mendelson, also a professor of operations, who will explore how an organization's business models are affected and shaped by sustainability forces, and vice versa. Erica will then rejoin the course in the third week and provide you with a framework for assessing the impact of your organization's value chain and the environment, again most notably through the lens of climate change. In the fourth week of the program, Professor Bill Barnett will begin an important conversation about how organizations develop sustainable business strategies.
As a Professor of Organizational Behavior, Professor Barnett will focus on leadership, and this session will explore questions that arise as you become a sustainability leader. This includes developing an understanding of your role in the process, how you can improve your organization's sustainability performance, and, perhaps most importantly, how you can transform your organization's sustainability strategy to become a market leader and an agent of change. With those perspectives in hand, Professor Stefanos Zenios will join us to talk about innovating for sustainability. Professor Zenios is an operations professor who specializes in helping both entrepreneurs and established organizations develop new business models to meet market needs. He will focus on the role of innovation and transformation in the context of sustainability and share generalizable tools and frameworks for improving and innovating your organization's business model. The following week, Professor Saum Jha, a political economist at the GSB, will focus on the politics of sustainability. His session will highlight current trends in environmental regulation and discuss how proactive organizations can take a leadership role in shaping the rules of the game.
Lastly, I will be delivering a module on The Triple Bottom line, a commonly used framework to help you measure and manage sustainability related performance and in the process, broaden our conversation about what it means to be strategically successful in the context of sustainability. As you can see, the program's flow is structured to mirror important steps associated with identifying and implementing a sustainable business strategy. The course is designed to help you understand today's sustainability challenges, assess the impact of your organization's business model, operational model, and value chain on the environment and society, and vice versa, and use that information to innovate, to devise new sustainability-oriented strategies, and to manage the business for long-term success. Most critically, the program concludes with a capstone project designed to allow you to apply these learnings to your own organization. The world faces a host of environmental and social challenges, ranging from the threats posed by climate change to the need for social fairness, equity, inclusivity. The world needs leaders who understand the challenges we face and possess the leadership tools and vision to solve them. We hope that this course empowers you to become such a leader and serves as a stepping stone in your personal journey to become an agent of change.
Throughout the course, we will frequently use carbon emissions and climate change as a lens to demonstrate how to analyze, develop and manage a sustainability-driven strategy. To that end, Professor Erica Plumbeck, Professor of Information, Operations and Technology at the GSB, will start the course by providing background on the science behind climate change and by highlighting the challenges organizations and society face with respect to mitigating and reversing the effect of cumulative carbon emissions. She will be followed by Professor Haim Mendelson, also a professor of operations, who will explore how an organization's business models are affected and shaped by sustainability forces, and vice versa. Erica will then rejoin the course in the third week and provide you with a framework for assessing the impact of your organization's value chain and the environment, again most notably through the lens of climate change. In the fourth week of the program, Professor Bill Barnett will begin an important conversation about how organizations develop sustainable business strategies.
As a Professor of Organizational Behavior, Professor Barnett will focus on leadership, and this session will explore questions that arise as you become a sustainability leader. This includes developing an understanding of your role in the process, how you can improve your organization's sustainability performance, and, perhaps most importantly, how you can transform your organization's sustainability strategy to become a market leader and an agent of change. With those perspectives in hand, Professor Stefanos Zenios will join us to talk about innovating for sustainability. Professor Zenios is an operations professor who specializes in helping both entrepreneurs and established organizations develop new business models to meet market needs. He will focus on the role of innovation and transformation in the context of sustainability and share generalizable tools and frameworks for improving and innovating your organization's business model. The following week, Professor Saum Jha, a political economist at the GSB, will focus on the politics of sustainability. His session will highlight current trends in environmental regulation and discuss how proactive organizations can take a leadership role in shaping the rules of the game.
Lastly, I will be delivering a module on The Triple Bottom line, a commonly used framework to help you measure and manage sustainability related performance and in the process, broaden our conversation about what it means to be strategically successful in the context of sustainability. As you can see, the program's flow is structured to mirror important steps associated with identifying and implementing a sustainable business strategy. The course is designed to help you understand today's sustainability challenges, assess the impact of your organization's business model, operational model, and value chain on the environment and society, and vice versa, and use that information to innovate, to devise new sustainability-oriented strategies, and to manage the business for long-term success. Most critically, the program concludes with a capstone project designed to allow you to apply these learnings to your own organization. The world faces a host of environmental and social challenges, ranging from the threats posed by climate change to the need for social fairness, equity, inclusivity. The world needs leaders who understand the challenges we face and possess the leadership tools and vision to solve them. We hope that this course empowers you to become such a leader and serves as a stepping stone in your personal journey to become an agent of change.
