The Challenge of Going Green

[Binay kumar gupta]

“It’s Not Easy Being Green” (May–June 1994). Help the environment and hurt your business, or irreparably harm your business while protecting the earth. Recently, however, a new common wisdom has emerged that promises the ultimate reconciliation of environmental and economic concerns. In this new world, both business and the environment can win. Being green is no longer a cost of doing business; it is a catalyst for innovation, new market opportunity, and wealth creation. The idea that a renewed interest in environmental management will result in increased profitability for business has widespread appeal. In a new green world, managers might redesign a product so that it uses fewer environmentally harmful or resource-depleting raw materials—an effort that if successful could result in cuts in direct manufacturing costs and inventory savings. This new vision sounds great, yet it is highly unrealistic, Walley and Whitehead argue. Environmental costs are skyrocketing at most companies, with little chance of economic payback in sight. Given this reality, they question whether “win-win” solutions should be the foundation of a company’s environmental strategy.

[Rita Dixit Kubiak]

thought this would be a relevant link for the big business community to consider as they weigh decisions on their economic returns https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/drawdown-transforming-the-clim...

[PINAKI DASGUPTA]

Sir, thank you for posting the piece taken from Harward Review. Its very relevant for today's affairs.

The original piece can be accessed at (for public reference)

https://hbr.org/1994/07/the-challenge-of-going-green

[Rita Dixit Kubiak]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts Shri Guptaji on the Parayavaran website....  it potentially provides a chance for thoughtful dialogue between all the stakeholders. Let us for a moment say the stake holders also include the planet its bio-diversity, endangered human communities, and the (big) business entities. Small business entities,  are most often prone to tailor their business strategy to the needs of their communities and localities.  This dialogue, is indeed necessary at a time of climate change/weirding, species die-back .... what we do to the planet we do to ourselves .... our intelligence needs to be highly fine tuned it cannot only be tied to the economic returns X big business insists upon....