DC Velocity - June 2018

BY SUSAN K. LACEFIELD, EDITOR AT LARGE

THE DC VELOCITY Q&A

thoughtleaders

THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (MIT) Professor Yossi Sheffi has researched and written books on a wide variety of supply chain topics, from resiliency to logistics clusters to urban transportation. “I guess I just get bored easily,” he quips.

But none of those books gave him as much trouble to write as his most recent one, Balancing Green: When to Embrace Sustainability in a Business (and When Not To).

Part of the reason may be that, unlike most people who write about the environment and sustainability, Sheffi does not consider himself a “tree hugger” … but he wouldn’t call himself a “climate change denier” either. Instead, he takes a pragmatic approach to sustainability, balancing corporations’ responsibility to protect the environment against everything else a business has to accomplish—including making a profit, providing jobs, giving back to the community, and providing goods and services that people want at a price they are willing to pay.

The result is a book that aims to help companies decide what types of sustainability efforts make sense for them from a business standpoint and what efforts do not. To help provide this guidance, Sheffi and his fellow researchers at MIT conducted more than 250 interviews with executives from companies of all types—from giant multinationals like Siemens and Coca-Cola to smaller companies that consider environmentalism part of their corporate mission, like Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps and Patagonia. The book presents three business rationales for sustainability: cutting costs, reducing risk, and achieving growth.