Critical Questions Live and Streaming: Is it up to business to save the planet?

How much can we expect business to lead on sustainability?

What should be a company’s biggest priority: Serving its shareholders, providing jobs, or addressing the health of our planet? Often, these goals are at odds. We’re bringing together two leading voices in the sustainability debate to wrestle with the issues in what is sure be a lively conversation. MIT’s Yossi Sheffi and sustainability expert and author Andrew Winston will debate and discuss the role of for-profits in supporting—and investing in—sustainability goals. Come here the point-counterpoint, moderated by Paul Michelman, editor in chief of MIT Sloan Management Review. Admission is FREE. View the live webcast recording here.

Should business lead?

Yossi Sheffi questions whether business has a leading role to play in the sustainability challenge.

His new book, "Balancing Green offers a pragmatic take on how businesses of all sizes balance the competing demands of profitability and employment with sustainability.

The demands and stresses on companies only grow as executives face a multitude of competing business goals. Their stakeholders are interested in corporate profits, jobs, business growth, and environmental sustainability. In this book, business strategy expert Yossi Sheffi offers a pragmatic take on how businesses of all sizes―from Coca-Cola and Siemens to Dr. Bronner's Magical Soaps and Patagonia―navigate these competing goals. Drawing on extensive interviews with more than 250 executives, Sheffi examines the challenges, solutions, and implications of balancing traditional business goals with sustainability.

Or must the approach to business change?

Andrew Winston claims companies can make a "big pivot" become champions of sustainability.

We live in a fundamentally changed world. It’s time for your approach to strategy to change, too.

According to Andrew Winston, bestselling author (Green to Gold) and globally recognized business strategist, the way companies currently operate will not allow them to keep up with the current—and future—rate of change. They need to make the Big Pivot. The mega challenges of climate change, scarcity, and radical transparency threaten our ability to run an expanding global economy and are profoundly changing “business as usual.” But they also offer unprecedented opportunities: multi-trillion-dollar markets are in play, and the winners of this new game will profit mightily.

Come here the point-counterpoint, moderated by Paul Michelman, editor in chief of MIT Sloan Management Review. Admission is FREE. Register now as we expect this event to fill quickly.