During the last couple of month we RESD Students had an interesting time while following our course in Green Strategy and Sustainable Innovation. In this course we talked a lot about generic stuff like “What is sustainability for a company?!”, and we were surprised that it is not so easy to answer this question. In fact, we learned that in todays world it is difficult to follow a business paradigm that is different from the established way of doing business.
The slogan the business of business is business seems outdated nowadays, because if the performance of a company gets measured only by its financial terms a lot of things get missed on the way. A company is a lot more than only shareholders that want big dividends for their trust and CEOs doing literally anything to reach this goal; all the other stakeholders have not such an importance. Environment, personell, customers, do not get a treatment like they should in a society where money rules them all.
What we learned in this course is that there exist some people out there that are working hard on new business paradigms that could break the supremacy of shareholder primacy and short-termism. Here I will provide you the most important ones so you can check them out!
- The Circular Economy (link), an economy without waste or pollution
- Sharing Economy (link) based on collaborative consumption
- The Purpose and Gift economy
- B-Corps and Social Business
- The Economy for the common good (link)
Give em a look, it will be worth your time!
