Building sustainable organisation is not insurmountable: Deveshwar

Mumbai, Sep 12: Proposing the idea of 'Green Leap Technology' Prof. Stuart Hart, Professor of Management, Cornell University, said that India could be one of the most important parts of the world where 'Green Leap Revolution' will take place.

Addressing an interactive session on ''Strategies & Leadership for Creating Sustainable Organisations'', organised by the CII ITC Centre of Excellence for sustainable development here today, Prof Hart who proposed that the leap frog change will emerge from the developing countries, expressed that the dual challenge of pollution, depletion of resources and degradation along with population, poverty and inequity may lead to crisis.

'' Challenge is to bring a convergence between clean technology and base of the pyramid business which is called the green leap,'' stressed Prof Stuart. He also emphasised that Indias 600 million rural population would represent country's silver lining to the organisations by building opportunities to create environmentally sustainable way of living that is affordable and which creates livelihoods for the rural populace.

Y C Deveshwar, former President, CII, Chairman, CII-ITC Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Development Advisory Council & Chairman, ITC Ltd. said '' You can be the change agents and bring the change you want to see.'' He laid down three propositions to take up the challenge of building sustainable organisations. '' We need to redefine the term value creation. Though traditionally, value has always meant shareholder value, we need to revolutionise the meaning to include societal value,'' proposed Mr Deveshwar.

He stressed that if conduct of business measured only shareholder value, disregarding consumer, social and ecological value, business would not be sustainable. The second proposition he laid was '' we should be able to measure this societal value and that there should be transparency.'' Talking about his third proposition, Mr Deveshwar said '' we should use markets to reward responsible corporate conduct. While explaining this with the initiatives taken at ITC Ltd., Mr Deveshwar elucidated that business has touch points with the society. It can bring about a transformation at marginal incremental cost. '' The challenge is how to translate the idea of creating societal value into shareholder value so that there is long term benefit. In the future, those organsations which are able to contribute to societal value will have a competitive advantage,'' Mr Deveshwar added.

--UNI

(c) 2009 Published with permission from United News of India.
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