{"id":2275,"date":"2020-03-31T12:23:51","date_gmt":"2020-03-31T12:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gronenonline.com\/_gronen1\/?p=2275"},"modified":"2020-03-31T12:28:18","modified_gmt":"2020-03-31T12:28:18","slug":"why-dont-businesses-see-this-coming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gronenonline.com\/_gronen1\/2020\/03\/31\/why-dont-businesses-see-this-coming\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Don\u2019t Businesses See This Coming?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest Blogger: Glen Dowell, Professor of Management & Organizations, SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

As the Covid-19 threat started to hit home in the United States, I was just preparing to begin teaching my Strategies for Sustainability course.\u00a0 I usually begin each class session with a broad question to prime the ensuing discussion; for that opening class I used two: (1) why do businesses need to address sustainability issues? And (2) \u201cwhy is it so hard to do so?\u201d\u00a0 We had a pretty lively discussion on the first question, and the students who self-selected into a sustainability class clearly recognized that this was an issue on which business needed to lead.\u00a0 But the second question, I think, is what is most relevant to the current Covid-19 crisis and the responses we are seeing.<\/span><\/p>\n

To prepare for that discussion, I went back to some data I have access to from the CDP (formerly Carbon Disclosure Project).\u00a0 The CDP is a consortium of large institutional investors that has written to CEOs of large public firms for nearly 20 years now, asking them to have their companies track and report their carbon emissions and their plans to improve them.\u00a0 The CDP also asks a host of other, more detailed questions in order to get a feel for how these companies are addressing climate change.<\/span><\/p>\n

I dug through the responses to some of the early questionnaires. What was striking was that the companies responding didn\u2019t question this science (take this with a grain of salt if you will \u2013 while these answers weren\u2019t public, the CEOs could well have been reluctant to admit that they were skeptical when institutional investors were stating concerns).\u00a0 What a surprising number of firms did<\/u> do, however, was state quite confidently that climate change posed no risk to them, or that the opportunities seemed at least as high as the risks.<\/span><\/p>\n

A large industrial firm, for example, stated that \u201cConsidering [our] manufacturing processes, we do not see climate change as posing significant risks or opportunities for our operations.\u201d\u00a0 Some others were equally sanguine, with service firms stating that they did not have significant emissions, so there was nothing to worry about.\u00a0 Perhaps my favorite was a financial services firm that responded that the time frame over which climate change would be felt was longer than their planning cycle, so essentially they weren\u2019t worried about it yet.\u00a0 I mean, you gotta admire the honesty, if not the foresight.\u00a0 To be clear, many other firms were already recognizing the threat that climate change posed, but the number that seemed confident that it would not affect them was what struck me.<\/span><\/p>\n

As the world has watched Covid-19 spread, I have been reminded of these responses and of the discussion from that opening class. Some of the reasons that students suggested that it was hard for firms to address sustainability issues because there was so much short-term pressure on companies, because it wasn\u2019t clear how to address sustainability profitably, and because there were other priorities for the money required to really make improvements.\u00a0 Research and anecdotal accounts of corporate sustainability supports all these reasons, by the way.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think there\u2019s another fundamental issue that gets in the way, however, and the problems we have seen with Covid-19 and the responses to the CDP questionnaire hint at it.\u00a0 Just like with Climate Change, governments have had plenty of warnings about the threat from a pandemic; for the most part, they have ignored those threats and assumed that either they were overblown, that the threat was far away, or that they were ready for them.\u00a0 But preparing for something that is so fundamentally different than business-as-usual is incredibly challenging, because it forces us to think about large, complex systems and all the interrelationships in them.\u00a0 It also forces us to be humble enough to realize that we can\u2019t actually plan perfectly for massive shifts like this.\u00a0 Instead, we have to ask \u201cwhat if we couldn\u2019t rely on the very factors we\u2019ve relied on for so long?\u201d\u00a0 And then it forces us to put together the best plan we can for that eventuality.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the lines that has been most quoted in this Covid-19 crisis is from former HHS Secretary Michael Levitt: \u201cEverything we do before a pandemic will seem alarmist. Everything we do after a pandemic will seem inadequate.\u201d\u00a0 This is the world that sustainability scholars have occupied for so long within business schools; as long as \u2018business as usual\u2019 works, all the sustainability efforts seem alarmist.\u00a0 Our hope is that we can learn from the Covid-19 crisis and that later, the efforts won\u2019t seem inadequate.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you want to reach out to discuss this, contact <\/em>gwd39@cornell.edu<\/em><\/a> or @glen_dowell on Twitter.\u00a0 <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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