Green Strategic Alignment

Abstract

The current business context, characterized by macro-economic incentives for carbon-mitigation, stringent environmental compliance constraints and the need to embrace sustainability as a key element of corporate social responsibility, presents difficult challenges for most organizations. These organizations need to re-align their strategies (and eventually their organizational structures and operations) to a new set of sustainability objectives, but lack the tools to enable this. In this chapter, the authors review some of our recent work on documenting strategies as a means to assessing and achieving strategic alignment. The authors show that these approaches provide an adequate and appropriate basis for documenting both business strategies and “green”/sustainability strategies, and lead to rich vocabulary for analysing strategic alignment. They then address the question of what organizations might do when faced with misalignment between their existing strategies and sustainability imperatives. Depending on the nature of the organizational posture towards sustainability, they outline the kind of analysis organizations might use to decide how to identify compromises between the competing pulls of their existing strategies and green objectives.

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