Sustainable Management 2 (B)

If you were responsible for drafting a vision statement for board consideration, you would begin by

The VP of operations of an online retailers explains: “While most of our packaging was made of paper anyway, many of the labels were of plastic and hard to remove as we even patched another transparent plastic layer on top of it. So, this created immense complications in the paper recycling system and unnecessary environmental impacts. We now stopped using these labels. We keep printing the label information directly onto the paper parcel now instead of onto a label on it. The same process, just without the label. We believe that with this small change dispatching has become much more sustainable.” Which type of change is this?

As public relations manager of a gaming platform, you are developing a new procedure for engaging with the families, friends, and other contacts of the gamers who are your customers, in order to early on spot any signs of gaming addiction or other health and wellbeing issues. This engagement activity will be carried out by a dedicated new team of family engagement operators in parallel to your company’s other management processes. Which organizational structure element best describes what you are doing?

Harry, a sales team manager tells you how he had this great idea to transform the way everyone is working from ‘every (wo)man for themselves’ to a collaborative team sales approach. After initial resistance from his colleagues, the change has now been implemented, but currently everything seems extremely chaotic and the performance has decreased alarmingly. He wonders if he made a mistake and shouldn’t have pressed for this change so hard. Based on your knowledge of the typical performance curve throughout the stages of a change process, which one of the following pieces of advice would be the most adequate one to give to Harry.

 Imagine you are the agricultural manager of a sheep farm producing wool for cruise ships, hotels, and casinos’ carpets which are exchanged on an annual basis. Due to a global health pandemic, these customers did not buy this year. There have been three main responses by other agricultural managers. 1. A few of your colleagues have made headlines by burning their wool as a protest against the fallen prices, which emits enormous amounts of carbon dioxide that would have been captured otherwise. 2. An alternative out there used by most agricultural managers in the same situation is to hire costly specialized storage space which is quite energy intensive (wool easily decays and needs drying and heating) to sell it next year hoping that demand will pick up again. 3. Some colleagues have thought out of the box and have managed to sell the wool to gardening centres and to private customers through d.i.y. stores, who can use the wool in gardening, which also leads to the capture of more carbon as it helps plants to grow better. The association of wool farmers has asked you to rank these alternatives based on their environmental sustainability, particularly, their carbon impact. How would you classify these three alternative organizing options using sustainability benchmarking?

You discuss with a friend, an environmentalist, about responsible management. He says that what he does not like about the topic is that managers “always think that humans go first-I think the bigger responsibility is the one we have for the environment!” Before you respond, you might want to think about which position your friend argues from. Which of the following sentences describes this statement best?