Archive for the ‘Unruh, Gregory’ Category

Nearly 10 years have passed since a “collective epiphany” in Switzerland gave rise to the Thunderbird Professional Oath of Honor, the world’s first pledge formally adopted by a business school faculty and Board of Trustees. “Since it was born as a collective epiphany by a group of young leaders in Geneva, the idea has lived on and grown thanks to the commitment and work of many people,” said Thunderbird President Ángel Cabrera, Ph.D., who attended the 2002 World Economic Forum event and brought the idea to Thunderbird in 2004. | Video: Thunderbird Oath History (5:10) | Video: Students Recite the Oath (1:01) | Read the Thunderbird Professional Oath of Honor
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By Ángel Cabrera, Ph.D., and Gregory Unruh, Ph.D.

Globalization has shaken up traditional leadership development. Language immersion, cultural etiquette tips and the like are wildly insufficient to prepare managers for the demands of today’s global marketplace. Likewise, worrying about expatriate culture shock or the risk that employees “go native” are concerns of a past era. Today’s global business needs truly global leaders. They can’t just act global. They have to be global. Real global leaders are a new breed with identifiable traits. | Video: Ángel Cabrera and Gregory Unruh on global leadership (2:07) | Amazon: Being Global: How to Think, Act and Lead in a Transformed World
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Corporate leaders seeking to fulfill their ethical obligations need to clarify their responsibilities, commit to improve and then find ways to capture value for shareholders and society, Thunderbird Professor Gregory Unruh, Ph.D., said March 3, 2011 during a free campus seminar for prospective students. Unruh calls the three-pronged strategy of “clarify, commit and capture” the three C’s of corporate social responsibility. His presentation, “Ethics, CSR and the Pursuit of Sustainability,” was the first installment in a 2011 lecture series organized by Thunderbird Executive MBA faculty and staff. | Blog: Gregory Unruh in the Huffington Post | Video: Social Contract for Business (2:52) | Video: CSR Strategy: Clarify (1:51) | Video: CSR Strategy: Commit (2:16) | Video: CSR Strategy: Capture (2:09)
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Thunderbird Professor Gregory Unruh, Ph.D., started his career as an environmental consultant working in remediation. His job was to help U.S. companies clean up their polluted sites and bring them into compliance with Environmental Protection Agency standards. Unruh saw value in the process, but he also recognized a flaw. “Trying to clean up a contaminated industrial site is like trying to put toothpaste back into a tube,” Unruh said at the Sustainable Brand Conference June 7-10, 2010, in Monterey, California. “You can never get all the toothpaste back in.” Unruh said a better approach to environmental protection is to prevent problems before they occur. He said businesses looking for a new model of sustainable manufacturing need to look at their own plant, which has been manufacturing products in a sustainable way for more than 2 billion years. “We have no other place we can look to learn how to operate and manufacture sustainably on the planet,” he said. Unruh shares sustainable business lessons from the Earth in this Sustainable Brand Conference presentation. For additional research and commentary, visit Unruh’s Huffington Post blog or read his new book, Earth, Inc.: Using Nature’s Rules to Build Sustainable Profits. | Video: Doing Business with Earth, Inc. (2:45)
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By Gregory Unruh, Thunderbird Professor

Sustainable consumption? Sounds like an oxymoron. But that’s what we’ll be discussing at next week’s World Economic Forum Summer Davos 2010 event in Tianjin China. In the session, entitled “Redesigning the Supply Chain in an Era of Sustainability,” my WEF colleagues and I will ask CEOs and policy makers to rethink our dominant model of industrial production: the supply chain. What is it about supply chain thinking that causes sustainability problems? To understand, you’ll have to come back to business school with me. Read the full article in my Huffington Post blog. Or read my book, Earth, Inc.: Using Nature’s Rules to Build Sustainable Profits.

By Gregory Unruh, Thunderbird Professor

It’s an age-old story. An entrepreneur enters a complacent industry with a startling innovation. The start-up’s market share steadily grows and before long, it’s the new behemoth. But then the surviving competitors, backed against the wall, counter with their own innovations that neutralize the new behemoth’s advantage. Soon, the new behemoth is scrambling for survival, its former success rendered meaningless in the new competitive landscape. This isn’t a story about Microsoft and Apple. It’s a story about weeds. Read the full article in my Huffington Post blog. Or read my new book, Earth, Inc.: Using Nature’s Rules to Build Sustainable Profits.

For any entrepreneur with a new commitment to green, there are several simple business practices to adopt, says Greg Unruh, author of “Earth, Inc.: Using Nature’s Rules to Build Sustainable Profits.” One the easiest is to make a conscious effort to buy sustainable business supplies, such as energy-efficient light bulbs, recycled binders and pens with nontoxic ink. Most manufacturers “now identify products they sell that are environmentally friendly,” explains Mr. Unruh, also a professor of global business at Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Ariz. “You don’t have to do the research on your own.”

To continue reading the article in the Wall Street Journal, click here.

Thunderbird Professor Gregory Unruh, Ph.D., first tackled the topic of sustainable business in 1974, when he wrote a report for his fourth-grade teacher on the upstart Environmental Protection Agency. Unruh’s passion for the topic continues in his new book, Earth, Inc.: Using Nature’s Rules to Build Sustainable Profits. Unruh shares five sustainable business rules from Planet Earth in this Earth Day student presentation on April 22, 2010. Click here to watch the video (58:07). For additional research and commentary, visit Unruh’s Huffington Post blog.
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Excerpts from a discussion with Thunderbird Professor Gregory C. Unruh on Earth, Inc., which Harvard Business Press released this week to coincide with Earth Day 2010.

Q. The palette of raw materials that humans use in manufacturing keeps expanding, not shrinking. What will it take to reverse this trend?
A. We need to recognize that proliferation of materials — while it allows us to create new applications and technology — goes against one of the fundamental principles that makes the biosphere sustainable.
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By Gregory Unruh, Ph.D.

Natural scientists define sustainability as the capacity of healthy ecosystems to continue functioning indefinitely. Maintaining this capacity has become a clarion call for business. Consider General Electric’s ambitious Ecomagination project, Coca-Cola’s efforts to protect water quality and Wal-Mart’s attempt to reduce packaging waste. These and other laudable efforts are steps on a road described by the aluminum giant Alcan in its 2002 corporate sustainability report: “Sustainability is not a destination. It is a continuing journey of learning and change.” Unfortunately, Alcan had it wrong. | Podcast: Rethinking the design (0:58) | Podcast: Doing more with less (0:55)
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