By David Jaber When working for more resilient communities or responsible businesses, one pattern that emerges is that they are more process oriented than results-oriented.   This comes across perhaps most clearly in larger-scale planning projects, where a vital piece of the work revolves around stakeholder engagement. As an illustration, a proposed residential/entertainment/hotel complex in [...]

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This year, Opportunity Green showcased some of the most innovative companies working in the corporate social responsibility space. Leaders from IBM, Starbucks, KPMG, Dell, and Patagonia shared their biggest sustainability challenges and offered solutions. Below is a compilation of some of the innovative approaches they are using to make progress on sustainability issues for their organizations.

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As SOCAP 2011 – a conference focused on “accelerating the flow of capital to social good” – drew to a close last Friday in San Francisco, there was a prevailing sense of optimism and opportunity. Here are 7 hot topics people were discussing in the halls and along the breezy Bay side Fort Mason conference [...]

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The governments’ signals to markets and businesses is clear from Cancun, ‘don’t wait for us, get greening on your own.’ In a market that’s still ‘risky’ and under-capitalized and receiving conflicting signals from the government, it’s important to look at the market with respect to systems thinking. This is the position of Aquamarine, a wave [...]

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What gets measured gets managed, and good managers know how to achieve results. But if we are measuring the wrong thing, then the best we can hope for is to make big strides in the wrong direction, which is exactly what we have done.

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By Ted Ko Some recent writings by Jay Ogilvy (not yet published) on the opposing styles of systems thinking provide an enlightening philosophical framework behind the evolution of strategy theory and the successes and failures of corporate strategy development processes. Fundamentally, strategy design is a systems thinking exercise and executives would do well to understand [...]

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By David Jay During a recent lecture at the Presidio Graduate School’s MBA program my professor gave us a taste of systems thinking. In a PowerPoint slide with text too small to read, he showed us a nest of boxes and arrows, stocks and flows describing just a few of the millions of complicated relationships [...]

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