Question:
Discuss about the Consequences of sustainable development for Business.
Answer:
Sustainable development has been beneficial for the environment and business firms. It creates a win-win situation for the society as well as the organization. Many companies have started adopting CSR in their strategies and they have changed their business approach to become more sustainable. The present report is based on the consequences of sustainable operations. Before reading this essay, my readers have positive views about sustainable development but after reading this essay they will be able to understand the ill effects of sustainable operations on the society as well as on the business organizations. The present report is based on surprising reversal strategy to provide a different view point about the subject.
Sustainability has been promoted across the globe and all the companies have started implemented it without considering its consequences. The main objective of sustainable strategy is to cause less harm to the environment and the community. The rights and interest of the people have to be protected (Alwan, Jones and Holgate, 2017). Even the government has been supporting it by improving transparency and reporting requirements. But they have not been able to understand the issues which are related to it. It is creating undue pressures of the business firms and such reinforcements have been pushing the ill-spending which are based on sustainable operations. It can be seen in the diagram below which shows the result of a research.
Figure 1: Sustainability pressure on businesses
Source: Sustainability Research, 2016
Sustainability makes it difficult for companies to survive and it causes harm to them. Even most of the sustainability is not economically viable. The government, community and local people are supporting it without understanding the economic fundamentals (Font, Elgammal and Lamond, 2017). It has resulted in negative market changes which are not beneficial for the organization. It not only increases their initial costs but they are not sure how it will improve their business in long term. Furthermore, investors and customers have inadequate information and knowledge about the firm’s internal processes. Similarly, it increases restrictions on the companies because it does not provide them with many alternatives to perform their activities efficiently. They have been only using to improve the image of the organization and to fulfill the requirements of the legislations (Bardos, 2016). These are vague goals which are not doing any good for the society and the environment. It is essential for the government to give freedom to the managers so that they can choose their own business methods and approaches. These movements are supported by some special interest groups who lack knowledge about the process in the business. People also follow the trend without understanding the ill effects (Ehnertnd & Muller-Camen, 2016). They have been following the trend of sustainability without using rational and economic fundamentals
It can be concluded that sustainability will only be beneficial for the organizations and environment if the business units are given more freedom to incorporate it. It is important to focus on rational decisions rather than trends and emotional connation. Manager should be allowed to understand the tradeoffs between different elements. It should be promoted but the consequences of undue pressure have to be understood. People should consider facts above thinking. It has been creating undue pressure on the companies which is causing harm. It is not doing any good for the environment. On the other hand, it has reduced efficiency, productivity and cost of operations.
REFERENCES
Alwan, Zaid, Paul Jones, and Peter Holgate. “Strategic sustainable development in the UK construction industry, through the framework for strategic sustainable development, using building information modelling.” Journal of Cleaner Production 140 (2017): 349-358.
Bardos, R. Paul, et al. “The rationale for simple approaches for sustainability assessment and management in contaminated land practice.” Science of the Total Environment 563 (2016): 755-768.
Ehnert, Ina, et al. “Reporting on sustainability and HRM: A comparative study of sustainability reporting practices by the world’s largest companies.” The International Journal of Human Resource Management 27.1 (2016): 88-108.
Font, Xavier, Islam Elgammal, and Ian Lamond. “Greenhushing: the deliberate under communicating of sustainability practices by tourism businesses.” Journal of Sustainable Tourism 25.7 (2017): 1007-1023.
Sustainability Research. 2016. [Online]. Available through: < http://sloanreview.mit.edu> [Accessed on 11th July 2017]
