Stuart L. Hart

Cornell University | CU · Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management

Business education should give students the skills to solve complex global challenges. It should align management practices with goals for a sustainable future. Sadly, few management schools even discuss the real issues business leaders face today. This article challenges others to develop a curriculum that embeds sustainability in the core of thei...

The past 15 years have witnessed an exponential growth in business activities aimed at serving the needs and increasing the well-being of disenfranchised individuals in low-income communities. Thousands of new business initiatives, development institution programs, and innovative investment funds focused on poverty alleviation have emerged during t...

This PDW analyzes an important key question on, how to design a Base of the Pyramid (BoP) enterprise that incorporates the realities of the poor and the expectations of key stakeholders? To answer this question, this PDW proposes to share and present a new and innovative simulation that aims to facilitate hearing the voices of the BoP and other key...

Revisiting the historical evolution of the corporation helps explain how the challenge of sustainability has been addressed in business education. Business schools emerged toward the end of the 19th century after U.S. Supreme Court judgments absolved corporate directors from the duty of adhering to social missions embodied in their limited liabilit...

Capitalism is at a crossroads and the challenges for management in the 21st century are manifold. From climate change, to increasing inequity, social exclusion, poverty and decreasing social trust in business, many agree that managers are witnessing a perfect storm. While many scholars posit that business needs to be rethought and reenacted, in thi...

The authors revisit Hart’s natural-resource-based view (NRBV) of the firm and summarize progress that has been made in testing elements of that theory and reevaluate the NRBV in light of a number of important developments that have emerged in recent years in both the resource-based view literature and in research on sustainable enterprise. First, t...

The money economy, the traditional economy, and nature's economy—the three components of the global economy—are overlapping, interdependent, and on a collision course that can only be avoided through sustainable practices. Sustainability offers substantial business opportunities in developed, emerging, and traditional markets, but what works in one...

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/35684/2/b1798303.0001.001.pdf http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/35684/1/b1798303.0001.001.txt

OVERVIEW: Nearly 41/2 billion people, all over the world, earn less than three dollars a day. These are largely rural, largely uneducated - but not stupid - individuals whom we do not understand and on whom corporations have never seriously tried to focus. The assumption has always been that this is a market for governments or the not-for-profit se...

This paper describes the introduction of ‘ustainability’ as a novel strategic paradigm to senior executive learning. Specifically, we describe the Sustainable Enterprise Academy, an executive education initiative founded by the Schulich School of Business at York University (Canada) with the active support of a number of academic collaborators, fiv...

Capitalism is indeed at a crossroads, facing international terrorism, worldwide environmental change, and an accelerating backlash against globalization. Companies areï¾ atï¾ crossroads, too: finding new strategies for profitable growth is now more challenging. Both sets of problems are intimately linked. Learn how to identify sustainable products...

Apesar da recente disseminação do discurso da sustentabilidade, grande parte dos executivos ainda considera o desenvolvimento sustentável uma espécie de mal necessário, uma vez que envolve regulações, custos e responsabilidades onerosas. Este artigo apresenta um modelo complexo e multifacetado de criação de valor para os acionistas que leva em cont...

This paper studies a new frontier in the understanding of International Strategy (IS). To explore it, we propose the analogy of the ecology of firms and places as a way to emphasize that the real problem is the colocation of different places with different types of firms. Locations are in fact the distinctive content of International Business Strat...

In a connected world, remote groups at the fringe of a firm's current operations can find common cause, exerting increasing pressure and calling into question the firm's legitimacy and right to operate - witness the recent debacles involving Monsanto, Shell, and Nike. Moreover, the knowledge needed to generate competitive imagination and to manage...

With established markets becoming saturated, multinational corporations (MNCs) have turned increasingly to emerging markets (EMs) in the developing world. Such EM strategies have been targeted almost exclusively at the wealthy elite at the top of the economic pyramid. Recently, however, a number of MNCs have launched new initiatives that explore th...

This paper is based on a panel we organized at the "First Annual Conference on Emerging Research Frontiers in International Business Studies", organized by the Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS), to discuss several new lines of research in international strategy. Four lines of research are developed: The strategic implications of semi...

Just as the creation of shareholder value requires performance on multiple dimensions, the global challenges associated with sustainable development are also multifaceted, involving economic, social, and environmental concerns. Indeed, these challenges have implications for virtually every aspect of a firm's strategy and business model. Yet, most m...

As multinationals unrelentingly seek new growth to satisfy shareholders, they increasingly hear concerns from many quarters about environmental degradation, labor exploitation, cultural hegemony and local autonomy. What is to be done? Must corporations' thirst for growth and profits serve only to exacerbate the antiglobalization movement? On the co...

This article is based on a 1998 working paper from the authors. It was originally published in Strategy+Business n. 26, first quarter 2002, and is one of the basis for the CK Prahalad best seller of the same title. Tha article argues about the possibility and opportunity to transform the bottom of the pyramid market in a profitable market.

A key reason national economies rise and fall these days is their ability to nurture "disruptive technologies"--innovations that lead to new classes of products that are cheaper, better, and more convenient than their predecessors. America's ability to exploit disruption has led to its recent boom, while Japan's failure to do so has led to stagnati...

We developed a new framework for defining sustainable forest management (SFM) based on the literature on environmental strategy and a field study of forest-product companies. We applied the framework to 21 forest-industry business cases and found that a comprehensive and effective SFM approach meshes operations with strategic purpose. When SFM prac...

DRAFT: Not for citation or distribution without the permission of the authors July, 2000 t is tragic that as a society we have implicitly assumed that the rich will be served by the corporate sector (MNCs) and governments or NGOs will protect the poor and the environment. This implicit divide is stronger than most realize. Managers in MNCs, public...

Most large corporations developed in an era of abundant raw materials, cheap energy, and limitless sinks for waste disposal. It has become increasingly clear that many technologies developed during this earlier peiod contribute to the destruction of the ecological systems on which the global economy depends. In the absence of dramatic change, few w...

Arguments can be made on both sides of the question of whether a stringent, global corporate environmental standard represents a competitive asset or liability for multinational enterprises (MNEs) investing in emerging and developing markets. This paper seeks to answer this question by analyzing the global environmental standards of a large sample...

Reputations rise and fall. In this Part of the Corporate Reputation Review attention focusses on companies whose star is waning. The presentations made at the Stern School of Business conference and now published below comprise a distillation of the insights gained by a senior crisis-management practitioner, as well as three case studies and three...

This article develops a framework for studying cross-functional teams in organizations that focuses on three domains: organizational context, internal process, and outcome measures. The framework was developed from qualitative data from over 200 individual and group interviews, written descriptions, and team observations. We then operationally defi...

This paper explores the relationship between organizational context and the interpretation of strategic issues by examining the hypothesis that CEOs' interpretations of foreign investment in the USA are influenced by the organizational context in which they are embedded. Three aspects of organizational context - the global business experience of th...

Evidence can be marshalled to support either the view that pollution abatement is a cost burden on firms and is detrimental to competitiveness, or that reducing emissions increases efficiency and saves money, giving firms a cost advantage. In an effort to resolve this seeming paradox, the relationship between emissions reduction and firm performanc...

How can executives achieve a match between expected external environmental conditions and internal organizational capabilities that facilitates improved performance? This paper argues that a firm's choice of ‘reference points’ can help achieve strategic alignment capable of yielding improved performance and potentially even a sustainable competitiv...

218 p., tabl. In today's fast-paced, competitive environment, technology can no longer only be the province of engineers and R&D managers: it must become a central component of the strategy-making process. Accordingly, this book seeks to facilitate the integration of technological concerns into the business strategies of organizations. Richly illus...

Historically. management theory has ignored the constraints imposed by the biophysical (natural) environment. Building upon resource-based theory, this article attempts to fill this void by proposing a natural-resource-based view of the firm-a theory of competitive advantage based upon the firm's relationship to the natural environment. It is compo...

Corporate industrial activities of the past are environmentally unsustainable. Many of today's environmental crises are rooted in an unsustainable pattern of industrialization. Sustainable economic development can be ushered in only if corporations, the main economic engines of the future, are made environmentally sound. This can be facilitated thr...

Strategy-making is usually portrayed in dichotomous terms: rational vs. incremental, or formulation vs. implementation. It may, however, be more valid to think of organizations as entities capable of developing resources and skills in multiple strategy-making process modes. This paper first develops measures to identify firms with different levels...

Environmentalism will be one of the most potent forces of economic, social, and political change in this decade. By the year 2000, organizations and organizational theory will need to transform themselves dramatically to accommodate environmental concerns. Despite the rise of environmentalism over the last two decades, organizations and organizatio...

This paper develops a model of executive leadership consisting of four competing roles: Vision Setter, Motivator, Analyzer, and Task Master. These four roles are operationalized and hypotheses are then tested concerning their relationships to three dimensions of firm performance using data collected from a sample of 916 top managers. Results sugges...

This paper develops a model of executive leadership consisting of four competing roles: Vision Setter, Motivator, Analyzer, and Task Master. These four roles are operationalized and hypotheses are then tested concerning their relationships to three dimensions of firm performance using data collected from a sample of 916 top managers. Results sugges...

Most prior literature on strategy making has focused on a limited set of themes (e.g., rationality) or actors (e.g., top managers). Resulting typologies have, therefore, tended to be incomplete or overlapping. None have captured the full range of content associated with the phenomenon. In response, this article offers an integrative framework consi...

This paper examines business location preferences according to two characteristics of the firm-age and size. CEOs of 636 firms in Michigan's "Automation Alley" provided data on their organization's location criteria, age and size. Firms defined by size exhibited the most striking differences on 10 indices of locational preference; firms defined by...

While the study of mature organizations and bureaucracies is well established, there has been comparatively little examination of the creation and development of new organizations. What work has been done is highly fragmented, primarily by discipline, and concentrates on different facets of a complex phenomenon. Following a literature review and cl...

The combined effect of increasing problem complexity and growing demand for participation in decisions has forced policymaking and decision making in organizations to become less an analytic endeavor and more a process of "knowledge management ' This requires an intermediarv to mediate among conflicting perspectives and integrate the different form...

The development and use of decision techniques on the one hand, and the conduct of empirically-based social and behavioral research on the other, have proceeded in virtual isolation from one another. Each stream of activity, however, does share one feature in common: they both lack a framework or set of contingency principles for organizing their p...

While most organizational and social decision making is done in a group or collective mode, there are few guides or evaluative criteria for judging when a high-quality outcome has been reached. Most past studies of group decision making have been conducted in laboratories using student subjects and factual problems with correct answers as means for...

Increasingly, the issues and problems faced by organizations seem to defy resolutions by the traditional decision tools and techniques developed over the past 30 years (primarily in the fields of operations research and quantitative modeling). These techniques were designed to solve well-defined problems that occur repeatedly in the management of o...

Writers on group decision making stress the importance of interaction during the evaluation and synthesis of ideas, but pay little attention to the structuring of ideas into organized and interrelated sets, despite the importance of such structuring for reducing the complexity group members must handle. A tool for structuring ideas, consensus mappi...

As Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) become increasingly important in the policymaking process, it is vital that they be as complete and accurate as possible. The authors of this volume consider ways in which the development and evaluation of scientific and technical information for EIS can be improved. Addressing key legal, social, political,...

The Federal Photovoltaics Utilization Program(FPUP) was established in 1978 with the belief that getting photovoltaic cells into the market was a “bootstrap problem” - one of eliminating market uncertainties through federal procurements to enable investments in improved production processes. A lack of clearly defined program objectives and expected...

This study addresses the growing need for techniques and approaches which aid in formulating and shaping complex, strategic problems emerging from increasingly turbulent environments. The research has three objectives: (1) to frame the overall strategic problem; (2) to describe an emerging "eight-step approach" (ESA) to such problems; and (3) to ev...

The year 2008 will come to be recognized as the turning point. Beginning that year, a series of crises gripped the planet—the oil price spike, the world food shortage, the sub-prime debacle, and finally, the global financial meltdown. Add these crises to the already long list of on-going mega-problems—melting glaciers, climate change, loss of biodi...

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Michigan, 1996. Includes bibliographical references (p. 98-100). Faculty advisor: Stuart L. Hart. "May 1996."

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan, 1983. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 273-286). Microfiche of typescript.

Los 4.000 millones de pobres, que pueden convertirse en consumidores constituyen el gran desafio y la gran oportunidad de las empresas multinacionales. El requisito es desarrollar una estructura comercial que se ajuste a sus necesidades. Los autores recomiendan la creación de alianzas con gobiernos y ONGs