Read The Sustainable Way

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Follow a chief executive as understanding is developed of how to deal with sustainability issues in the business.

Learn about those cultural issues that need to be sorted out for a sustainability change to take place.

This easily read story will help you to understand how to deal with sustainability issues.

Dealing with sustainability properly invariably requires change. Some organisations get on with implementing and executing change, while others never seem to get started. In The Sustainable Way, Dr Lionel Boxer demonstrates how those businesses that do succeed at dealing with sustainability issues make it happen.

His simple framework to articulate what leaders need to do has been developed from observing CEOs who are known for dealing effectively with sustainability issues.

The Sustainable Way has condensed a very important message into an easily absorbed novel. The idea of aligning culture by adjusting several components seems almost too simple, but this is what Dr Boxer has observed CEOs doing across disparate organisations. If you need to deal with sustainability issues you need to understand the implications of The Sustainable Way.

The challenge we all face is to achieve a balance and truly travel the sustainable journey. That is, follow The Sustainable Way.

The objectives of The Sustainable Way:

• Help people to understand how to deal with sustainability issues
• Initiate positive discourse about sustainability
• Applying knowledge about yourself and others

Discursive action, or conversation takes place in every social encounter. Through conversation individuals define themselves and others. Every encounter alters this definition and alters each individual’s knowledge and sense of truth. Individuals evolve as a moral agent with changes in the knowledge they develop and their perception of truth.

Discursive action is made up of three mutually supportive components.

1. Each individual brings themselves (their position) to the conversation
2. There is a story line, along which each individual participates
3. Various speech acts are made by each individual.

The aggregate of all conversations creates an underlying mood of an organisation, which in turn creates a field of power. That field of power enables or obstructs initiatives such as sustainability to be dealt with effectively.

Discursive action occurs in a culture that is defined by the intersection of four mutually interdependent components. These components produce an underlying mood, and are here referred to as:

1. The Local System of Rights: - What people think they can and cannot do.
2. Duties and Obligations: - What people perceive they are responsible to perform.
3. The Local Moral Order: - What guides actions of those in the organisation.
4. Public and Private Actions: - The actions engaged in by people in the organisation.

To effectively deal with sustainability issues, it is necessary to align these four interdependent components of your organisation’s collective conscious. This is done through appropriate focussed discourse to alter the underlying mood.

The Sustainable Way turns theory into practice.

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