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Watch Rebecca Henderson’s “Getting Unstuck: How to Promote More Sustainable Practices in Our Organizations” talk at MIT Sloan School of Management

All that’s required to achieve sustainability, says Rebecca Henderson, is to clean up your current operations and/or rethink the business. “That’s easy,” she says — with a smile. Henderson has spent much of her career trying to help firms embrace and survive such transformations. She and her colleagues have analyzed why businesses get stuck in their ways, and how they can break free to act boldly around the challenge and opportunity of sustainability […]

All that’s required to achieve sustainability, says Rebecca Henderson, is to clean up your current operations and/or rethink the business. “That’s easy,” she says — with a smile. Henderson has spent much of her career trying to help firms embrace and survive such transformations. She and her colleagues have analyzed why businesses get stuck in their ways, and how they can break free to act boldly around the challenge and opportunity of sustainability.

There’s no magic bullet for getting unstuck, and warns Henderson, whatever you do, don’t rely on vision models or simple blueprints for change. Rather, businesses must undergo a painful process of behavior change, “building muscle memory.” Henderson offers some tips for organizations to break out of ruts successfully. CEOs need to get a real fix on capacity (so they don’t throw one initiative after another at employees), and track performance historically. They must understand that significant change will be costly, and likely mean cutting out other projects – so perhaps “pick low-hanging fruit,” biting off “little chunks, addressing areas that make a big difference.” Managers must clearly state strategy and values, then live by them, and respond to problems as systems dynamics issues — “don’t beat up employees.”

Henderson acknowledges these strategies are “easy to put on a slide, but hard to do.” Yet she feels that if organizations develop the ability to have real conversations, put aside an exclusive focus on the current quarter in favor of the long-term health of the company, a focus on sustainability “gives us the emotional power and moral juice to do these things.”

How to Promote More Sustainable Practices in Our Organizations

“Getting Unstuck: How to Promote More Sustainable Practices in Our Organizations”

About Rebecca Henderson

Rebecca Henderson specializes in technology strategy. Her current research focuses upon the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. She received an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 1981 and a doctorate in Business Economics from Harvard University in 1988. She spent 1981″1983 working for the London office of McKinsey and Company. Her publications include “Underinvestment and Incompetence as Responses to Radical Innovation: Evidence from the Photolithographic Industry” in the Rand Journal of Economics, and “Architectural Innovation: The Reconfiguration of Existing Product Technologies and The Failure of Established Firms” with Kim Clark, in Administrative Science Quarterly. Henderson sits on the Board of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and on the Board of the Linbeck Corporation. She was recently retained by the Department of Justice as an Expert Witness in connection with the Remedies phase of the Microsoft case, and in 2001 was voted “Teacher of the Year” at MIT Sloan School of Management.Host(s): Sloan School of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management

via Getting Unstuck: How to Promote More Sustainable Practices in Our Organizations | MIT World.

By Itamar Medeiros

Originally from Brazil, Itamar Medeiros currently lives in Germany, where he works as VP of Design Strategy at SAP and lecturer of Project Management for UX at the M.Sc. Usability Engineering at the Rhein-Waal University of Applied Sciences .

Working in the Information Technology industry since 1998, Itamar has helped truly global companies in multiple continents create great user experience through advocating Design and Innovation principles. During his 7 years in China, he promoted the User Experience Design discipline as User Experience Manager at Autodesk and Local Coordinator of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) in Shanghai.

Itamar holds a MA in Design Practice from Northumbria University (Newcastle, UK), for which he received a Distinction Award for his thesis Creating Innovative Design Software Solutions within Collaborative/Distributed Design Environments.

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