Leadership for the Sustainability Transition

• Published date: 01 June 2017
• Date: 01 June 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/basr.12116
• Author: Matt Mayberry,William Throop

Leadership for the

Sustainability Transition

WILLIAM THROOP AND MATT MAYBERRY

ABSTRACT

Society is looking to business to help solve our most com-

plex environmental and social challenges as we transition

to a more sustainable economic model. However, without

a fundamental shift in the dominant virtues that have

influenced business decision making for the past 150

years to a new set of dominant virtues that better fit

today’s environment, it will be more natural for compa-

nies to resist the necessary changes than to find the

opportunities within them. We use the term “virtues”

quite broadly to describe dispositions to think, feel and

act in skillful ways that promote the aims of a practice.

Addressing this deeper level of cultural change is essen-

tial to cultivating new instinctive behavior in business

decision making. In this article, we describe five clusters

of virtues that facilitate effective response to the transition

challenges—adaptive, collaborative, frugality, humility,

and systems virtues. To illustrate the application of these

virtues, we present a detailed case study of Green Moun-

tain Power, a Vermont electric utility that has embraced

the shift to renewable energy and smart-grid technology,

and is creating an innovative business model that is

William Throop is a Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at the Green Mountain

College, Poultney, VT. E-mail: throopw@greenmtn.edu. Matt Mayberry is President of Whole-

Works, Manchester, VT. E-mail: mayberry@wholeworks.com.

V

C2017 W. Michael Hoffman Center for Business Ethics at Bentley University. Published by

Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington

Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.

Business and Society Review 122:2 221–250

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disrupting the industry. After distilling key findings from

the case, we outline an approach to leadership develop-

ment that can help accelerate the infusion of transitional

virtues across an organization.

LEADERSHIP FOR THE SUSTAINABILITY TRANSITION

Business is in the midst of a great transition—one similar in

scope to the industrial and digital revolutions. This sus-

tainability transition is driven in part by the need to adjust

to planetary limits, but also by opportunities presented by an

evolving global economic system that is highly sensitive to disrup-

tive social dynamics. Business leaders face a complex tangle of eco-

nomic, social, and environmental challenges that require deep

changes in operations and organizational culture. To use Ronald

Heifetz’ language, today’s greatest social challenges are not so

much technical problems as they are adaptive challenges where

the “problem definition is not clear-cut, and technical fixes are not

available.”

1

For businesses to flourish, leaders will need to behave

in new ways consistent with a finite, complex, uncertain, changing,

collaborative, connected, and caring world.

This will require a shift in the dominant virtues that characterize

most corporate cultures today. We use the term “virtues” quite

broadly to describe dispositions to think, feel and act in skillful

ways that promote the aims of a practice. Although the term

“virtue” sometimes connotes only moral habits, we use it in Aristo-

tle’s sense which focuses on cognitive/behavioral skills rooted in a

deep understanding of a practice. Companies often identify core

competencies they want employees to have. Competency models

used in talent development represent a model of effective perfor-

mance that helps an organization achieve its goals.

2

If competen-

cies are interpreted as involving more than discrete skills, and

including patterns of thought, feeling, and motivation embedded in

enduring character traits, then competencies approximate virtues.

Virtues, however, generally have a broader range of applicability

(across a range of business and personal contexts), they tend to be

mutually reinforcing and embedded in a worldview. Aristotle

argued that manifesting the excellences associated with being

222 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW