THE DRAX POWER STATION AND BIOMASS ENERGY case explores strategic decision making in the energy sector characterized by intensive government regulation and environmental sustainability concerns. The Drax facility was the largest electrical power plant in the United Kingdom, providing 7% of the country's electricity. It was also the largest coal-fired power producer - and therefore greenhouse gas emitter - in the UK. In response to governmental policy changes and rising concerns about climate change, Drax management began a conversion away from coal to a renewable source of energy, biomass and the plant quickly became the single largest biomass-powered facility in the country. The company was making expansive public claims that the plant was generating environmentally sustainable power, but the strategy was not without its critics. A growing set of experts were reconsidering the assertion that biomass was consistent with efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These shifts in scientific understanding and potentially policy threatened the long-term viability of the Drax biomass conversion strategy.

The Intel AI for Youth case tells the story of a global educational initiative spearheaded by Intel's public affairs group. Intel executives are seeking to establish artificial intelligence (AI) education and skilling programs for public school systems in international markets that are important to Intel's business. The key decision point of the case is how to bring a program that has already been successfully introduced in nine different countries to Intel's home market in the United States. Behind this core decision are the larger questions about the creating and capturing the value of corporate responsibility and sustainability initiatives. At the time of the case, Intel is making big bets on being a leader in the emerging AI economy, a market that some analysts see growing to nearly $16 trillion within this decade. If Intel can successfully capture a substantial portion of this growth, AI will be a major business line for the company. By analyzing the case, students discover the multiple ways that the AI for Youth initiative supports the development of this market and allows discussion of how Intel can benefit from its growth.

Conventional wisdom has held that business should keep a low profile on divisive political issues. Why risk drawing the ire of politicians, pundits, customers, shareholders or employees by wading into non-business concerns? And yet 72 per cent of Walmart customers now expect it to 'take a stand on important social issues' and 85 per cent agree that it should 'make it clear what values it stands for.' The paradigm is shifting, and in today's world, business leaders need to have expertise on both 'the gridiron' and 'the pitch'. The authors provide a 'playbook' for navigating this new territory, which includes empowering your team to communicate, adopting a readiness posture and playing the long game.

The case tells the story of Chris Freund, the co-founder of Mekong Capital, a Vietnam-based private equity firm established in 2001 when the country began its transition to a market-based economic model. Mekong initially focused its investment strategy on small and medium enterprises in the export manufacturing sector. However, over the first five years of the company's history, the investment strategy shifted to a greater focus on rapidly expanding consumer businesses to take advantage of the broad economic prosperity arising in the Vietnamese marketplace. Where most private capital firms added value through financial engineering or operational expertise, Mekong had taken a different tack, choosing to employ what it called Vision Driven Investing (VDI). At the core of the vision driven approach was what Mekong and its consulting partner, the Vanto Group, describe as "transformation." As Freund explained, "Where other PE firms choose to be really good at transactional stuff and deal making, that's not inspiring to us. It's fulfilling to add value to companies and see them empowered. It's adding value through transformation." Transformation describes a framework intended to foster high-performance leadership and organizational cultures in investee companies intended to produce breakthrough results. The case presents several examples of the transformational approach and opens opportunities to discuss its efficacy and broader applicability for organizational management and leadership.

The case presents the history of a socially innovative start-up restaurant business, Pixza, that was created as a mixed-motive firm with both internal business objectives and external economic, social and environmental objectives. Founded by the entrepreneur and case protagonist Alejandro Souza, Pixza planned to sell an original style of pizzas produced with locally grown, organic, and traditionally Mexican ingredients and flavors. At the same time, Pixza had a social purpose and was designed as a social reinsertion vehicle for the economically disadvantaged, providing psychological support and job training that permitted formerly homeless men to obtain an income, a residence and an opportunity to achieve personal independence. Alejandro Souza is one of the outstanding examples of social entrepreneurship in Mexico, with experience in designing and implementing projects around the world on issues of impact evaluation, international development and social innovation. The case catches up with Souza in 2017, when Pixza is running two locations in Mexico City and is putting in place a new iteration of its social empowerment program. The restaurants are a hit with locals and are seeing a huge demand and acceptance of the new pizza recipes like blue corn, huitlacoche and epazote. However, running the pizza business and managing the social reinsertion programs is taking a toll on the physical and emotional well-being of Alejandro. Despite the obvious success of the enterprise, the case begins with Alejandro confessing to a close friend that he intends to close the business.

The case presents a decision point in the development of the California-based Chopra Center from the considerations of the center's Chief Operating Officer. The center was founded in 1996 by the physician and author Dr. Deepak Chopra in partnership with Dr. David Simon with the goal of bringing the insights of a 5,000-year-old Indian healing tradition to modern medicine. Two decades on from its founding, the center is confronting important structural questions about its portfolio of customer offerings, the role that digitization of programs and marketing will play and how these questions will be informed by the center's commitment to its founding values.

This article applies the Biosphere Rules--a biomimicry-inspired management framework for circular economy initiatives--to the emerging field of additive manufacturing and three-dimensional (3D) Printing, which are revolutionizing industrial sectors from medical devices to spare parts. They are also potentially keys in the emergence of a true circular economy that will bring about environmentally sustainable manufacturing. This article lays out an established strategy that can guide managers and policy makers in pursuit of a cradle-to-cradle economy.

As the effects of climate change become more prominent, business needs to grapple with its own attitudes toward government. A more destructive physical environment requires a more nuanced relationship in which government is viewed as a partner in enabling and supporting markets rather than as a regulator that needs to be managed.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In the final report of our 8-year study of how corporations address sustainability, MIT Sloan Management Review and The Boston Consulting Group examine the crossroads at which sustainability now finds itself. Despite sociopolitical upheaval that threatens to reverse key gains, our research has shown that companies can develop workable -and profitable -sustainability strategies to reduce their impact on the global environment by incorporating 8 key lessons.

As evidence mounts that sustainability-related initiatives are key to a company's success over time, a growing number of investors are now paying close attention to environmental, social and governance ('ESG') metrics. That according to the authors, whose 2016 Global Executive Study showed that for a decisive majority of investors -more than 70 per cent of those surveyed- sustainability has become central to their investment decisions. With wide ranging examples from GE to Volkswagen to Mitsubishi, they show how leading companies are rising to the challenge.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Investors see a strong link between corporate sustainability performance and financial performance -so they're using sustainability-related data as a rationale for investment decisions like never before.

In virtually every industry, the focus of green competition is shifting from a race to launch new eco-friendly products to a battle over what constitutes a "green" product in the first place. The definition can vary from one sector or product to the next, but whatever your business, if you're not engaged in the debate and in shaping the rules, you risk being assessed against standards you can't meet. Once you understand what degree of standardization exists in your industry and what your company's internal capabilities are, you can choose from among four strategies the authors offer: adopt existing standards; co-opt them by negotiating beneficial modifications with a standard-setting body; define standards where none exist; or break away from the current standards by challenging and supplanting them. In the building sector, for example, LEED certification is considered definitive, so architects, construction companies, and office furnishings suppliers naturally choose to adopt LEED standards. But the coffee industry has more than a dozen competing standards, so Starbucks decided to create its own-the C.A.F.E. Practices.

Most companies know that they need to be greening their offerings-if not to gain advantage, then simply to keep up. In this article the authors offer a framework for embarking on the green-product development process, introducing three broad strategies that companies can use to align their green goals and capabilities. An "accentuate" strategy involves evaluating products in the company's current portfolio and playing up or extending latent or existing green attributes (as Arm and Hammer did when it repositioned its 150-year-old baking soda as "the #1 environmentally sensible alternative for cleaning and deodorizing"). An "acquire" strategy involves buying someone else's green brand-an approach used effectively by L'Oreal when it acquired The Body Shop, Unilever when it acquired Ben & Jerry's, and Colgate-Palmolive when it acquired Tom's of Maine. Finally, companies with innovation expertise can use an "architect" strategy, building green products from scratch, as Clorox did when it developed its celebrated Green Works line. Unruh and Ettenson offer case studies, outline benefits and hazards, and describe the optimal organizational and competitive circumstances for each strategy.