This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Despite the economic downturn and tenuous recovery, more than two-thirds of businesses are strengthening their commitment to sustainability, according to a new global study by MIT Sloan Management Review and the Boston Consulting Group, as reported in this article. The study found that 69% of companies surveyed plan to step up their investment in and management of sustainability this year. Just over one-quarter (26%) plan no change, and only 2% intend to cut back on their commitment. The study also found that a two-speed landscape is emerging, with a gap between sustainability "embracers"-those who place sustainability high on their agenda -and nonembracers or "cautious adopters,"who have yet to focus on more than energy cost savings, material efficiency and risk mitigation. Embracers are significantly more confident about their competitive position than nonembracers are. Seventy percent of embracers said they believe their organizations outperform industry peers. By contrast, only 53% of cautious adopters described themselves as outperformers, and 14% admitted to lagging behind peers -more than twice the percentage of embracers who made the same claim (6%). In addition, nearly three times as many embracers (two-thirds of them) as cautious adopters said that their organization's sustainability actions and decisions have increased their profits. "What's fascinating is that these findings depict a business landscape in general that's tilting hard toward where the embracers already are,"says Michael Hopkins, editor-in-chief of MIT SMR and a coauthor of the report. "So the embracers have handed us a kind of crystal ball. Their insights and behaviors suggest a blueprint for how management practice and competitive strategy will evolve." The report identifies seven specific practices exhibited by embracer companies, which together begin to define sustainability-driven management.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. To understand the challenges and opportunities associated with the use of business analytics, MIT Sloan Management Review, in collaboration with the IBM Institute for Business Value, conducted a survey of more than 3,000 business executives, managers and analysts from organizations located around the world. The survey was part of the 2010 New Intelligent Enterprise Global Executive Study and Research Project, which attempts to understand better how all organizations are trying to capitalize on information and apply analytics today and in the future. One of the most significant findings is that there is a clear connection between performance and the competitive value of analytics. Survey respondents who agreed that the use of business information and analytics differentiated them were twice as likely to be top performers. Three stages, or capability levels, of analytics adoption emerged from the research: aspirational, experienced and transformed. The article provides a comprehensive description of each, enabling organizations to identify where they fall in the continuum. In addition, the authors include suggestions for the best entry points and techniques for each level, and measures to avoid the most common pitfalls. Based on insights from the survey, case studies and interviews with experts, the authors also describe an emerging five-point methodology for successfully implementing analytics-driven management and rapidly creating value -as leading businesses are already managing to do. These include (1) focus on the biggest and highest data priorities, (2) within each of those priorities, start by asking questions, not by looking at the available data, (3) embed insights into business processes to make them more understandable and actionable, (4) keep existing capabilities and tools while adding new ones and (5) develop an overarching information agenda that enables decision making and strategy for the future.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Credit insurance and debt protection product seller Assurant Solutions ran a classic customer service call center -operationally optimized, "skills-routed,"managerially enlightened. But when it explored analytics-based approaches to rethinking how the center worked, a strange thing happened: The success rate for customer interactions tripled. According to Cameron Hurst, vice president of Targeted Solutions at Assurant, the result surprised them. "We learned that operational efficiency and those traditional metrics of customer experience like abandon rate, service levels and average speed to answer are not the things that keep a customer on the books."They found instead that technology could assist the company in retaining customers by leveraging the fact that some customer service reps are extremely successful at dealing with certain types of customers. Matching each specific in-calling customer to a specific customer service rep made a huge difference. Science and analytics couldn't quite establish why a particular rapport would be likely to happen, but they could look at past experience and predict with a lot of accuracy that a rapport would be likely to happen. In this SMR case-study interview, Hurst explains how Assurant Solutions figured out the right questions to ask, used analytics to focus on new ways to match customers with reps and figured out the best ways to solve the problem of conflicting goals.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. MIT Sloan Management Review's second annual Sustainability & Innovation survey -exploring the current and projected sustainability-related practices of organizations and executives -was fielded during a year of bad public news for sustainability advocates. Between last year's much-publicized delay in reaching an international agreement on climate change in Copenhagen and the continuing economic malaise, it was hard to predict how sustainability would fare as a management priority. Would companies begin to scale back their efforts to adopt more efficient business practices and become less focused on sustainability-related issues? Would they put existing programs on hold? What assessments would they make about the implications for managers of the changing sustainability landscape, and how were their strategic plans for competing in the future being affected by sustainability concerns? This article is a first look at the results of the 2010 Sustainability & Innovation Executive Study -focusing especially on 12 top-line observations drawn from the survey data and separate in-depth executive interviews. The survey respondents included more than 3,107 managers and executives, representing every major industry and region of the world. This article offers answers to such questions as, Where does sustainability now fit on top management's agenda? Do top-performing companies see things differently? Who drives the agenda within companies? What does the C-suite think? And how do top managers go about making sustainability-related investment decisions when tangible information for weighing costs and benefits is often lacking?

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. How are organizations attempting to compete on their ability to capture, analyze and act on information? How do you win with data and analytics? MIT Sloan Management Review conducted a global survey of nearly 3,000 executives to learn how they're turning the data deluge and analytics into competitive advantage -or trying to, anyway. The major comprehensive analysis is still to come, but in these two companion articles ("10 Insights"and "10 Data Points"), readers will find an early snapshot of how managers are answering the most important question organizations face. To answer that question, SMR has teamed with the IBM Institute for Business Value to build a new innovation hub and research program called "The New Intelligent Enterprise." Through the SMR and IBM IBV collaboration, The New Intelligent Enterprise aims to help managers understand how they can capitalize on the ways that information and analytics are changing the competitive landscape. What threats and opportunities will companies face? What new business models, organizational approaches, competitive strategies, work processes and leadership methods will emerge? How will the best organizations reinvent themselves to use technology and analytics to achieve novel competitive advantage? How will they learn not only to be smarter, but to act smarter?

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Sustainability is garnering ever-greater public attention and debate. However, the business implications of sustainability merit greater scrutiny-and scrutiny of a different kind than the "green"-oriented focus that's most common. Will sustainability change the competitive landscape and reshape the opportunities and threats that companies face? If so, how? How worried are executives and other stakeholders about the impact of sustainability efforts on the corporate bottom line? What -if anything -are companies doing now to capitalize on sustainability-driven changes? And what strategies are they pursuing to position themselves competitively for the future? To begin answering those questions, MIT Sloan Management Review and collaborator The Boston Consulting Group conducted in-depth interviews with more than 50 global thought leaders, followed by the Business of Sustainability Survey of more than 1,500 worldwide executives and managers about their perspectives on the intersection of sustainability and business strategy, including their assessments of how their own companies are acting on sustainability threats or opportunities right now. The study identifies three major barriers that impede decisive corporate action: a lack of understanding of what sustainability is and means to an enterprise; difficulty modeling the business case; and flaws in execution, even after a plan has been developed. The study also reveals that while novice practitioners think of sustainability mostly in environmental and regulatory terms, with any benefits stemming chiefly from brand or image enhancement, practitioners with more knowledge tend to consider the economic, social and even personal impacts of sustainability-related changes in the business landscape.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. MIT Sloan Management Review's first annual Business of Sustainability survey revealed much about what executives are thinking and doing about sustainability-driven concerns right now -as well as what's impeding their attempts both to capture opportunities and defend against threats. The most widely credited leading thinkers at the sustainability and management intersection, though, wanted to explore something else: the ways that many fundamental management and strategy practices will be transformed by the pressures that sustainability issues are already bringing to bear. This article identifies eight significant ways that current management expectations and practices will be affected by growing societal and economic understanding about sustainability. Among them: how labor productivity can be dramatically increased by sustainably designed workplaces; how companies "bump into" sustainability-related choices, even when they don't look for them; how a company's sustainability profile will become a proxy for the organization's overall management quality; how innovation results are improved by pursuit of sustainability-related outcomes; how sustainability efforts within an organization lead to more productive collaboration across typical organizational silos; and how transparency and trustworthiness will become increasingly consequential to competitive success.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. MIT Sloan Management Review's Business of Sustainability survey and thought leaders interview project identified numerous management challenges presented by the new competitive landscape that sustainability pressures is creating. Perhaps the biggest challenge, though, is how to build the "business case" for investing in a sustainability-related project -even when you believe that the project addresses a significant opportunity. What do executives need to know about sustainability as a business proposition? Interviewee Amory Lovins, co-founder of Rocky Mountain Institute, co-author of Natural Capitalism -Creating the Next Industrial Revolution and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," argues that executives labor under several pernicious misunderstandings about how sustainability affects business -the worst being that sustainability efforts have to cost a company, when in fact, says Lovins, they nearly always increase profits. How does one begin to build a persuasive business case for undertaking sustainability-related initiatives? Map your flows and costs of materials and energy, says Lovins; you will find fiscal "leaks" that can be fixed, with direct bottom-line benefits. He also points out numerous side benefits of sustainability-related efforts: gains in innovation, labor productivity and appeal as a collaboration partner. Those benefits, he argues, will exceed the direct ones.