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This case focuses on an opportunity that American Electric Power (AEP) has to invest, with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), in one of the world's first projects for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). The proposed plan was to protect 812,000 hectares of rich, biologically diverse forest land, known as Bosque Rojo, in central Peru. This project would address the two issues targeted by REDD by ending both deforestation from the local communities' conversion of land from forest to farmland and forest degradation from commercial logging. REDD projects offered a substantial opportunity to mitigate climate change, as deforestation and forest degradation contributed approximately 15-20 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Protecting Bosque Rojo could prevent the release of millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2). The project partners and investors would obtain certified offset credits equivalent to the reduction in emissions over the 30-year project lifetime. Among U.S. power companies, AEP had one of the highest levels of CO2 emissions. It estimated its 2009 emissions would reach 150M metric tonnes. With climate change legislation on the horizon, it wanted to set an example for Congress to show that REDD offsets could lead to cost-effective reduction in GHG emissions, and also gain experience in the international REDD scene. AEP expected to have to substantially reduce its own emissions (e.g. by substituting wind power for coal in electricity generation) or obtain offset credits either on the open market or through direct participation in external emission reduction projects. AEP believed that REDD projects would be much cheaper than any of its other options to obtain offset credits. To confirm this belief, the company needed to calculate a net present value (NPV) for the project, understand the project's risks, and determine if Bosque Rojo was, indeed, the best use of company funds.

The case puts students in the position of a young analyst working for a Chicago-based student housing developer. The premise is that the analyst, Tricia, must prepare a report for the firm's partners detailing her recommendations regarding a variety of green upgrades for a potential value-added acquisition project. The redevelopment project is based on two multifamily student housing redevelopment projects in Denton, Texas (led by Iconic Development). The case focuses solely on the operating expense reduction that took place at the property and does not address potential changes to property revenues.

Green retailing, generally viewed as the incorporation of environmental protection measures into retail operations, has become a common phenomenon. Despite an increasing interest among practitioners, there is a lack of understanding about what green retailing is and what the success factors are for its implementation. This article examines the practices of leading green retailers, shedding light on the different coordinator roles of retailers between suppliers and customers in greening their value chains. It identifies three broad dimensions of green retailing-internal-improvement, external-coordination, and supportive-development-and notes the critical capabilities required for firms to achieve success. It also presents a strategy loop with practical steps to help retailing executives incorporate green practices.

A practical framework for evaluating the ethical dimensions of a proposed course of action for managers and executives.

The case focuses on how Pratham, a non-governmental organization, provided quality education to underprivileged children in India by collaborating with the government. It focuses on the problem Madhav Chavan, the founder, is trying to solve, the contributing factors that have caused this problem not to be solved till now, Madhav's theory of change, questions about whether these activities (inputs) will affect the outputs and have an impact, what will it take and how will we know if Pratham is successful, and recommendations about what Madhav should do next.

Recent corporate scandals highlight that an exclusive focus on financial performance, to the exclusion of broader stakeholder-related performance criteria, can be detrimental to overall firm value creation. Among the ways to enhance leaders' focus on stakeholder value creation is the development and executive championing of an effective code of ethics. Such "Ethics Code Commitment" (ECC)-which incorporates characteristics of the code and behaviors by top management-affects a broad number of organizational stakeholders, yielding value for them, thus increasing their psychological and/or financial commitment to the organization while strengthening the firm's corporate culture. This article develops a model highlighting the various benefits of ECC to key stakeholders and the subsequent effects on an organization's culture and competitiveness. In particular, we focus on the need to include community leaders and key employees in the ethics code development process; the importance of moving away from a purely legalistic document to one that inspires stakeholders; the importance of linking ethics to strategy; and managerial approaches that can enhance the effectiveness of the code of ethics through ethics-related dialog. When developed and implemented correctly, ECC can prove to be an important source of competitive advantage via the effects it has on relationships between the firm and key stakeholders.

This case discussed an innovative for-profit social venture that connects talented artisans in developing nations with customers worldwide. Though raised in the US, co-founders and lifelong friends Roberto Milk, Andy Milk, and Charles Hachtmann have always been exposed to global influences. All three grew up with family from other countries. All three traveled a great deal in their youth. All three were multilingual. Similarly, all three were surrounded by people whose life mission was to make a positive social contribution. When Roberto meets his future mother-in-law, Armenia Nercessian de Oliveira, a professor and UN employee who has dedicated her life to helping others across the globe, the stage is set to launch NOVICA. While Roberto has an entrepreneurial vision about which he is passionate, he is also a thoughtful and patient leader. With NOVICA, he first builds, over the course of a decade, an executive team composed of his family and friends; then develops the most critical operational components of the organization; and finally scales the business to profit. The case ends with Roberto and his team facing a critical decision about how at last to propel the company from slow to rapid and substantial growth. By 2009, NOVICA has reached $15 million in annual revenue, helped better the lives of more than 75,000 artisans and their dependents worldwide, and retained the tight-knit founding team of its earliest days. The founders, however, want NOVICA to be a truly global presence, offering help in new parts of the world, in new ways - bringing in $100 million annually and benefiting at least 1,000,000 people. The case allows students to explore the role of profit and the centrality of sound business fundamentals in the context of doing good. It also motivates consideration of the prerequisites for and possible paths to organizational growth - asking what criteria should be considered in making growth decisions and what sorts of growth strategies are appropriate.

The Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), Bob Joss, must decide whether to make the school's new campus LEED certified. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and was an environmental certification awarded by the U.S. Green Building Council. LEED was a system where projects earned points for satisfying specific green building criteria. In addition to the added cost of making the campus LEED certified, which was thought to be around $11 million, but was very hard to estimate, Joss had to take into consideration the differing opinions of the school's faculty, alumni, students and administration. While many of the school's alumni and students were in favor of the certification, faculty tended to be against it. Stanford's administration was decidedly against pursuing LEED certification. There were several arguments for pursuing LEED certification. First, the GSB would take a leadership position in sustainability, which would teach students about the importance of the role of sustainability in business and serve as a model for the business community. It would also give the GSB a competitive advantage in attracting students to the school. There were also arguments against pursuing LEED certification. Would the environmental concerns be put ahead of practical day-to-day operational functionality, such as having sufficient light and air conditioning? Some felt that the LEED system itself was flawed, with a rigid point system, which they believed counted nominal environmental improvements rather than real ones. Also, Stanford's administration argued that the school had its own set of sustainability standards which were strict, yet more suited for campus buildings than the LEED system.

This case focuses on Gas Natural BAN's network expansion project to provide natural gas to five low-income neighborhoods in the suburban area of Buenos Aires. It shows how a business model evolved to serve low-income sector (henceforth, LIS) customers, and, more particularly, it describes how the company partnered with a local CSO, Fundación Pro Vivienda Social (Foundation for Social Housing, henceforth FPVS), and learned how to work with these communities in a project carried out in Moreno's Cuartel V. Starting with the project carried out with FPVS, the company had begun to pursue natural gas network expansion projects for LIS neighborhoods with a business approach that differed from the scheme used with conventional customers. At the juncture depicted by this case, the company needs to set the guidelines for its natural gas network expansion strategy targeting LIS neighborhoods. Gas Natural BAN's experience with FPVS, though viewed as successful by the company, registered some inefficiencies that prevented its large-scale application and led management to look for new options to pursue its LIS strategy. As a result, the FPVS collaboration model and its potential for optimization were questioned. It was also questionable whether the scheme used by FPVS in Moreno's Cuartel V would be applicable to other neighborhoods with different conditions. This teaching case deals primarily with the development of inclusive business models based on cross-sector collaborations involving companies, nonprofits and citizens. It may be used in graduate courses on Business and Society, Corporate Social Responsibility or Business Strategy including BOP issues.

A brutal winter storm hits the Baltic Sea region, felling 200 million trees and leaving forest owners and lumber industry competitors devastated. The chairman and majority owner of a large private timber mill in Sweden needs an action plan to pull through the disaster quickly-before the felled timber rots. Will they be able to rescue the timber? How shall his business react to the sudden oversupply? How will the exponentially increased supply be absorbed? What will the short- and long-term effects of the storm be on the timber markets? This case was developed for use in a first-year marketing class on balancing needs, interests, and responsibilities. The material would also work in a class on crisis management.

This three-part case study presents the initial problem, the thinking, the politics, and the design negotiations that produced New York City's "NYC Acquisition Fund" in August 2006. The case concludes with a brief round-up of performance data and commentary from the Fund's first two and a half years of operation. The NYC Acquisition Fund was created to deliver loans to small and nonprofit affordable housing developers, allowing them to compete with market-rate developers to buy property in New York City on the open market at a time of rampant speculation, rapidly rising prices, and fierce competition. It represented a groundbreaking effort to use public sector funds and authority, together with foundation capital, to leverage hundreds of millions of dollars in loan capital from private lenders. In September 2008, the Fund was named a winner of the annual Innovations in American Government competition, sponsored by the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, which declared it a "national model." HKS Case Number 1907.0

In 2004 Washington Mutual (WaMu) was touted by the business press as one of the most customer-focused, innovative, community-friendly, employee-loyal, and shareholder-enriching retail banks in the United States. Its stock reached $46.18 in May 2006, an almost 60% increase since 2001. CEO Kerry Killinger was lionized. By late 2008, however, WaMu's stock had plummeted to 16 cents as it became infamous as the largest bank failure in U.S. history. Relying on publicly available published sources, the case documents eroding focus on customers, excessive risks in subprime mortgages, alleged unethical pressure on mortgage officers to approve bad loans, attempts by the CEO to retain his job, and the eventual termination of the CEO, sale of the company to Chase, and destruction of all shareholder value. Whereas the (A) case documents WaMu's formula for success, the (B) case challenges readers to discover the seeds of destruction in the company's leadership, culture, incentives, and human resource policies and practices. WaMu's death contains some hard lessons of the danger of success and pride.

Unlike conventional supply chains, green supply chains are designed to ensure that value creation, rather than risk and waste, accumulates at each step, from design to disposal and recovery. As a primer, this note is suitable for undergraduate, MBA, or executive students exploring corporate response to environmental degradation, rising energy and materials prices, and the growing challenges of international global supply chains. Managing complex relationships and flows of materials across companies and cultures poses a key challenge for green supply chains. But "greening" a supply chain nets many benefits.

This case covers the coal industry and clean coal initiatives in the Unites States and China. Coal is a crucial source of global energy, but coal-fired plants are environmentally unfriendly and are a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. One way to reduce emission is through clean coal technologies, a term which usually refers to Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), also referred to as Carbon Capture and Sequestration. CCS projects around the world are in the pilot and planning stage. The U.S. government has become involved in promoting clean coal technology by setting aside $3.4 billion for CCS projects through the Department of Energy. One billion of that will go toward a troubled CCS project called "FutureGen" in Illinois, and the government is trying to put together a group of 20 private companies to invest in the project in order for it to move forward. Private Companies, such as American Electric Power Company and Duke Energy are also working on their own individual CCS pilot projects. The Chinese government has also gotten involved in promoting clean coal technologies by dedicating billions of dollars to technology development and joining with private companies on CCS projects, the most notable of which is GreenGen. Seventy percent of China's energy comes from coal, as well as eighty percent of its electricity. The case also looks at the arguments and impact of environmentalists on the adoption of clean coal technologies. Environmentalists, most notably former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, believe that clean coal is a myth and have been lobbying against clean coal and coal in general.

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.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In 1994, when Interface Inc.'s founder and CEO Ray Anderson began to think about his legacy, it made him uneasy. Deep down, Anderson realized that the business model of the commercial carpet manufacturing company he had founded 20 years before was based on "digging up the earth and turning petroleum and other materials into polluting products that ended up in landfills"-not something he wanted his grandchildren and great-grandchildren to remember him by. So at age 60 Anderson broke with the old model and began anew. Standing up to naysayers (whose ranks included associates, suppliers and Wall Street analysts), he set out to transform Interface from a traditional business built on consumption and waste to one whose focus -that is, beyond profitable growth -would be zero waste and restoring the earth. Since the start of the journey, Anderson and his associates have confronted technical barriers that no one could have anticipated. But inch by inch, kilowatt-hour by kilowatt-hour, recycled pound of carpet by recycled pound of carpet, Anderson's vision has moved closer to reality. In addition to becoming increasingly efficient in its energy and materials usage -for example, 89% of Interface's global electricity and 28% of its total energy come from renewable sources -Interface prides itself on its ability to turn an increasingly large percentage of its carpet into new product. It is also proud of the influence its sustainability efforts are having on other companies. This article presents a timeline showing how Anderson's "mental model" changed and how he and his company moved along the road to sustainability.

This case fits with courses that have a focus on environmental sustainability and systems thinking, which help students conceptualize and formulate policy recommendations in industries dependent on the conservation of natural resources. Students are asked to construct a stock-flow map that depicts the interactions between markets, pricing, production, policy, and environment impacts. Class discussion explores stakeholder perspectives and compares student maps to an actual map constructed by a consultant working in the shrimp industry. Followed by a B case [OM-1389] and a systems simulation model available for further exploration of the issues surrounding the design and testing of policy to improve industry performance.

This case is appropriate for courses that focus on the areas of environmental sustainability and systems thinking. Students explore how the structure and information flows in the shrimp industry can create boom and bust performance. Key decision-making policies by industry participants and public administrators are designed and tested for improving industry performance through an in-class simulation. The A case (UV3569) serves as background.