Andrew Winston
Author & Founder
Winston Eco-Strategies
COP21: A View from Paris
Organizational Change / The Conference of the Parties … COP21 … the climate conference … or just “Paris,” as in “What’s going to happen in Paris?” - 7 years ago
How Target Is Taking Sustainable Products Mainstream (and Working with Walmart)
Collaboration / For years, the answer to the question “Do people really want to buy more sustainable products?” was a profound “sort of.” Surveys consistently show that we aspire to buy responsibly, and we even say we’ll pay more for environmental or socially preferable products. But purchase intent does not always translate to real sales, and companies have often struggled to make sustainable products more mainstream. - 8 years ago
Making a 'Big Pivot' to Sustainability Will Require a Cultural Evolution
Leadership / Last year, Andrew Winston stood on the main stage at SB ’14 San Diego and called for the business world to make a “Big Pivot” — away from ecologically harmful practices and toward a sustainable future. - 8 years ago
Why Business Culture Should Be the Ultimate Aim of Sustainability Leaders
Organizational Change / Business schools play a critical role in society.They support the continual evolution of our economies, the industries that shape them, the people that lead them, and the thinking behind it all.But it’s not just a role. It’s also a responsibility.In today’s hotter, scarcer, and more open world (to borrow from Andrew Winston’s The Big Pivot), that responsibility is greater than ever. More than at any other time in history, humanity is collectively aware of its impact on the planet. We know that our current actions, if left unchecked, will lead to unknown disruptions of life on earth. - 8 years ago
Winston, Desso, Coke Explore Ways to Reimagine Business on #SB14sd Day Two
Business Case / The second day of SB '14 San Diego kicked off with a morning full of inspirational plenary presentations examining how we can reimagine business to become a positive global force.Gil Friend, Chief Sustainability Officer at City of Palo Alto, gave the opening remarks, reminding attendees of how the US transformed itself during the Second World War to respond to problems that would not wait. Friend suggested that the several social and environmental issues currently afflicting our planet represent a call to action to transform our economy just like our forebears did. - 9 years ago
Big, Science-Based PivotGoals: A Dialogue with Jeff Gowdy (#SustyGoals 9)
New Metrics / In conjunction with the publication of his new book, The Big Pivot, Andrew Winston partnered with sustainability consultant and Vanderbilt University business professor Jeff Gowdy to create the PivotGoals website, a database tracking thousands of corporate sustainability goals and targets. - 9 years ago
How CEOs Can Save the World from Global Warming
Leadership / The business world is waking up to the challenge of climate change.Apple CEO Tim Cook recently lashed out at a shareholder who pressed the company to stop investing in carbon reduction and renewable energy. In the most recent World Economic Forum Global Risk survey of CEOs and world leaders, three of the top six issues of “highest concern” were failure to tackle climate change, extreme weather, and water crises. - 9 years ago
Ceres Conference and Report Ask: Is Corporate Sustainability Gaining Ground or Losing Pace?
New Metrics / “We're screwed,” agreed authors Andrew Winston and Paul Gilding in the opening plenary of last week's Ceres Conference.“But we've got huge opportunities to solve mega-challenges profitably,” Winston added. - 9 years ago
The Big Pivot: A Realist's Guide to a Climate-Challenged Present
Organizational Change / If you’ve ever thought of dropping a book on your boss’s desk, in the hopes of sparking a Ray Anderson-type conversion, here’s a tip. Don’t use the new IPCC report: It’s gloomy, terrifying and a muddle.Try this instead: Andrew Winston’s business transformation book for the “new normal” of climate change-fueled disruption. It’s called The Big Pivot. - 9 years ago
It Just Got Easier for Companies to Invest in Nature
New Metrics / Nature is valuable. But figuring out how valuable has been challenging. By some measures, the services that nature provides business and society — clean water, food and metals, natural defense from storms and floods, and much more — are worth many trillions of dollars. But that number is not helpful to companies trying to assess how dependent they are on natural resources, or how to value them as business inputs. - 9 years ago
#SustyGoals 5: The Hardcore Business Case for Setting Science-Based Goals – A Dialogue with Andrew Winston
New Metrics / One of the key messages in the upcoming book The Big Pivot: Radically Practical Strategies for a Hotter, Scarcer, More Open World is the “need to set goals in companies based on science, not on what we think we can do, not bottom-up,” says author Andrew Winston. - 9 years ago
10 Sustainable Business Stories Too Important to Miss
Leadership / Somehow it’s already year-end, a time to look back and try to make sense of what’s happened. Creating any “top” list of stories from 12 months is nearly impossible. But as I’ve done for the last 4 years, I’ll attempt to summarize some of the latest stories about the big environmental and social pressures on business, and how some innovative companies are dealing with them. - 9 years ago
Celebrating the Emergence of a New Generation of Business Innovators
Product, Service & Design Innovation / When you look at the environmental and social challenges we face, it's often tough to stay optimistic. The worst predictions of climate science are coming true. Resource scarcity — especially water — is a major threat to business and the economy. Worker conditions around the world, like those that led to the unfathomable recent tragedies in Bangladesh, can seem like intractable problems. And the political system that we need to tackle big issues is mostly broken. - 10 years ago
A Vision of Real Corporate Leadership on Sustainability
Leadership / The basics of sustainability excellence are fairly well known by now: reduce your footprint, create products and services that help customers do the same, drive employee engagement, think value chain, track data and enable transparency, and on and on. But real leaders will go further and address the scale of the sustainability challenges we face by fundamentally remaking their - 11 years ago
Defining and Developing Personal and Brand Leadership
Leadership / This month two of us - Andrew Winston and Chris Laszlo - begin 2012 with an inquiry into how personal and brand leadership is evolving to serve both thriving businesses and a flourishing world. The question of what leadership really looks like is vital; - 11 years ago