Commentators representing the corporate world share their insights and discuss how they’re making an impact – and how MBAs could do the same
Rita Monteiro, Head of Sustainability, Amazon Japan
‘Stakeholders around the world are realising that sustainability is a requirement and no longer an option. Being in a customer-obsessed company, as we like to call ourselves, we care about our customers and caring about our customers is caring about our planet.
‘My recommendation [to leaders who want to make a difference] would be to take the business skills that you have from a holistic business management perspective and apply it to the solutions we need for tomorrow. It will require innovation and it will require an understanding of what you can do to influence things when certain policies do not help in creating the right scaling infrastructure. Another thing to remember is that nobody does anything alone. Amazon is not going to change the world alone.
‘We all need to work together. Business leaders of the future must
try to understand that it’s no longer about competing with each other, it
is about collaborating to really find scalable solutions.’
Sian Sutherland, Co-Founder, A Plastic Planet
‘I don’t think there is a simple solution [to the planet’s sustainability], you always have to look at it as a system change first – what is the behaviour change, for example. Then, if you have to take any kind of resources from the planet – because every resource has an impact – what’s the material change we can make that we know will fit into a circular model. The more I know about plastic, the more I think we are lying to ourselves if we think that plastic is a circular product.’
Harry Tucker, Co-Founder at PLANE Industries; Financial Consultant at McKenzie & Co
‘When you look at the world and look at the way in which we are consuming disposable products all the time, it’s a problem.
‘I think that when you start going down that road, you want to build things that have a story behind them, are interesting, and that a consumer probably won’t throw away. I really believe that none of our customers would throw away our products because they are expensive, but also because they are built for them and they have a great story attached to them.’
