“Clarke: Transformation for Environmental Sustainability” by Laszlo, McCabe, Aheam and Ghatde Problem Solution Essay

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Table of Contents

Issues
Alternative Solutions
Analysis of Solutions
Recommendations
Works Cited

Issues

Despite the fact that the tidal wave of environmental concern, which started in 1990s, seems to have died down in 2010s, the recent introduction of the sustainability principle into not only management of various natural environments, but also the field of business and economics, has provided the premises for an innovation approach in the company operation.

The latter presupposes that environmental sustainability should be integrated into the company’s principles in order to facilitate improvement in the organisational performance rates. In their article “Clarke:

Transformation for Environmental Sustainability,” Laszlo, McCabe, Aheam and Ghatde address the specified concept, outlining the key problems that a 21^st-century entrepreneurship traditionally has and identifying the methods, which the sustainability principle will allow for integrating into the corporate strategy in general and the strategy of Clarke’s company in particular.

Among the key issues faced by the latter, such problems as the problems with the transition to the triple-bottom line, the need to establish the business as a safe and harmless company and a change in the business model (Laszlo et al. 22–25) must be mentioned.

Alternative Solutions

According to what Laszlo et al. suggest, in order to meet the new requirements listed by EPA and, therefore, produce the goods that contain the so-called “green chemicals” (Laszlo et al. 22), it will be necessary to resort to the sustainability principle, which, in its turn, presupposes a range of rapid and impressive changes in the company’s organisation structure, performance and

Analysis of Solutions

The authors of the article provide several methods of addressing the lack of sustainability within the company. To be more accurate, they suggest that the company should switch to a more sustainable and environmentally friendly approach (Laszlo et al. 23).

Table 1: Pros and Cons

Solution	Argument in favour	Argument against
Introduction of a new brand (Natular)	Toxicity rates of the new product were considerably lower than those of the predecessors; The product would make the company look more environmentally friendly	Unreasonable princes may have thrown the target audience off; The bureaucratic nature of the target audience may have slackened the process of product promotion
Carbon footprint reduction	Improvement in the company’s reputation; Contribution to environmental sustainability	Necessity to reconsider the production process; Increase in costs for new and more expensive equipment
Usage of renewable resources	Encouragement of recycling and, therefore, reduction of costs for the raw materials	Possible drops in the quality of the raw materials and, thus, of the product
Usage of bicycles and hybrid vehicles	Promotion of healthy lifestyle among the staff; Premises for developing a new set of values directed at the physical and emotional wellbeing of the staff carried out with the help of introduction of healthy lifestyle principles; A stronger emphasis on the company’s environmentally friendly policy.	Dissatisfaction among the staff due to the lack of comfort in transportation; Drops in the speed of the product delivery, as well as the transportation of raw materials and, thus, the overall reduction in the speed of the production process
Name change	Allowing the customers know that the company is moving in the right direction; Creating the room for a fresh new start	Necessity to create a promotion campaign from scratch; Need to deal with numerous rivals and come up with a groundbreaking approach

Recommendations

It is obvious that the organisation has gone a long way to becoming a more environmentally friendly company with a set of strong moral values.

Regardless of the fact that the firm had to sacrifice a range of potentially profitable resources for the sake of its new image, it still managed to come up with a viable strategy, which will help it last quite long, shining among its competitors, who are less environmentally aware and far not as safe as Clarke’s company.

At present, it can be recommended that the company should identify the avenues for cutting the losses for choosing an environmentally safer approach. As it has been stressed above, the costs for providing the staff with the transportation methods that are less polluting are very high, and a reconsideration of the company’s logistics may be the answer to making the company’s costs smaller.

To be more exact, a choice of different partners for carrying out transportation can be suggested; in addition, the current routes can be changed so that the consumption of petrol could be reduced a few notches.

Finally, the company’s policy should become the focus of its next promotion campaign. With the introduction of a new brand product into the market, the firm must come up with a promotion campaign that will help make the product more popular and memorable among the target audience.

It should be born in mind that the promotion campaign is going to be quite costly; therefore, modern media should be used as the key tools for making the product popular. With the integration of social networks and direct advertisement, the company is going to benefit from a shift towards sustainability greatly.

Works Cited

Laszlo, Chris, Katey McCabe, Eric Aheam and Indrajeet Ghatde. “Clarke: Transformation for Environmental Sustainability.” Leading Change. Ed. Will O’Brien. Worcester, MA: Clark University. 2014. 21–38. Print.

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