Michael W. Toffel; Katharine Lee
|Also Available In:||English Hardcopy Black & White|
|List Price: $7.46||Source: Harvard Business School|
|Publication Date: Jul 23, 2009||Product #: 610012-PDF-ENG|
|Discipline: Operations Management||Length: 28 p, English PDF|
|Revision Date: Jan 14, 2014|
This case describes Millipore Corporation's approach to becoming a more environmentally sustainable company. As he prepared for his quarterly meeting with the CEO, the Director of Sustainability needed to develop positions on several issues. Tactically, he needed to recommend whether the company should purchase carbon offsets to help meet its aggressive greenhouse gas reduction targets, and whether to continue publicly reporting its greenhouse gas emissions and strategies despite recent problems. On a more strategic level, he needed to recommend how to take the company's Sustainability Initiative to the next level and consider whether changes were needed to its organizational structure. Finally, he needed to develop a more systematic approach to prioritizing investments in various projects being proposed to improve environmental performance.
To expose students to the challenges of conceptualizing "environmental sustainability" at an organization level, and differentiating sustainability management from traditional environmental, health and safety management. Highlight differences between sustainability issues and conventional environment, health and safety issues. Explore corporate transparency in the context of environmental sustainability to promote an understanding of the risks and opportunities of voluntarily disclosing corporate information. Promote an understanding of the opportunities and limitations of special initiatives sponsored by senior management.
Climate change; Disclosure; Facilities; Global business; Operations management; Organizational change; Process improvement; Social responsibility; Sustainability