Trade and Media Publications

Quarterly July-September 2019 Issue pages 30-33

“Is the bike-lane fever breaking?” None seemed to address the argument. It is unconscionable to restrict the movement of hundreds of thousands of car users in the name of making life more convenient for a few hundred bicyclists.

There are only two ways for the world to avoid what most scientists refer to as disastrous global warming. One way is to stop economic growth, which would be immoral, while the other would require us to deploy our greatest natural resource.

Warren Buffett said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” It has been more than two decades now since a 1996 issue of Life magazine depicted a Pakistani boy sewing a Nike soccer ball, reportedly for six cents per hour. After the story, the company lost more than half its market capitalisation in just one year – it took Nike six years of demonstrated social responsibility to recuperate.

More companies are banning straws to burnish their environmental credentials. MIT’s Yossi Sheffi writes the impact of such measures is just a drop in the ocean.

For most companies, sustainability is not a case of "profit vs. planet" but a more subtle issue of people looking for jobs and inexpensive goods versus others who seek a pristine environment. Here's how your supply chain can satisfy these conflicting motivations to achieve both economic growth and environmental sustainability.  

MIT Professor Yossi Sheffi has just published, along with Edgar Blanco of Amazon, the definitive book on sustainability in business. For supply chain enthusiasts like me the topic is endlessly complex and compelling, but arguably too big to pin down systematically. This new book, Balancing Green, does it. It is deep and technically credible, but also readable and loaded with familiar names and stories. Most importantly, it tackles the question of sustainability without a preconceived agenda.

Yossi Sheffi, Director of the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics, has done it again. He recently published a must-read book on sustainability. Balancing Green: When to Embrace Sustainability in a Business (and When Not To) is a well-researched book that cuts through many of the fallacies and wishful thinking that surrounds sustainability.

As a serial entrepreneur in the logistics field and director of MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics, Sheffi has spent a lot of time thinking about how complex networks of people, products, and vehicles operate. In his latest book, “Balancing Green: When to Embrace Sustainability in a Business (and When Not To),’’ Sheffi brings this perspective to the push for corporate responsibility, analyzing the challenges and benefits of “going green” in a multilayered global economy.