Sustainability is GOLDEN
GOLDEN (Global Organizational Learning and Development Network) for Sustainability, a research programme devised by CROMA Bocconi, Wirtschafts Universität Wien and EABIS (the Academy of Business in Society) with the support of Microsoft, kicked off last January with an international meeting at Bocconi and lacks neither ambition nor scale.
The goal of the programme is "to build a global network of research centres committed to cooperating and coordinating their work to study how business firms change, and learn to change, to integrate and manage principles of sustainability in their business models", according to an official presentation, but the words of its academic director, Maurizio Zollo of CROMA, are much more heartfelt: "We want to answer fundamental questions such as: Why is it that, despite major efforts and investments to integrate environmental and social sustainability in our companies, even the most sophisticated businesses are still struggling to regain the trust and reputation they once were proud of?What makes integrating sustainability in business strategies, practices and cultures so difficult to achieve? And we think that the answer has to do with the ultimate source of sustainability: the mindsets, the values and the character of the thousands of people that make up any business organization".
"At full capacity", Zollo goes on, "GOLDEN will be the largest project ever run in management research, thanks to its unprecedented scale, depth and geographic coverage". The scholars want to involve at least 25 international research centres (22 are already in!) and 100 companies, in a perspective of "engaged scholarship", aimed at establishing a deep and sustained cooperation between each company and the research centre it will work with.
Participating companies will receive detailed benchmarking reports assessing the effectiveness of their sustainability efforts, "including", Zollo says, "the most comprehensive and advanced set of measurements of sustainability outputs and the organizational factors that can influence them. They will enjoy peer network learning opportunities and will position themselves as global leaders in sustainability".
Companies in Italy, Spain, Russia, Denmark, China, Russia, Australia, South Africa and the US are already involved and some of them are at the centre of the case studies discussed at the Bocconi meeting. In the next months the scholars will fine tune the methodology, develop the research protocol and test it in a pilot assessment affecting eight companies. The final, rollout phase will start in January 2012.