Corporate social responsibility

Extra ventilation often means using more energy - but it doesn't have to.

Abuse. And it's not only a problem for Twitter.

When political and social issues touch business and the workplace, employees and their leaders sometimes struggle to address those issues productively...

By pooling the resources of the poor and by sharing information, religious and financial institutions can work together to change inner-city economies.

A rising number of companies are meeting the pandemic with humanity.

A growing number of socially motivated entrepreneurs have been creating new kinds of organizations that combine a social mission with a business engine....

Why would a new Ceres report give low scores to Whole Foods, one of the nation’s largest purchasers of renewable energy, for the way it is responding to the challenge of climate change? Precisely for the word that Whole Foods uses to describe itself: “whole.” Many of the company’s actions on climate change are laudable, […]

New research confirms that ESG can create competitive advantage.

In a tight economy, with companies spending much less on IT, the tech giants will take growth wherever they can find it. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that Cisco and HP are in a pitched battle for customers for their high-end teleconferencing systems. According to the report, it’s “one of the few technologies that […]

Joe Ryan turned a small-town cosmetics company into a national powerhouse, making employees happy and shareholders rich in the process. Does it really matter that he cheats on his wife?

Most businesspeople will serve on the board of a nonprofit organization at some point. But the governance of nonprofits can differ dramatically from the governance of businesses. Even the best intentions can prove disastrous when new board members fail to understand that their traditional business experience can carry them only so far.

CEO activism has entered the mainstream.

The economic distress of America's inner cities may be the most pressing issue facing the nation. The lack of businesses and jobs in disadvantaged urban...

Hitting big targets starts with getting the details right.

Renewable energy, eco-friendly construction, and many other green initiatives are markets that promise to generate jobs and profits. Former U.S. president...

Better managing the planet’s resources doesn’t have to mean you don’t turn a profit.

In the fall of 2012 the author decided he needed to do some soul searching. The start-up he'd founded six years earlier had grown into a global company...

A Q&A about the storm’s aftermath.

(Editor’s note: This post is part of a six-week blog series on how leadership might look in the future. The conversations generated by these posts will help shape the agenda of a symposium on the topic in June 2010, hosted by HBS’s Nitin Nohria, Rakesh Khurana, and Scott Snook.) Earlier this year, at the Economist […]

[For more, visit Tomorrow’s Smart Grid.] Creating a clean economy will not be easy. It will require sustained, consistent, and large-scale investment across many sectors, including transportation, building systems and appliances, energy generation, and of course the electric grid itself. We will need new, more intelligent software and hardware to manage the new demands on […]