Gregory Unruh

In the previous post I discussed the importance of a global mindset for successful global leadership. But a global mindset's true value comes when global leaders act as global entrepreneurs and leverage their mindset for value creation. Global leaders become global entrepreneurs by using their global understanding and...

As discussed in my previous post, today's global leaders have three common characteristics. The first of these is a global mindset. Global mindset can be defined as the ability to perceive and decode behaviors in multiple cultural contexts. It is an ability to connect with people from other...

Globalization has shaken up traditional leadership development. Language immersion, cultural etiquette tips and the like are wildly insufficient to prepare managers for the demands of today's global marketplace. Likewise, worrying about expat culture shock or the risk that employees "go native" are concerns of a past era. Today's global business...

I've been in over a dozen meetings now with organizations like the World Economic Forum and the U.N. Global Compact where people use the word "sustainable consumption." Everyone seems to like the term, so I always ask them, "What do you mean by sustainable consumption?" The usual answer, after uncomfortable...

As Alice learns from the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." The feeling is shared by corporate sustainability executives confronting the constantly shifting expectations of greater social and environmental responsibility. Call it "Red...

In preparing for the Sustainable Brands 11 Conference, in June, I have been interviewing panelists including Ben Packard, VP Global Responsibility, Starbucks; Steve Arbaugh, VP Brand Marketing, Interface; Jennifer Schwab, Chief Sustainability Officer, Sierra Club Green Home and Bonnie Nixon, Executive Director, The Sustainability Consortium. The subject of our session...

In early 2009 I submitted a blog post to Harvard Business Online with the following title "Surprise! Green is Countercyclical." It was rejected, probably because it sounded so far-fetched at the time. At the start of the '07-'08 recession, sustainability naysayers were having a field day. A poor economy meant...

As bizarre as it may seem, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher conceived a love child. Today the demanding adolescent goes by a number of aliases, but most business people call it Corporate Social Responsibility.

Before you start protesting, hear me out. Reagan and Thatcher believed in the power of the...

The dot com bubble. The housing bubble. Markets are prone to an endless succession of irrational exuberance that allows commodities to dramatically overshoot their intrinsic value. Greed and avarice blind the masses to the overvaluation until rationality unpredictably takes hold and the bubble collapses. There are always people who recognize...

The talk in the investment world is the impact of the Australian floods on coal markets. Supposedly once-in-a-century rains have inundated Australia's open pit mines, turning them into lakes that can be seen from space. Investors are now scooping up stocks in coal producers operating in Canada and...

One of the hazards of earning a Ph.D. is that everything you encounter afterward becomes a hypothesis to be tested. For me this means that much of my life has become an ongoing experiment in sustainable consumption within the constraints of suburban American life. Often it's about pushing physical and...

When DARPA researchers connected computers between UCLA and Stanford in 1969, the Internet was born. But in the early days, the net was an academic oddity used for transferring arcane data sets. Then in 1971 Ray Tomlinson wrote a little program to send messages across the system and e-mail was...

Words of truth from Karl Rove as he interpreted the impact of Tuesday's Republican victory for shale-gas executives: the "Climate is gone." He meant climate legislation. In reality, however, the electoral victory merely sealed the already determined fate of climate policy in this country. With the rise of...

I led a session at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) last week entitled "Green Jobs: Preparing for the Green Economy" and can summarize the outcome in three areas: promise, progress and potential.

Promise
Most agree that a green economy -- and sustainable development more broadly -- are society's best...

Monday morning Tianjin, China and it's the first session of the World Economic Forum's "Summer Davos 2010" event. Ironically, after a filling breakfast in opulent surroundings, my panel colleagues and I are discussing scarcity. With concerns about peak oil, peak water, peak real estate, peak financial markets - and just...

Sustainable consumption? Sounds like an oxymoron. But that's what we'll be discussing at next week's World Economic Forum Summer Davos 2010 event in Tianjin China. In the session, entitled "Redesigning the Supply Chain in an Era of Sustainability," my WEF colleagues and I will ask CEOs and policy...

The male peacock's extravagant plumage is a conundrum for evolutionary biologists. What good could come from investing so much energy in producing decoration that has to be dragged around most of the time? How can it help in the "survival of the fittest" scenario? The answer is that survival in...

It's an age-old story. An entrepreneur enters a complacent industry with a startling innovation. The start-up's market share steadily grows and before long, it's the new behemoth. But then the surviving competitors, backed against the wall, counter with their own innovations that neutralize the new behemoth's advantage. Soon, the new...

From time to time, the firm may waive certain provisions of this Code...

Imagine Moses descending from Mount Sinai bearing two tablets inscribed with the 10 founding values of his people, plus a clause that says, "From time to time certain provisions such as 'Thou shalt not murder, steal, adulter,...

While speaking at the Sustainable Brands 2010 conference last week in Monterey, CA, I had one simple question for the VPs of sustainability who were in attendance: "Over the long run, can 'green' brands and 'non-green' (we'll call them 'brown') brands coexist in the same product portfolio?"

The question...