Wanted: Heroic leaders to drive the transition to “business beyond usual”

Abstract

Business-as-usual is likely to drive us to an unsustainable world. To solve the problems human industrial activity has created, such as climate change, species extinction, and biodiversity loss, business leaders (CEOs, top managers, and boards of directors) must be central to the solution for corporate sustainability. In particular, “heroic” leaders are needed to transform their companies into business beyond usual. In this essay, we briefly outline what researchers already know about microfoundational or socio-cognitive and motivational underpinnings of leaders that affect corporate sustainability. However, gaps remain in our understanding of affective drivers and values of leaders. We question whether microfoundations research has the potential to understand true business transformation for positive deviance and suggest that positive organizational scholarship and research on sustainability change agents can provide insights. We next highlight how empirical and research design shortcomings might be addressed. Finally, we discuss how to identify, develop, and empower leaders with transformational potential so that we can proactively create heroic leaders rather than wait for them to magically appear.

Strategy and organization scholarship through a radical sustainability lens: A call for 5.0

“…However, few MBA programs appear to be integrating sustainability issues throughout their curricula in a way that demonstrates that sustainability is not simply a topic to be taught to those students interested in it, but rather demands a rethinking of the strategies and practices of the businesses the students will join. Yet, two of the essays in this issue (Hoffman, 2021;Walls et al, 2021) suggest that such a shift in mindset is the only way that managers will truly embrace sustainability as a business necessity.…”

“…Hoffman's (2021) essay concludes on a hopeful note, as he points to recent calls by organizations (Business Roundtable) and individual leaders (Laurence Fink of BlackRock) for business leaders to reorient their approach to building value as evidence that the business world is changing, albeit more slowly than it needs to do. The essay by (Walls et al, 2021) offers a similar nugget of optimism, noting that corporate leaders are concerned that business is not doing enough to prioritize the urgent social and environmental issues we face. Walls and her colleagues then outline what we know (and do not yet know) about the role of leaders in driving more sustainable outcomes and in the traits of people who might become such leaders.…”

“…Of course, Walls et al's (2021) pessimism over the role of business schools in fostering heroic leaders for sustainability leaves us wondering how such leaders will emerge if they are not fostered (or worse yet, squelched) by business education? Their answer is to offer a framework that businesses themselves can use to identify, foster, and empower leaders with the potential to create sustainable change.…”

“…We, as editors, see a radical sustainability lens as a call to arms and an opportunity for researchers to reinvent the objects of our strategy and organization study (Hahn and Tampe, 2021;Howard-Grenville and Lahneman, 2021), the methodologies we use, and disciplinary lenses through which we view the institutions we study (e.g. Tett, 2021), and our impact as scholars (Hoffman, 2021;Walls et al, 2021). In particular, in this special forum, Williams and Whiteman (2021) call for academic research into sustainability issues to be less-possessed with developing new theories, and more focused upon impacting practice.…”

“…We consider this So!apbox Forum as something of a call to arms for strategy and organization scholars. The essays in this forum provoke us to open our thinking about the broader, interdependent systems within which organizations operate (Hahn and Tampe, 2021;Howard-Grenville and Lahneman, 2021), the role of managers within those organizations (Walls et al, 2021), and about our own roles as teachers (Hoffman, 2021) and impacting the participants in our research (Williams and Whiteman, 2021). This is a crucial overarching agenda.…”