Leadership Capabilities and Transition Strategies: An Essay Analysis

This essay examines leadership capabilities and transition strategies for individual improvement within a chosen workplace or organization. It explores self-management and relationship-building aspects of leadership, evaluating them within a specific context. The essay then delves into the implementation of transition strategies designed to enhance individual leadership abilities. The structure includes an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion, with attention given to English language proficiency, grammar, and proper citation using APA referencing. The assignment focuses on providing a comprehensive analysis of leadership, offering practical strategies for personal and professional development in a business setting. It evaluates how leaders can adapt to changes in consumer behavior and business trading patterns. The essay also uses the iceberg model of virtues to illustrate the importance of deeper levels of cultural change in business decision-making.

Leadership for the
Sustainability Transition
WILLIAM THROOP AND MATT MAYBERRY
ABSTRACT
Society is looking to business to help solve our most com-
plex environmental and social challenges as we transition
to a more sustainable economic model. However, without
a fundamental shift in the dominant virtues that have
influenced business decision making for the past 150
years to a new set of dominant virtues that better fit
today’s environment,it will be more natural for compa-
nies to resist the necessary changes than to find the
opportunities within them. We use the term “virtues”
quite broadly to describe dispositions to think, feel and
act in skillful ways that promote the aims of a practice.
Addressing this deeper levelof cultural change is essen-
tial to cultivating new instinctive behavior in business
decision making. In this article, we describe five clusters
of virtues that facilitate effective response to the transition
challenges—adaptive, collaborative, frugality, humility,
and systems virtues. To illustrate the application of these
virtues, we present a detailed case study of Green Moun-
tain Power, a Vermont electric utility that has embraced
the shift to renewable energy and smart-grid technology,
and is creating an innovative business model that is
William Throop is a Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at the Green Mountain
College, Poultney, VT. E-mail: [e-mail] Mayberry is President of Whole-
Works, Manchester, VT. E-mail: [e-mail].
VC 2017 W. Michael Hoffman Center for Business Ethics at Bentley University. Published by
Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington
Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.
Business and Society Review 122:2 221–250
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disrupting the industry. After distilling key findings from
the case, we outline an approach to leadership develop-
ment that can help accelerate the infusion of transitional
virtues across an organization.
LEADERSHIP FOR THE SUSTAINABILITY TRANSITION
B usiness is in the midst of a great transition—one similar in
scope to the industrial and digital revolutions. This sus-
tainability transition is driven in part by the need to adjust
to planetary limits, but also by opportunities presented by an
evolving globaleconomic system that is highly sensitive to disrup-
tive social dynamics. Business leaders face a complex tangle of eco-
nomic, social, and environmental challenges that require deep
changes in operations and organizational culture. To use Ronald
Heifetz’ language, today’s greatest social challenges are not so
much technical problems as they are adaptive challenges where
the “problem definition is not clear-cut, and technical fixes are not
available.”1 For businesses to flourish, leaders will need to behave
in new ways consistent with a finite, complex, uncertain, changing,
collaborative, connected, and caring world.
This will require a shift in the dominant virtues that characterize
most corporate cultures today. We use the term “virtues” quite
broadly to describe dispositions to think, feel and act in skillful
ways that promote the aims of a practice. Although the term
“virtue” sometimes connotes only moral habits, we use it in Aristo-
tle’s sense which focuses on cognitive/behavioral skills rooted in a
deep understanding of a practice. Companies often identify core
competencies they want employees to have. Competency models
used in talent developmentrepresent a model of effective perfor-
mance that helps an organization achieve its goals.2 If competen-
cies are interpreted as involving more than discrete skills, and
including patterns of thought, feeling, and motivation embedded in
enduring character traits, then competencies approximate virtues.
Virtues, however, generally have a broader range of applicability
(across a range of business and personal contexts), they tend to be
mutually reinforcing and embedded in a worldview. Aristotle
argued that manifesting the excellences associated with being
222 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW

human—the virtues—was the road to flourishing.3 We have found
that if the virtues embedded in an organizational culture fits its
context, then they contribute greatly to its flourishing. If not, then
even the best leaders and innovative strategies are often thwarted
by virtues out of sync with the context.
In this article, we briefly summarize some major challenges busi-
ness faces and then describe five clusters ofvirtues that facilitate
effective response to the challenges.We argue that making these
virtue shifts is essential work for business leaders because it will
be required to fully grasp the opportunities of this time and to
avoid missteps, as is illustrated in a detailed case study. The vir-
tues are not novel, though they are underemphasized. The changes
we recommend are occurring in some businesses and the transi-
tional virtues can be cultivated by any organization through delib-
erate practice and reflection. Such training requires a safe learning
environment to overcome performance anxiety, and sufficient time
for the changes to become internalized.4 In our conclusion, we out-
line an approach to leadership development that can infuse transi-
tional virtues across the organization.
THE CHALLENGES OF THE TRANSITION
The momentum behind the sustainability transition is building
with the agreement at COP 21, the new United Nations Sustainable
Development Goals, and the recent Encyclical Letter by Pope Fran-
cis.5 It is driven by a growing understanding of the challenges we
must meet. Although each business faces challenges specific to its
history and sector, we see common themes across sectors that
stem from the larger scale social, economic, and environmental
contexts in which business operates.
Environmental Challenges
In the last 50 years, we have seen a tremendous increase in human
impacts on ecosystems; Steffen et al.6 have called this the great
acceleration. Climate change and human population growth are
the trump cards in this process because of their pervasive impact
on the ecological services that support society. In this context,
firms must be more sensitive to the cumulative impacts of their
223THROOP AND MAYBERRY

sector on resource availability and the capacity of systems to
absorb waste, which in turn increase supply chain risks and
threaten the economic bottom line.
A business’s specific environmental challenges depend on the
dynamics of the bioregions in which it operates, and may include:
carbon risk, sea level rise, super storms, flooding, availability of
clean water, lack of pollinators, catastrophic fire, and so on. 7 The
risks of such challenges affect business stakeholders—consumers,
investors, and employees—which will affect operations and sales.
The acceleration of these challenges also destabilizes the regulatory
environment, making it harder for firms to plan strategically. The
narrative of our exceeding environmental limits is pervasive among
a growing subset of the population, especially the young, which
fuels the pursuit of sustainability and resilience.
Social Challenges
Businesses are operating in an increasingly unstable social climate.
They are embedded in a 24/7 decentralized media environment
which has an insatiable demand for controversy. Media must create
news out of whatever occurs,and stimulate strong reactions that
fuel increased interestin analysis and updates. One result is an
amplification of our differences.Political polarization is just one
manifestation ofthe way our media make it harder for us to solve
problems together and erode trust in the social institutions like busi-
ness, science,and government.8 Another is rapid dissemination of
information on social media which often focuses on latest trends
rather than historical context and contributes to information over-
load. The latter makes it increasingly hard for businesses to break
through the media clutter to create an enduring brand identity.
As the stresses associated with the great acceleration magnify,
we see more armed conflict around the globe, escalating anger
among the disenfranchised,increased racial tensions, and declin-
ing social capital, all of which increase supply chain risk in a glob-
alized economy. In the political sphere, we see poll-driven
leadership, lack of political participation, intolerance of complexity
and nuance, over-regulation, and an adversarial approach to
problem-solving.These all contribute to the failure of government
to address our challenges. Businesses must also deal with
224 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW

increased diversity in the workplace, which can contribute greater
innovation, but which can also make effective teamwork more diffi-
cult. Within these challenges lie well documented opportunities;
movements like creation ofshared value,9 and base of pyramid10
contribute to effective community development and local increases
in trust and associations.11
Economic Challenges
The above socialand environmental challenges increase the likeli-
hood of economic turbulence. Our economic expectations are con-
ditioned by 75 years of extraordinary growth, which will be hard to
sustain in the current climate. Our dominant economic story
remains one of material progress, but many are losing confidence
in rising standards of living.12 Increasing inequality, global interde-
pendence, an aging population, and the difficulty of achieving high
employment levels in low growth economies underlie the fragility of
our economic situation.
For many businesses, this economic turbulence is magnified by
the increasing speed of disruptive innovations, regulatory instabili-
ty, and shifts in global supply chains. Some are also affected by the
high cost of providing worker benefits, high employee turnover
rates, and the declining proportion of consumers in the United
States with discretionary income. Despite living in a period of sig-
nificant economic growth, many people feel economically fragile
and powerless. This affects employee engagementand the talent
pool available to business.
Amidst such challenges, there is a great deal of opportunity—new
markets to be tapped, especially in developing countries; more demand
for waste reducing products and sustainability branding;increased
investment in infrastructure to handle challenges, and a high
demand/payoff for innovative solutions. But are businesses ready to
grasp the opportunities that the transition to sustainability holds?
FLOURISHING AMIDST THE CHALLENGES
Business could be the most potent force helping societies navigate
the transition, but without a fundamental shift in organizational
culture, it will be more natural for companies to resist the
225THROOP AND MAYBERRY

necessary changes than to find the opportunities within them.
When the virtues that dominate a business fail to align with the
cultural context, leaders typically act in intuitive but counterpro-
ductive ways. Our default responses can be overridden, but it takes
significant conscious effort and attention, which are difficult to
muster when acting under pressure.
Virtues contain elements that are visible to the observer (includ-
ing knowledge, skills, and behavior), and those that are beneath
the surface (deeply held beliefs about success and predispositions
to perceive and respond in certain ways). The virtues shift needed
to cultivate new instinctive behavior in business decision making
requires addressing the deepest layers. This equates to a “rewiring”
of the unconscious fast-thinking brain circuitry. 13 Transforming
an organizational culture14 requires significant motivation, willing-
ness to experiment, and a prolonged period of deliberate,focused
practice. This can be difficult in today’s fast-paced business envi-
ronment where leaders often emphasize quick,decisive solutions,
FIGURE 1 The “iceberg” Model of Virtues, Showing Elements
That Are Visible to the Observer and Those Beneath
the Surface That Tend to Drive Instinctive Behavior.
[Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
226 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW

imposed from the top to achieve immediate results. Given those
instincts, it can be difficult to muster the required patience and
perseverance needed to unlearn old behaviors and establish new
ones across the organization.
An illustration of this challenge is the difficulty many U.S. firms
have had in adopting TQM and lean production principles in recent
decades.15 Thousands of executives toured Toyota plants each year
hoping to learn the secrets of the Toyota Production System (TPS).
What many saw during those tours were the visible elements of
Toyota’s culture, the activities on the shop floor, and the visual
management tools such as the andon lights and kanban bins. In
other words, they saw the TPS as a discrete toolkit to be copied
rather than a system to be developed.When they returned home,
they attempted to install a quality culture in accelerated fashion,
rolling out company-wide quality initiatives led by scores of newly
minted lean leaders and black belts. When the tools of the TPS did
not produce the impact expected, company leaders often lost
patience, put continuous improvement on the back burner, and
reverted to tried-and-true moves, often involving restructuring.
What did they miss?
The answer lies beneath the surface of Toyota’s culture, in the
deeper layers of virtues not visible during the plant tours. They
reside in the tacit habits and patterns of thought that infuse the
Toyota Way. At the heart of the Toyota system are two pillars—con-
tinuous improvement and respect for people—that can be consid-
ered clusters of virtues. They include the deeply held belief that
progress comes from engaging people at alllevels of the organiza-
tion in ongoing problem solving and experimentation. Compared to
most U.S. firms, the role of management was fundamentally differ-
ent in the Toyota system. Managers avoided providing answers;
they were teachers. This meant being with employees on the front
lines (going to the gemba)as they worked through problems. For
U.S. managers, whose success had been based on hitting home
runs from the board room, this was an unfamiliar and uncomfort-
able role. It is easy to see why so many TQM efforts in the United
States failed, given the dominant disposition by management for
big moves and fast results.16
The TPS history illustrates how an organization’s default virtues
make it difficult to grasp the essence of new ones. Intellectual
understanding only goes so far. A deeper understanding requires
227THROOP AND MAYBERRY

practicing the new virtues long enough until they begin to make
intuitive sense. This is why Toyota insists that new managers in
the United States spend significant time on the front lines working
within the TPS system. It takes practice to internalize the princi-
ples. We believe that a similar process will be required for organiza-
tions to fully embrace the virtue shift we are describing here. We
now explore those virtues in more detail.
VIRTUES FOR THE TRANSITION TO SUSTAINABILITY
Our identification of the virtue clusters that will enable businesses
to grasp the opportunities in the globaltransition toward sustain-
ability is guided by research into the limits which will become
increasingly important in light of our challenges. As a short hand,
we will call the virtues that businesses will increasingly need to
cultivate sustainability virtues,but these traits are much broader
than the practices traditionally associated with sustainability. To
be clear, we are not saying a virtue shift alone is sufficient to effec-
tively address the challenges. We also need new knowledge, better
technology,and probably more effective governance.We can miti-
gate our challenges with technologicaladvances and by increased
efficiency and strong leadership, but without a virtue shift, most
businesses are unlikely to flourish in the long run.
As depicted in the schematic of Figure 2, the paradigm shift we
are advocating is a shift in emphasis. The culture of an organiza-
tion or society often has dominant virtues and contrasting sets of
virtues that are secondary. The latter are less well developed and
less salient. In many corporate cultures, competitive virtues domi-
nate and collaborative virtues are secondary. Both are necessary
for an organization to function, but our research indicates that col-
laborative virtues will need to become the default approach to
problem-solving in most contexts. They will need to be more salient
and more highly rewarded in order for businesses to grasp the
opportunities that lie amid the challenges we face. Competition will
still be crucial to business success, but it will often involve innova-
tive collaborative partnerships. The two sets of virtues are not
opposites. One can have both competitive and collaborative virtues,
but they do engage contrasting modes of thought and behavior.
They are supported by opposing assumptions about how the world
228 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW

works and different models of success. Where one set is the default
approach to decision making, the contrasting set tends to be less
developed and under-represented in the culture.
Abundance Versus Frugality Virtues
We are calling a cluster of character traits associated with a focus
on material wellbeing “abundance virtues,” because their current
manifestation is based on an assumption that we can transcend
material limits and continue to grow indefinitely—that technologi-
cal innovation makes our resources abundant. These virtues
include being acquisitive, opportunistic, magnanimous, and opti-
mistic. Our tendencies to focus on size (larger is better), on materi-
al standard of living, on convenience and technologicalsolutions,
and on GDP as a measure of progress are manifestations of these
virtues. These habits have motivated us to be industrious, creative,
competitive, and specialized; they have led to tremendous material
prosperity. As population has increased, however,that prosperity
has threatened the ecosystems on which we depend.
FIGURE 2 The Shift in Dominant Virtues Needed to Align with
Today’s Business Environment.
229THROOP AND MAYBERRY

By contrast, frugality virtues reflect the assumption that actions
must be guided by a deep awareness offinite resources and waste
sinks. These virtues have dominated other eras of business and could
do so again as Bruce Piasecki has argued in Doing More with Less.17
These virtues include thrift, prudence in our pursuit of pleasure, effi-
ciency, waste aversion, and a focus on relationships and nonmaterial
goods. For at least three reasons, frugality virtues are important for
flourishing amid our challenges.First, it is beneficial economically.
Businesses that cultivate these virtues in their cultures willreduce
costs and find opportunities to develop financial cushions that dimin-
ish the shocks of economically turbulent times. Second, these virtues
shift employee focus from the material to the immaterial rewards of
working for an organization. The low cost, intangible pleasures of fam-
ily, friendship, meaningful work, and discovery are correlated with
happiness18 and employee engagement.19 Third, frugality virtues
focus employees on minimizing materialwaste and other negative
environmentalimpacts. Companies that have moved away from a
“take-make-waste” model of production to a more frugal model based
on closed-loop materialcycles and renewable energy have demon-
strated significant cost reductions and decreased liability risks (due to
reduction of emissions, pollution, etc.).20
Control Versus Adaptive Virtues
Control virtues, which are closely related to abundance virtues,
tend to dominate firms’ approaches to changing business condi-
tions. These habits share a tacit presupposition that we can control
enough of our environment to advance our interests. Ambition, a
can-do attitude, the will to power, dominance, and a faith in tech-
nological solutions have enabled tremendous social progress. They
remain important today; yet their underlying presuppositions are
increasingly in question. As more of our pressing challenges involve
a social component where we have limited control and as many of
the systems we are impacting are global in scale and have long
response times, we must deemphasize controland focus on adap-
tive management. Large scale culturaltransitions are usually tur-
bulent, and require organizations to have the ability to handle
traumatic change without despair and to focus on the opportuni-
ties within the changes. To flourish in this context, businesses will
230 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW

need to innovate more aggressively, to become much more resilient,
and to appreciate the struggle as part of any intensely meaningful
long term-project.
We will continue to control many aspects of our environment,
but we must avoid generalizing this strategy to many of the issues
that confront us. We must become more comfortable with adversity
and more accepting of what we cannot change in the external envi-
ronment, which requires us to change internally.
Adaptive virtues enable us to deal effectively with limits to our
control. These can be subdivided into those traits that help us to
individually cope with what we cannot control and those that help
others to cope. The first group includes resilience, flexibility, cour-
age, hopefulness, creativity, entrepreneurial spirit, composure,
self-control, and the second includes empathy, self-sacrifice, gener-
osity, and the like. The emphasis on adaptive virtues reflects a view
that societies move through a cycle of growth leading to increasing-
ly severe challenges which eventually result in release and reorga-
nization.21 Firms that cultivate adaptive virtues in their cultures
will benefit from their employees’increased tolerance for disruptive
change and their ability to persist in pursuit of long term goals.
They are likely to have fewer personnel issues and to find the
opportunities that come with new business models, as we willsee
in the case of Green Mountain Power’s transition to a distributed
energy model based on renewables.
Conviction Versus Humility Virtues
The conviction virtues that dominate many organizational cultures
make it harder to change course as the context changes. They reflect
the assumption that we know enough based on the past to decide
how to proceed. Currently, we gravitate toward leaders who are high-
ly assertive, who express no doubts about the strategies they favor,
and who are persuasive and pugnacious. We tend to favor intellectu-
al simplification and clarity. We reward forceful managementand
quick problem resolution (even if it is a quick fix). We reward these
habits and encourage them in our organizations. Although we know
the dangers of over-confidence,we tend to focus more on building
internal scripts about justifying confidence than on carefully assess-
ing what we do and do not know.
231THROOP AND MAYBERRY

These virtues have undoubtedly contributed to personal and
organizational success, but their dominance in corporate cul-
tures now makes it harder to deal effectively with the complexity
of the systems which we must try to explain and predict. Convic-
tion virtues tend to limit the creative thinking necessary for deal-
ing with novel situations, and they tend to polarize people
around ideological issues. They also require a degree of hypocrisy
in our leaders, who must claim to know what to do in unfolding
crises, when that is often unreasonable. Over time, this results
in lack of trust in the institutions that we need to help us
address our challenges.
The contrasting humility virtues focus us on the limits in our
knowledge about how a complex system will behave, and about
how to resolve our differences respectfully. Humility virtues include
an open-mindedness about the views of others and a curiosity
about the perspectives of multiple disciplines. They promote genu-
ine questioning of one’s own and others’ views. They include the
gratitude appropriate for all that we learn from others. Humble
leaders typically celebrate the work ofothers, rely on high stand-
ards to motivate people, use transparent decision making, and act
“with quiet, calm determination.”22 This is compatible with also
acknowledging that we have some important kinds of knowledge,
but these virtues avoid the hubris of generalizing knowledge
beyond its legitimate scope. In times of major transition, our usual
forms of inductive reasoning about the future are even less reliable
than normal. Under such conditions, asking the right questions is
often more important than having an answer. Firms that cultivate
open-mindedness and curiosity are more likely to see break-
through solutions to problems. They are also likely to avoid group
think. If they emphasize humility virtues, organizations will be
more open to complexity and less likely to oversimplify.They will
be more likely to seek the wisdom of others and to collaborate.
They will be better positioned to be genuine learning
organizations.23
Competitive Versus Collaborative Virtues
The conviction virtues are reinforced by a set of competitive
virtues, which we celebrate in schools, sports, business, and
232 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW

international affairs. These traits govern how we relate to others in
the context of scarcity, for example, scarcity of resources or high
status positions. They reflect the assumption that the most effec-
tive way of promoting generalwelfare is through competition. We
tend to frame a wide range of interactions in terms of who wins
and who loses. Thus, we value traits like aggressiveness, tough-
ness, ruthlessness, contentiousness, and being driven to win. Our
competitive spirit has pushed us to achieve a great deal. Arguably,
it has been the virtue engine of capitalism, and it remains
important.
But our emphasis on competition has also contributed to the dif-
ficulties we have addressing our challenges. Political parties and
nations often prefer noncollaborative stances to avoid appearing
weak. Binary win/lose thinking (as in jobs vs. the environment)
tends to obscure opportunities for creative solutions that can help
all parties. Competitive habits tend to polarize positions and
demonize opponents, making compromise unattractive.
A great deal has been written lately about the importance of col-
laboration, working in teams, and developing social skills.24 When
competitive virtues are too dominant within an organization, trust
diminishes, and the organization as a whole is less likely to achieve
its goals. Employees often receive a mixed message—they should
be very good at collaborating within an organization and ruthless
with its competitors. Even the most sustainable companies must
compete in the marketplace. The collaborative virtues must become
more salient, however, if we are to succeed with cross-sector part-
nerships (business, NGO’s, government) that are increasingly
important in dealing with complex environmental and social issues
and working with diverse stakeholders.25
In some organizations, collaboration is the dominant tendency.
They tend to think of win-win rather than win-lose situations. Peo-
ple who embody collaborative virtues are good listeners, sensitive
to audience and context, fair in the distribution of benefits and
burdens, creative in seeking compromise,charitable in the inter-
pretation of others, and gracious in disagreement and confronta-
tion. These virtues are rooted in the assumption that an emphasis
on social and emotional intelligence enables us to efficiently solve
complex problems and promote functional organizations. The
increasing need to deal with diversity in the broadest sense
(employee,globalization, cross-sector) has made this much more
233THROOP AND MAYBERRY

important and challenging. Empathy and caring are also essential
to grasping the needs of others and working with them to develop
solutions that provide mutual benefits.
Our challenges are sufficiently complex that they require inte-
grating the expertise and interests of many people. Such coopera-
tive action typically requires that stakeholders feel they are
understood, that their interests are taken seriously and that they
receive a fair balance of benefits and burdens. Collaborative virtues
tend to minimize conflicts in such circumstances and build trust,
which increases the efficiency of human interaction and decreases
the need for cumbersome regulations.We will need to depend on
each other more, not less, in turbulent times. If collaborative traits
complement competitive virtues in a culture, the business is more
likely to effectively use the knowledge and skills of its employees
and know when to draw on external perspectives and partnerships.
Individualistic Versus Systems Virtues
Where competitive virtues dominate our interaction with others,
individualistic virtues tend to dominate our thinking about cau-
sation, responsibility, and justification.26 These virtues reflect the
assumption that the most productive way to solve problems is to
break them down into their discrete parts, understand each sepa-
rately, and look for linear casual relations between them that
enable us to control their interactions. When applied to humans,
individualism emphasizes the value and rights of each person rath-
er than system dynamics—this promotes the tendency to blame
individuals when things go wrong. 27 This perspective is often
extended to include a view of the common good as the sum of indi-
vidual goods; by pursuing our own welfare, we strengthen the com-
mon good. So understood, the individualistic virtues are the
cognitive habits typically used to justify our competitive tendencies
and to support our versions of control and conviction virtues.
Individualistic cognitive habits make it very difficult for us to
intuitively grasp complex socio-ecological systems; most of our
large-scale challenges are best characterized in systems language.
As a result, we tend to delay action on our challenges because our
individualistic assumptions do not provide the knowledge or the
justification for actions that reshape whole systems. They also
234 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW

undermine investment in infrastructure that supports common
goods, except where this can be justified by individual goods, as in
creating jobs. What we are calling systems virtues are intellectual
and behavioral dispositions that focus on the dynamics of whole
systems and allocate praise and blame in light of such dynamics.28
These share the assumption that most of the major issues compa-
nies face are best addressed by diverse teams that understand the
organization as a whole system that is nested within global eco-
nomic, social, and ecological systems. A number of academic fields
use systems theories, but this approach has not yet permeated
interpretive habits of most employees and many business leaders.
We need to habitually understand causation partially in terms of
the dynamics of systems, their feedback loops, and energy/infor-
mation/material flows. We need to think in terms of systems hav-
ing some homeostatic properties, but also potentially flipping to
other trajectories. We need to develop the cross-disciplinary collab-
orative habits that enable us to see complex systems as wholes
with emergent properties. We need to develop capacities for design
thinking and the creativity to develop prototypes that may leverage
system change.
The quality movement has demonstrated the potential benefits
of a systems approach to problem solving. TQM focuses on
understanding systemic causes of defects. Deming was a strong
systems thinker. 29 What we are talking about here is a similar
shift in problem-solving capability. If our cognitive habits become
more systems-focused, we will frame problems in more produc-
tive ways that integrate their economic, social, and environmen-
tal dimensions. We will become more comfortable acting under
uncertainty. Our decisions will tend to be more collaborative and
better able to achieve multiple goals simultaneously. The systems
virtues form the intellectual and moral backdrop for the frugality,
adaptive, humility, and collaborative virtues, motivating them
and providing a framework that increases coherence among
them.
APPLICATION OF THE VIRTUES
The following case study illustrates how shifting from the current
dominant virtue clusters to the transition virtues we have outlined
235THROOP AND MAYBERRY

can help a business simultaneously achieve strong financial perfor-
mance, contribute value to society, and reduce its environmental
footprint.
Green Mountain Power
Green Mountain Power (GMP) is the largest utility in Vermont,
serving around 265,000 residential and business customers—
about 75 percent of the state. In recent years, it has emerged on
the national scene as a leading innovator in renewable energy,
demonstrating how electricity can be generated,stored, and dis-
tributed in ways that are cheaper, cleaner, and more resilient to
disruptions. Recent projects include the 63-MW Kingdom Commu-
nity Wind, a ridge-top installation of 21 turbines that supplies
about 4 percent of the utility’s portfolio, and the 2 MW Stafford Hill
Solar Farm project, the first micro-grid powered only by solar and
battery back-up. Working with NRG Energy, GMP has also devel-
oped the first statewide comprehensive system ofelectric vehicle
charging stations in the Northeast. The company’s commitment to
its communities and the environment recently helped it earn certi-
fication as the first B-Corp utility in the world.
Mary Powell, Green Mountain Power’s CEO since 2008, sees
these efforts as early steps in an inevitable long-term shift away
from fossil fuels to renewables, and from a centralized distribution
model to a more distributed, smart, micro-grid approach. Critical
to GMP’s progress have been the changes at the deeper levels of
the company’s culture—the shift in virtues—that has enabled
many of these more visible changes to occur.
Frugality Virtues
Frugality at Green Mountain Power is closely connected to the com-
pany’s mission of serving its customers. As with any regulated utili-
ty, the company’s right to operate depends on keeping electricity
rates low. It might seem obvious, then, that GMP would embrace
virtues such as thrift and efficiency. But back in 1998, when Powell
was first hired as the head of HR, this was not the case. In fact, she
almost did not join the company because of the prevailing culture:
When I came for my interview I entered this campus that was
too full of pomp and circumstance for a company that exists
236 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW

to serve its customers. It was odd in Vermont to enter what
felt like an elite college campus, to walk into a massive lobby
with huge wasted space, to go up this set of stone stairs, pass
through two private secretaries in big offices to get into an
executive’s massive office with a private conference room, pri-
vate bathroom and shower. I could say that my first act of fru-
gality was to get rid of all that.
Today when you visit the company’s headquarters, you arrive at
a converted warehouse in an industrial park. Walk through the
door and you encounter a setting that looks more like a lean and
scrappy high-tech start-up than a stuffy utility. The interior space
is bathed in natural lighting and office spaces are open and collab-
orative. Mary Powell can often be found conversing around the
office, or working at her stand-up desk, located in a tiny low-walled
cube in the midst of the customer service area.
GMP’s frugality was largely born out of necessity. A bad deal
with Hydro-Quebec, and the subsequent rejection of GMP’s request
for a rate increase by Vermont’s Public Service Board, brought the
company to near bankruptcy. Powell saw the situation not as a cri-
sis, but as an opportunity to change the culture to one that was
more nimble and less bureaucratic, one more focused on trustful
relationships and getting things done than worrying about the
trappings of position. Powell describes the company culture today
as “fast, fun, and effective.”
Frugality is not about sacrificing well-being to work in dungeons
or about short-term cost cutting that props up quarterly financial
results. It is about finding ways to use resources—human, natural,
and financial—to meet customers’ energy needs in the most effi-
cient way possible. This includes making smart, long-term invest-
ments in technology and infrastructure. According to Powell:
“While you’re talking about frugality, you’re also saying we’re going
to make big investments in facilities, we’re going to double down on
technology, we’re going to double down on innovation.”
Humility Virtues
Green Mountain Power’s cultural shift is also grounded in the
deeper virtues of humility. Powell’s open office is a visible symbol of
this humility, an acknowledgment that the truth about a business
resides not in the heads of executives far removed from the front
lines, but rather with the daily concerns of customers, employees,
237THROOP AND MAYBERRY

and other stakeholders. Powell used the company’s financial crisis
in 1998 as an opportunity to change the culture to one that was
more open-minded, tolerant of ambiguity, and willing to take risks.
According to Dorothy Schnure, the company’s spokesperson who
has been with GMP since 1982: “People at the top were also
encouraged to understand that they didn’t have all the answers.
Now it’s much more of an acknowledgement that we’re allin this
together to serve the customers, and do some creative things.”
One of the ways that humility virtues appear in day-to-day oper-
ations is through GMP’s efforts to continuously improve customer
service, particularly after storm-caused outages. During one state-
wide meeting, when other utilities were publically congratulating
themselves on a 48 h recover time, Powell asked how they could all
improve the recovery time to 24 h. As Schnure recalls,
I got a call the next day from someone at another utility in the
state who was furious that Mary wasn’t congratulating every-
one on how we did, but that she was saying we could do bet-
ter. Their culture was more about “We did great” whereas
ours was “We probably did OK, but we could do a lot better,
and let’s figure out how to do it.”
Humility at GMP also means respect for every customer—like the
woman Powell met at a company reception who shared with the CEO
that she could only afford two showers per week because of the high
cost of hot water. It is a story that Powell frequently tells to keep her
organization grounded. GMP’s emphasis on customers’basic needs
now runs deep through the culture, in part because of empathy and
respect for those at the base of Vermont’s socio-economic pyramid.
Customers are not just bill payers; they are friends, co-workers,
family members,and neighbors. Decreasing response time during
storms is not done for the bottom line; it is driven by a shared desire
to eliminate hardships borne by fellow Vermonters.
Adaptive Virtues
Vermont is probably not the best state to operate a utility if you
want to control your business environment. Recently the legisla-
ture approved a bill that requires 55 percent of the power sold by
Vermont utilities to come from renewable sources by 2017. That
figure rises to 75 percent by 2032. The state’s utilities are required
to achieve minimum renewable percentages in their electricity-
238 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW

supply portfolios, support distributed energy generation from
small-scale projects, and invest in efficiency projects that reduce
fossil fuel use. According to one account, “[Vermont Governor]
Shumlin boasted that other governors say utility companies in
their states would ‘kill them’if they did something similar and that
there was no way their own utilities would cooperate with state
government in a business model like that.”30
Indeed, while some utilities are resisting the shift to renew-
ables,31 Powell is leaning into it, seeing it as an opportunity to cre-
ate a fundamentally different business model. According to Powell,
The biggest challenge utilities face is resistance versus accep-
tance. If you look at any industry sector, the long-term win-
ners are always those who figure out how to innovate and
move in the direction their customers want to go. That’s why
for us, it’s not a debate.32
GMP’s ability to embrace change has enabled the utility to
reimagine itself as an energy service provider offering a wider range
of bundled products, from charging stations to batteries. As an
entrepreneur, Powell is well aware that in a rapidly changing busi-
ness environment, it is essential to keep looking forward:
“Whenever you think you’ve arrived you’re in trouble, because you
are just riding the wave until you see the next wave that you have
to catch.” But constantly pushing the envelope is not always easy.
For example, adaptability has meant finding positive ways to
deal with the potentially negative impacts of GMP’s merger with
Central Vermont Public Services (CVPS) Corporation in 2012.
Because the CVPS headquarters was located in Rutland, 2 h south
of GMP’s headquarters, community leaders feared potential job
losses and the devastating impact they could have on the local
economy.Powell recognized the criticalneed to invest in Rutland,
and she translated this into an opportunity to transform Rutland
into “The Solar Capital of New England” with the highest per capita
solar generation of any city in the northeast. The company located
its new Energy Innovation Center downtown, helping to attract
other new tenants, many of them solar entrepreneurs, to a revital-
ized Rutland. The new GMP has also regained the trust of local res-
idents by carrying forward the legacy of CVPS and contributing
significant time, talent and financial resources to numerous local
projects that have helped build a more vibrant community.
239THROOP AND MAYBERRY

Collaborative Virtues
As a statewide utility, GMP has numerous stakeholders: the state
legislature, the Public Service Board, numerous business partners,
other utilities around the state, nonprofit organizations, communi-
ty leaders, its employees, and of course, its customers. Collabora-
tion would be much easier if all parties shared the same priorities,
but this is rarely the case. Even when organizations share common
goals, there can be competitive behavior that interferes with out-
comes. GMP has worked to create more positive collaborations by
practicing a number of the virtues in the collaborative cluster such
as active listening, sensitivity to audience and context, fairness in
sharing benefits and responsibilities, seeking creative compro-
mises, and being gracious in disagreement.
Consider, for example, GMP’s relationship with Efficiency Ver-
mont, the statewide utility created in 2000 by the Public Service
Board to deliver energy efficiency programs to customers. In
developing its eHome program in Rutland, GMP has needed to fig-
ure out how to coordinate leasing programs for heat pumps in a
way that avoids confusion for customers. It would have been easy
to view Efficiency Vermont as a competitor since both companies
have state-mandated goals (as specified by the legislature).
Instead, Powell helped bring the parties together by focusing on
the needs of customers. The result is that GMP’s eHome initiative
offers residents an easy and affordable way to give their homes a
complete energy makeover with a package that includes energy
efficiency, solar power, and smart controls to optimize and moni-
tor real-time energy use—all financed through the customer’s
utility bill. This initiative has required developing customer-
focused relationships with other partners, including Neighbor-
Works (a nonprofit which conducts energy audits, and provides
low-interest loans to residents for energy improvements), and
numerous local solar contractors. GMP is also one of the first util-
ities in the nation to offer Tesla’s Powerwall home battery to its
customers as a way to reduce peak-load usage and have clean
back-up power during outages.
These collaborations feed the long-term financial bottom line.
The risk with decentralized energy in coming decades is that a utili-
ty will lose customers who find it easier and cheaper to leave the
grid. This will force the utility to raise rates to maintain investor
returns, driving more customers to go off-grid. By bundling smart-
240 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW

grid services GMP makes it cheaper and more convenient to remain
on the grid.
Seen through the lens of traditional virtues, collaboration can at
times seem time consuming and burdensome. Powell sees it
differently:
When I hear a lot of people talk about collaboration, they
translate it into this slow, tortuous process. The cultural attri-
bute I try to drive is impatience. Yes, you have to collaborate,
but that’s not an excuse to have 50 meetings and then decide
to have 5 more. I’m very focused on collaboration that is about
innovating. Moving quick, moving fast, taking some risk, may-
be making a mistake, and then collaborating again. The rea-
son we are partners with a fast-moving innovator like Tesla is
because we could move fast enough to come up with a master
agreement in time before they launched their Powerwall. So
it’s about speed and impatience.
Systems Virtues
Mary Powell is an intuitive systems thinker. Talk to her about why
Rutland’s Solar Capital initiative is important, and she will weave
together a story that connects the shift to a low-carbon economy,
future trends in smart-grid technology, the opportunity to attract
local entrepreneurs to the area, linkages between the localecono-
my and the quality of life in Rutland, and how that impacts
employee recruitment and engagement.Powell’s systems perspec-
tive may explain why she never needed to use the word
“sustainability” during our interviews when describing GMP’s busi-
ness strategy,or the company’s initiatives in renewable energy or
community development.To Powell, the connection between sus-
tainability and the business is obvious:
It is absolutely a common sense natural way to do business
for me. It feels so logical that it escapes me why others don’t
intuitively see it as an informal mandate if you want to run a
successful business. I actually have a dislike for creating
“Sustainability Officers” and the like, because it signals that it
is something apart from the core of doing business. It should
be a part of what everyone does.
GMP does not treat sustainability as a bolt-on activity, or as a set
of tools to be applied, but as an integral part of its culture and core
241THROOP AND MAYBERRY

business strategy. This approach to sustainability is embedded in
the first sentence of the company’s mission statement: “Green
Mountain Power has a vision to use energy as a force for good,
improving lives and transforming communities.” Realizing this
vision in an industry heavily invested in traditional grid infrastruc-
ture requires taking a long view about business opportunities.
Powell and her team are thinking 30–50 years in the future as
they invest in today’s smart-grid technologies and experiment with
service offerings. With the big picture in mind, they see opportunities
to create a more efficient system that will keep customers connected
to the grid, enabling GMP to continue providing cost-saving services
to them. For example, GMP recently announced that customers who
purchase Tesla’s Powerwall home battery can opt for a service where
GMP pays them a monthly fee to utilize the energy stored in their
batteries during peak load times. This lowers costs by reducing the
utility’s transmission and capacity requirements. The idea of a utili-
ty company paying its customers to use less expensive energy must
seem crazy to other companies in the industry with a traditional
mindset. But it is exactly this kind of counterintuitive (and systems)
thinking that is behind GMP’s innovative and disruptive business
model. And it is a model that provides stable financial returns to the
company’s owners, while reducing electricity rates for customers
and satisfying regulators. By combining operational efficiency with
innovation, GMP has reduced electric rates by more than 2 percent
over the past 4 years during a period when average New England
rates were increasing significantly (9.7 percent in 2014 alone).33 In a
regulated environment, where excess profits are passed back to con-
sumers, this indicates strong financial performance.
The preceding case study illustrates several additional points
about how companies can flourish amid these turbulent times,
benefiting both the business and society. First, the examples from
GMP show how virtues are not manifested in either/or choices, but
rather in nuanced approaches that lie somewhere between polar
extremes. Virtues are means between opposing vices of excess and
deficiency. Powell’s approach to the virtue of frugality at corporate
headquarters lies between the excess of extravagance and the defi-
ciency of austerity. The level of collaboration she seeks during
meetings is somewhere between being over-deliberative and super-
ficial about decision making. Finding the appropriate mean
requires flexibility and judgement.
242 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW

Second, Powell demonstrates how the role of the senior leader is
critical to the cultural transformation process in an organization.
Consistent with change theory, the CEO must convey an authentic
sense of urgency for cultural change and demonstrate a commit-
ment to that change by eliminating reward systems (both formal
and informal) that perpetuate the old culture.34 The senior leader
plays an important role in modeling new desired behaviors for the
organization.35 The CEO also facilitates cultural change by creating
a shared vision of the future, challenging herself and others when
actions do not align with espoused values, protecting those who
break the old rules, and celebrating “mistakes.” Shifting to a new
set of dominant virtues requires breaking with convention, and
first attempts at doing so rarely produce the kind of immediate
breakthrough results that will be rewarded by the existing culture.
It helps tremendously when a CEO like Powell is willing to lead
from the front of the line.
Lastly, the case shows how the right culture is needed to
address the multiple challenges faced by a business. In GMP’s
case, the transformation to a more open and entrepreneurialcul-
ture provided the nimbleness and creativity needed to devise inno-
vative approaches to community engagement with Rutland and to
create bundled services in partnership with NRG and Tesla. The
competencies needed to thrive in a transitioning world overlap
strongly with those needed to be nimble and innovative. Without
these basic capabilities, an organization is unlikely to successfully
take on the complex web of social and environmental challenges
that sustainability requires.
IMPLEMENTING CHANGE
The shift in virtue emphases is an integrated “package deal;” the
virtues clusters are mutually reinforcing. Humility leads us to ask
deeply probing questions. Combined with a larger systems view,
that curiosity leads us to inquire about our impact on others and
the natural world. Mix in frugality, and we begin to seek ways to
conserve and restore social and natural capital. Add collaboration,
and we engage other stakeholders in finding innovative approaches
together.Blend in adaptiveness, and we bring flexibility, grit, and
ingenuity to our work. The meal is thus much more than the
243THROOP AND MAYBERRY

separate ingredients or the recipe. Just as it is impossible to
decompose the Toyota culture into separate elements and still
retain the essence of the Toyota Way, the culture shift required for
these transitional times loses its deeper meaning when broken
down into a list of competencies. The whole that exceeds the sum
of the parts relates to the deepest levels of the virtues that govern
our subconscious responses. We have referred to this as a sustain-
ability mindset. Steve Schein, who has studied the development of
sustainability leaders in corporations from a psychological perspec-
tive, refers to this as an ecological worldview.36 It is this underlying
mindset that enables us to see connections to nature and to each
other in ways that would otherwise be hidden from us.
We want to be clear that we are not saying that the sustainabili-
ty virtues should replace the dominant virtues; both are important
and appropriate parts of a business culture. The former just need
more emphasis if businesses are to navigate the transition that is
upon us. We will still need strong leaders, competitive practices
and justified convictions. We are also not saying sustainability vir-
tues are morally superior. They are especially useful in this transi-
tional context.
Each organization (and each leader within that organization) will
need to define their own path in working through these transition
challenges. While GMP’s relatively small size (600 employees)has
enabled Mary Powell to use personal interactions with employees
to promote change,leaders of larger organizations will need ways
to scale up their approach. In a control-dominant world, it may be
tempting to define a set of specific rules or guidelines to follow
when describing a cultural shift. However, if we are to operate
more compatibly with our complex and uncertain world, we will
need to resist rigid rule-based approaches, and learn to tailor our
solutions to our circumstances. Aristotle referred to this capability
as practical wisdom.37 Practical wisdom provides the judgment
necessary to determine what is required in a situation. It helps us
navigate the inevitable tensions between today’s dominant virtues
and the sustainability virtues. It tells us when to be competitive,
and when to be cooperative—when to present a vision with convic-
tion, and when to listen more carefully. It helps us frame our
choices in terms of the larger purposes of our organization.
Without rules, how will leaders shift the emphasis on virtues as
we recommend? Virtues are cultivated through reflective practice,
244 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW

by acting consciously in new ways, and making adjustments when
behaviors fall short. Today, we refer to this as experiential learn-
ing,38 the cycle of experimentation,reflection, thinking, and deci-
sion making that is iterative and cumulative. This learning process
is more complex than training for specific skills because the
desired behaviors are context-specific, and therefore, the appropri-
ate response to a particular situation cannot be prescribed at the
outset. Virtues must be practiced over time, in multiple contexts,
until our instinctive responses begin to change.
Experiential learning requires making mistakes along the way.
This can be problematic when the business stakes are high. To
shift cultures, then, organizations will need to create a safe learn-
ing environment that minimizes the learning anxiety managers feel
when they are pushed beyond their comfort zones in high-stakes
situations. Companies will also need to accelerate the experiential
learning process since feedback loops within complex stakeholder
systems can take years or decades to play out. Accelerating this
process will be especially critical for large firms if they are to
remain competitive, since the business landscape is changing
faster than the typical adoption time for cultural change.
Fortunately, there are several promising approaches for accel-
erating the practice of the virtues we have outlined here. For
example, full-immersion business simulations that combine role-
playing with computer simulation can recreate the system
dynamics and serve as “practice fields” for leaders to experiment
with new approaches. Such simulations accelerate learning by
compressing time and space, thus making feedback much more
immediate.39 Other complementary approaches can also be used
to take leaders out of their comfort zones and open them up to
new perspectives. For example, skills-based pro bono programs
such as IBM’s Corporate Service Corps enable leaders to practice
new capabilities as they help organizations in developing coun-
tries tackle social challenges.40 These programs give leaders prac-
tice solving real social and environmental problems in a different
part of the world, and thus gain a new perspective. Within organi-
zations, action learning projects can also be effective growth expe-
riences. In all cases, the learning experiences need to be directly
linked to the needs of the core business. 41 When combined with
effective leadership from the top, these experiences can catalyze
and accelerate a paradigm shift.
245THROOP AND MAYBERRY

For any of these approaches to work, leadership development and
corporate responsibility must be viewed as integral to the business
and not delegated to departments. This will require breaking down
traditional silos between talent development, line management, and
corporate responsibility offices—and viewing organizational culture
as the enabler of a company’s long-term strategy.As Mary Powell
expressed it, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast every day.” Organi-
zations that can make the cultural shift needed to thrive in today’s
turbulent world will achieve an enviable (and sustainable) competi-
tive position because they will grasp the emerging opportunities for
innovation while their rivals see only risks and costs.
CONCLUSION
The business case for the sustainability virtues includes traditional
motivations such as higher revenue, lower operating costs, and
reduced risk of exposed downside impacts of doing business. It also
includes social motivations,increased employee engagement,cus-
tomer loyalty,and brand trust. 42 As more businesses continue to
realize these benefits,there will be increasing interest in pursuing
sustainability strategies. There is both promise and peril in this trend.
The promise is that we can create a reinforcing feedback loop
where business success with sustainability strategies encourages
more and more companies to shift their strategies. As organiza-
tions’ activities become more aligned with the needs ofa broader
range of stakeholders the perception of business as contributing to
the greater good will begin to shift. Business will come to be viewed
as a source of good behavior; not just an exploiter of resources for
financial gain.
At the same time, there is a peril in creating a bandwagon for
organizations to jump on. Opportunists will pursue sustainability
strategies at a superficial level—by focusing on tools, copying other
companies’ strategies, training employees in sheep-dip fashion,
and delegating the work of sustainability to a specialized function.
Abundant and controlling leaders will seek fast growth and imme-
diate scalability rather than adopting a longer-term view. In effect,
organizations will try to perform in new ways, but with old virtues.
Without addressing the deeper, hidden layers of virtues, such
efforts will miss the emerging opportunities that arise from shifting
246 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW

beliefs and attitudes, such as we have outlined here. It is this
deeper shift that ultimately changes how business will behave—
even when no one is looking—and ultimately create a closer align-
ment with the new environment we face.43
NOTES
1. Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 1994), 75.
2. See, for example, Bruce Griffiths and Enrique Washington, Competen-
cies at Work: Providing a Common Language for TalentManagement(New
York: Business Expert Press, 2015).
3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.Translated by Robert C. Bartlett and
Susan D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
4. Edgar H. Schein, “How can organizations learn faster? The challenge of
entering the green room,” Sloan Management Review 34/2 (1993): 85–92.
5. See “Encyclical letter Laudato Si’ of the holy father francis on care for our
common home (official English-language textof encyclical).”Available at
http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-fra
ncesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html, accessed January 12, 2016.
6. Will Steffen, Regina Angelina Sanderson,Peter D. Tyson, Jill J €ager,
Pamela A. Matson, Berrien Moore III, Frank Oldfield et al., Global Change and
the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2004).
7. The Millennium Ecosystem assessment reports are an excellent guide to
these challenges; they can be found at http://www.millenniumassessment.
org/en/index.html, accessed December 12, 2014.
8. Amy Mitchell, Jeffrey Gottfried, Jocelyn Kiley, and Katerina Eva Matsa,
PoliticalPolarization & Media Habits, A Pew Research Journalism Project,
http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-media-habits/
accessed December 12, 2014. See also the Pew Research Center report Political
Polarization and the American Public, http://www.people-press.org/files/
2014/06/6-12-2014-Political-Polarization-Release.pdf accessed December 12,
2014.
9. Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer, “Creating Shared Value: How to
Reinvent Capitalism—and Unleash a Wave of Innovation and Growth,”
Harvard Business Review 89/1 (2011): 62–77.
10. For the original BOP concept, see C. K. Prahalad and Stuart L. Hart,
“The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid,” Strategy 1 Business 26 (2002):
1–14; for a recent review, see Fernando Casado Ca~neque and Stuart L. Hart,
247THROOP AND MAYBERRY

eds., Base of the Pyramid 3.0:Sustainable Development through Innovation
and Entrepreneuship (Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf, 2015).
11. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of Ameri-
can Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
12. While globalization and technology innovations have made many
goods more affordable, they may also have contributed to a decline in
manufacturing jobs in the United States that paid well and supported the mid-
dle class. For an example of the kind of debate centered on these issues, see
Thomas B. Edsall, “Is the American middle class losing out to China and
India?,” New York Times, April 1, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/
04/02/opinion/edsall-is-the-american-middle-class-losing-out-to-china-
and-india.html?, accessed October 18, 2015.
13. According to Kahneman,fast thinking determines our first impres-
sions and instinctive responses, while slow thinking governs more deliberate
logic and reasoning.See Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
14. Schein also describes organizational culture in terms of layers, with
“unconscious, taken-for-granted beliefs, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings”
at the deepest (hidden) level. See Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and
Leadership, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992).
15. For an in-depth discussion of the Toyota quality system and the cul-
ture that underpins it, see Jeffrey K. Liker and Michael Hoseus, Toyota Cul-
ture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008).
16. See, for example, the discussion in Michael Beer, “Why total quality
management programs do not persist: The role of management quality and
implications for leading a TQM transformation,” Decision Sciences 34/4
(2003): 623–642.
17. Bruce Piasecki, Doing More With Less (Hoboken,NJ: John Wiley &
Sons, 2012).
18. Ed Diener and Martin Seligman, “Very happy people,” Psychological
Science 13/1 (2002): 81–84.
19. Susan Cartwright and Nicola Holmes, “The meaning of work: The chal-
lenge of regaining employee engagementand reducing cynicism,” Human
Resource Management Review 16 (2006): 199–208.
20. Interface carpets is a good example of this. In 1994, then CEO Ray
Anderson initiated a multipronged initiative to eliminate the company’s envi-
ronmental footprint by 2020. The first phase of their effort focused on frugality
in terms of resource efficiency:eliminating waste to reduce fossilfuel con-
sumption, reducing toxic emissions and solid waste disposal,and saving
costs. For a full account, see Ray Anderson, Confessions of Radical
248 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW

Industrialist: Profits, People, Purpose—Doing Business by Respecting the Earth
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009).
21. Carl Folke, “Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social–eco-
logical systems analyses,” Global Environmental Change 16 (2006): 253–267.
22. For this kind of description and defense of humility in business leader-
ship, see Jim Collins, “Level 5 leadership: The Triumph of humility and fierce
resolve,” Harvard Business Review 79/1 (2001): 66–76.
23. Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning
Organization (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1990).
24. Julie M. Wondolleck and Steven L. Yaffee, Making Collaboration Work
(Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000).
25. An example is the cross-sector collaboration to minimize the negative
impact of the palm oil industry on rainforests and indigenous communities.
The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) has brought together stake-
holders that include producers,consumer goods manufacturers,retailers,
banks/investors, governments,and NGOs to develop environmental and
social criteria to minimize the negative impact of palm oil production. See, for
example, http://www.rspo.org, accessed October 5, 2015.
26. This generalization may be limited to western developed countries.
Considerable research suggests that eastern cultures tend to focus more on
group and context. Recent research suggests the differences may arise from
early patterns of food production—the emphasis on wheat in the west, which
requires little collaboration to grow, compared with rice in the east that
requires shared irrigation systems. See T. Talhelm et al., “Large-scale psycho-
logical differences within China explained by rice versus wheat agriculture,”
Science 344/6184 (2014): 603–608.
27. Senge, The Fifth Discipline, 19–20.
28. Donella Meadows,Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Brattleboro,VT:
Chelsea Green Press, 2008); Allen Thompson, “The virtue of responsibility for
the global climate,” in Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of
the Future, edited by Allen Thompson and Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 203–222.
29. This is evident in W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics for Indus-
try, Government, Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). The book out-
lines Deming’s proposalfor transforming management system to one that
supports improvement.
30. Sarah Olsen, “Bill that aims to cut costs and raise efficiency is signed
into law,” VTDigger.org,June 11, 2015, http://vtdigger.org/2015/06/11/
bill-that-cuts-energy-costs-for-vermonters-and-raises-efficiency-standards-
is-signed-into-law/, accessed August 1, 2015.
249THROOP AND MAYBERRY

31. Bill McKibben, “Power to the people:Why the rise of green energy
makes utility companies nervous,” The New Yorker, June 29, 2015, http://
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/29/power-to-the-people, accessed
September 1, 2015.
32. Rachel Barron, “How green mountain power’s Mary Powell is
building the utility of the future,” Solar Energy, December 8, 2014,
http://solarenergy.net/News/green-mountain-powers-mary-powell-building-
the-utility-of-the-future/, accessed August 1, 2015.
33. See “New England electric rates increased 10 percent, Vermont rates
down 1.6 percent,” VermontBiz, http://www.vermontbiz.com/news/april/
new-england-electric-rates-increased-10-percent-vermont-rates-down-16-per-
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34. See, for example, John P. Kotter, Leading Change (Boston, MA:
Harvard Business School Press, 1996).
35. Bernard M. Bass and Ronald E. Riggio, Transformational Leadership,
2nd ed. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006).
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Hidden Power of Ecological Worldviews (Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf, 2015).
37. Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe, Practical Wisdom: The Right Way
to Do the Right Thing (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010).
38. See, for example, David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as
the Source of Learning and Development (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1984).
39. For a discussion of how simulations can be used to learn about com-
plex systems, see John D. Sterman, Business Dynamics:Systems Thinking
and Modeling for a Complex World (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000).
40. See Rachael Chong and Melissa Fleming, “Why IBM gives top employ-
ees a month to do service abroad,” HBR.org, November 5, 2014, https://hbr.
org/2014/11/why-ibm-gives-top-employees-a-month-to-do-service-abroad/,
accessed November 23, 2015.
41. H. Skipton Leonard and Michael J. Marquardt, “The evidence for the
effectiveness of action learning,” Action Learning: Research and Practice 7/2
(2010): 121–136.
42. Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston, Green to Gold: How Smart Com-
panies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Com-
petitive Advantage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
43. The authors wish to thank Mary Powell and the team at Green Moun-
tain Power for their assistance with our case study. We also would like to thank
Karen Martinsen Fleming, Bill Prado, and Bruce Piasecki for their helpful com-
ments on this manuscript.
250 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW