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IN FOCUS: LEADERSHIP

Highlighting innovators and leaders in the Good Business movement

PROFESSOR STUART HART: Pioneer in Sustainable Business

Long before sustainable business practices were fashionable, Stuart Hart, PhD was driving the change. In 1993, Hart created the Corporate Environmental Management Program (CEMP) at The University of Michigan Business School (now the Ross School of Business) in 1993. In the early 90s, the concept of sustainable business was laughingly labeled “treehugging.” However, Hart as a driving force in the application of environmental sustainability in business must be having the last laugh now. Maverick and innovator Hart wrote the ground-breaking article, “Beyond Greening: Strategies for a Sustainable World” published in the Harvard Business Review in 1997. Way ahead of the curve, the article garnered the McKinsey Award and was instrumental in launching the corporate sustainability movement. In 2002, he co-authored another cutting edge article with C.K. Prahalad entitled, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.”

At The University of North Carolina, Kenan-Flager Business School in 1999, Hart launched the Center for Sustainable Enterprise (CSE) which evolved into the Sustainable Enterprise Initiative. A year later in 2000, Hart created the Base of the Pyramid Learning Lab. The Ross School and Kenan-Flager Business School are considered leading academic institutions on sustainable business thanks in large part to Hart’s vision. According to BRINQ, an initiative dedicated to resolving poverty issues through business strategies, “Base of the Pyramid (BoP), is a socio-economic designation for the 4 billion individuals that live primarily in developing countries and whose annual per capita incomes fall below $1,500.”

In 2003, Professor Hart joined the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. At Cornell he co-authored the BoP Protocol, a guideline for social enterprise initiatives focused on the world’s poorest. Business Week calls Hart “one of the founding fathers of the "base of the pyramid" economic theory” and claims Hart “plays a crucial role in reshaping the way companies view the 4 billion people who live in poverty.” Hart founded and chairs Cornell’s Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise which spawned the innovative programs, "Base of the Pyramid Learning Lab" and "Sustainable Innovation Learning Lab." (See IN FOCUS: Institutions & Programs)

The foreword of his 2005 book Capitalism at the Crossroads is written by Climate Change Nobel Prize winner and former US Vice President, Al Gore. In the book’s acknowledgements, Hart credits his professors as an undergraduate student at University of Rochester and grad student at Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for his interest in combining environmental studies and management. He writes, “I am living proof that college professors really do have enormously important influence on their students.” Indeed they do. As exemplified by Hart, college professors can also have an “enormous important influence” on the world at large. Hats off to maverick thinker and educator Stuart Hart.

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