Welcome to Green Business Strategy! Have you ever wondered why more companies are not more environmental? Would you like to see your company become more environmental? Would you like to be able to assess what sort of environmental strategy could work for a company? Or to understand if a company is using an environmental strategy that is likely to be successful. This course will help you answer these questions and more. Because almost all environmental harm is done through some form of business activity from resource extraction through consumption and waste, it is necessary that we train business people to understand why, when, and how to align environment and business strategy. At this time not all environmental activities will be profitable, and not all profitable firms will be environmental. But if a firm can be both environmental and successful, it will inspire others to follow their example so we will have more firms involved in reducing their environmental harm. But it is not easy for a firm to be green and successful, so we explore why a firm might want to go green, what the benefits are to going green, and what it means to be a green business. People often wonder if environmental investments will pay off, so we share some of the research on this. Firms worldwide are increasingly held accountable for their environmental actions so we introduce a concept called the social license to operate as a way to understand how a firm can build trust and legitimacy. This is a very useful tool to understand how a firm can work with a community to build value, and also to understand how firms can lose value. The core of the course is a very useful environmental strategy framework that will help you understand how a firm can gain a competitive advantage through its environmental actions. To help you understand how this works in real life we describe case studies of firms that are doing exactly this, being environmental and successful. We are at a period of great change on the planet and the relationship between business and the natural world are at the heart of some very serious problems. To understand what the future of business and environment might look like, we need to look back to where our global business practices came from. To do this we need to go back to the wild west of the United States in the second industrial revolution where mass production and mass consumption took hold and today’s business practices emerged. We take you through railroads, buffalo, the QWERTY keyboard, the Sears catalog and the Harvard MBA. From these you will gain insight into why things are stuck the way they are, which is a good step towards understanding how we might get unstuck. Looking into the future, today’s relationship between business and the environment is still in the early stages of an unfolding evolution in how we think about environmental problems. We explain the likely stages of this evolution so you can make better sense of the world around you. Whether you are an environmentalist who wishes to know more about business or a businessperson who wishes to know more about the environment, the content of this course will be useful to you. Thank you for listening