Stuart Hart

Corporate Sustainability Expert

Capitalism at the Crossroads: Creating Sustainable Value

Link to this speaker

Create PDF

Email to a friend

Back to search results

Stuart Hart is one of the world's foremost speakers on corporate sustainability. More than just "being green for the sake of green", Hart focuses on creating sustainable value -- growing profits, increasing competitive advantage, and generating growth -- through the pursuit of sustainability. His vision of a sustainable future is one in which companies, and even nations, can flourish indefinitely. This means reversing the widening gap between rich and poor, and halting the rampant loss of natural capital and biodiversity worldwide. Hart believes that business can, and should, be the engine for change. The winning companies of the present and future will be sustainable enterprises, companies that grow and profit by moving us more rapidly in a sustainable direction. Attaining global sustainability through this new breed of enterprise calls for transformational change in corporate vision and strategy. To address this challenge, companies must learn how to open up to the world: Strategies need to take into account the entire human community of 6.7 billion, as well as the host of other species with which we share the planet. To realize the vision of sustainable enterprise, a new set of guiding principles are needed -- and Stuart Hart is at the forefront of developing them.

Stuart Hart is the Samuel C. Johnson Chair in Sustainable Global Enterprise and Professor of Management at Cornell University's Johnson School of Management. He is also Founder and President of Enterprise for a Sustainable World. Hart has published over 70 papers and has authored or edited seven books. His article "Beyond Greening: Strategies for a Sustainable World" won the McKinsey Award for Best Article in the Harvard Business Review for 1997 and helped launch the movement for corporate sustainability. With C.K. Prahalad, Hart also wrote the path-breaking 2002 article "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid," which provided the first articulation of how business could profitably serve the needs of the four billion poor in the developing world. His best-selling 2005 book, Capitalism at the Crossroads, was named as one of the top 50 books on sustainability of all-time.

Stuart Hart Speech Topics

Capitalism at the Crossroads: Creating Sustainable Value

In order to realize the vision of sustainable enterprise, we have to change the way we do business. In this practical keynote, Stuart Hart shares the key building blocks and philosophies that he sees as crucial to any sustainable enterprise. Companies must abandon the notion that being sustainable requires a trade-off in profit, understand the powerful disruptive potential of sustainable technology, and engage the poor to better serve (and profit from) underserved communities. By engaging populations in developing nations, or what Hart calls "the base of the pyramid", we can help spark global growth -- leading us into a new age of capitalism that brings widely distributed benefits to the entire human community. With unparalleled expertise, Hart helps his audiences change the way they think about business, and gives them the tools they need to make their own sustainable enterprise.

Next Generation Business Strategies for the Base of the Pyramid

During the last decade, companies launched scores of business ventures aimed at serving the world's four billion poor at the base of the pyramid (BoP). These first generation strategies focused primarily on "finding a fortune at the base of the pyramid" by selling existing goods to and sourcing familiar products from the poor. Many of these initiatives did not scale and some failed outright. But through this experience, crucial lessons have been learned. In this keynote, BoP pioneer Stuart Hart shows how to apply these lessons through next-generation BoP strategies which seek to "create a fortune with the base of the pyramid." By combining the latest leapfrog "green" technology from the developed world with the local knowledge and ancient practices of local communities, Hart shows how to craft and implement BoP strategies with the potential to create entirely new markets -- and reinvent corporate business models for the future.

BOOKS

Next Generation Business Strategies for the Base of the Pyramid

Looking Forward

Capitalism at the Crossroads

All Speakers > Stuart Hart

SUSAN CAIN at TED 2012

"When it comes to creativity and to leadership," Susan Cain said at TED 2012, "we need introverts doing what they do best." Her talk received a standing ovation. Cain's instant bestseller, Quiet, is a manifesto for the one-third to one-half of the population who are introverts—and who have been told, all their life, that their natural personality is flawed, that behaving like an extrovert is the only path to success. Most of our institutions, from schools to workplaces, are heavily biased toward extroverts. A self-identified introvert, Cain is working to change this and to radically transform the way we develop leaders, manage teams, make smart hires, and stimulate innovation.