The Sustainable Corporation: Organisational Renewal in Australia

Australia's corporations are shaping up to two acute challenges. In the face of global competition in a knowledge economy, they must develop their human capital to an extent unknown before. In the face of global environmental degradation, they must also pursue technologies which are ecologically sustainable. Those who will prosper are corporations who thrive on the continuous renewal of human talent and ecological resources.Fortunately, there is a movement whose history has helped prepare the way to answer those challenges. The Sustainable Corporationtraces the revolutionary shift in the approach to management and human resources which has occurred in the last 30 years-a shift from the Taylorist methods of the industrial age to a more flexible, dynamic and responsive vision of management. Instrumental in that shift has been the organisational renewal movement, an international group of committed change theorists and practitioners such as Fred Emery, Hollis Peter, Dexter Dunphy and Bill Ford, who have sought to reconcile social and managerial objectives, previously thought to be irredeemably at odds.The ORM's history runs its course from the organisational heresy of a handful of visionaries to a now accepted orthodoxy. The Sustainable Corporationdraws the lessons from that history to outline an agenda for change needed to meet the sustainability challenges of our time. The organisations which act within our world must do so not with the intent to exploit, pollute or plunder, but rather to renew the life of the planet and ourselves. This is the new heresy which must become the orthodoxy of the twenty-first century.Dunphy, Dexter is the author of 'The Sustainable Corporation: Organisational Renewal in Australia' with ISBN 9781864487527 and ISBN 1864487526.