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The rules of nature can help you succeed in adversity, but they can also steer you wrong.

Business strategy expert and longtime MIT Sloan professor Rebecca Henderson is a sustainability integrationist. Like other founding members of the school's Laboratory for Sustainable Business (S-Lab), she finds sustainability's implications everywhere in daily economic and social life and everywhere interrelated. But among the multi-disciplinary angles from which she attacks sustainability are two questions that are interestingly oblique: What capabilities and behaviors make organizations themselves sustainable? And, why are some organizations so extraordinarily better than others at getting new things done? (Learn more about Henderson, and find selected links to her work on our website sloanreview.mit.edu.) In this installment of The MIT Sustainability Interview series, Henderson spoke with MIT Sloan Management Review editor-in-chief Michael S. Hopkins about the baseline understandings and misunderstandings about sustainability, and the choices it will present to leaders.

Above all else, MIT Sloan professor John Sterman is a world-class "systems guy" he leads the school's System Dynamics Group, is a trained scientist, is co-leader of MIT Sloan's Sustainable Business Lab (S-Lab) and perhaps unsurprisingly brings to any conversation about sustainability a certain impatience with views that refuse either to confront the evident facts or, for that matter, to see the problem whole instead of in parts, to see it as the systemic set of interdependencies that it is. But if indeed this should register as a "but" he is a humanist, too. And "a true optimist." And it is impossible to come away from talking with him without feeling that there is work to do, yes, but that it can be done. And that for businesses, doing that work presents an opportunity, not just a threat.

Jeff Seabright, The Coca-Cola Company’s vice president of environment and water resources, explores how the beverage giant is moving to greater sustainability.

Like most leading thinkers about the intersection of sustainability and business, Richard Locke got here from somewhere else. Trained as a political scientist, he became known early on for expertise in supply chain labor practices, and for advocating that social and economic concerns be integrated into curriculum and research. Now, as the Alvin J, Siteman Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a Professor in the political science department at MIT, Locke's interdisciplinary cast of mind is evident in all the work he does especially his exploration of sustainability. He has helped spearhead the development of MIT Sloan's Laboratory for Sustainable Business (S-Lab), which, notably, not only investigates sustainable-management issues in the classroom but puts students inside companies that are grappling with sustainability challenges on every front. Locke's own current research focuses on improving labor and environmental standards in global supply chains. As a result of his research on Nike and its efforts to improve working conditions among its suppliers, Locke was awarded the Faculty Pioneer Award from the Aspen Institute's Business and Society Program.

What really precipitated the global financial crisis?

Companies have long used teams to solve problems: focus groups to explore customer needs, consumer surveys to understand the market and annual meetings to listen to shareholders. But the words “solve,” “explore,” “understand” and “listen” have now taken on a whole new meaning. Thanks to recent technologies, including many Web 2.0 applications, companies can now tap into “the collective” on a greater scale than ever before. Indeed, the increasing use of information markets, wikis, crowdsourcing, “the wisdom of crowds” concepts, social networks, collaborative software and other Web-based tools constitutes a paradigm shift in the way that many companies make decisions. Call it the emerging era of “Decisions 2.0.” But the proliferation of such technologies necessitates a framework for understanding what type of collective intelligence is possible (or not), desirable (or not) and affordable (or not) & #8212; and under what conditions. At a minimum, managers need to consider the following key issues: loss of control, diversity versus expertise, engagement, policing, intellectual property and mechanism design. By understanding such important issues, companies like Affinnova, Google, InnoCentive, Marketocracy and Threadless have successfully implemented Decisions 2.0 applications for a variety of purposes, including research and development, market research, customer service and knowledge management. The bottom line is this: For many problems that a company faces, there could well be a solution out there somewhere, far outside of the traditional places that managers might search, within or outside the organization. The trick, though, is to develop the right tool for locating that source and then tap into it.

In his book Remix, Stanford"s Lawrence Lessig argues for a new approach.

Over the past several decades, research has shown how both cognitive biases and small group dynamics can undermine effective decision making in organizations. However, there has been little work on the ways that informal networks impact framing and execution of decisions. In this article, the authors examine the roles decision networks play, both within teams and throughout organizations, in the way decisions are framed and carried out. Although company leaders frequently recognize the importance of such decision networks, they fail to leverage their potential and focus instead on the organization’s formal structure. The authors present two indepth case studies to show how network analysis applied to decision-making interactions within organizations can help improve the effectiveness and efficiency of decision making. The first case demonstrates how a rapidly growing pharmaceuticals company used process mapping and network analysis to streamline decision-making interactions. A team found that decision-making inefficiencies permeated the organization. Decision rights were not clearly delineated or allocated, and even mundane approvals had high collaborative costs. The second case, based on a larger, more established company, shows how network analysis can improve top-team decision making and execution in organizations slowed by bureaucracy and a culture of consensus. The company had sought a technological fix in an effort to rescue itself from organizational gridlock, but the problems persisted. A network analysis helped senior managers identify the underlying network drivers of gridlock, thereby enabling them to take targeted steps to speed up and improve decision making. In both cases, the authors highlight the insights and performance impact that can result when decisions are viewed through a network perspective. Although it is still early, the benefits of understanding how decision-making networks affect the top team appear to be compelling. The number of collaborations required to execute decisions at key points in the network was significantly reduced. This had a positive effect on both company performance and morale.