According to our textbook, “the one lesson of business consists of identifying a

Question

According to our textbook, “the one lesson of business consists of identifying assets in low-valued uses and devising ways to profitably move them to higher valued ones” (Froeb et al.,Managerial Economics, 2014, p. 14). The text and the lectures provide several specific suggestions to increase value and capture value. What are the specific ways your company can, does, and should increase and capture value? Please be sure to discuss the industry structure in which your firm operates and how it has influenced the behavior and performance of your firm; and conversely how your firm has influenced its industry structure. How has your business and industry evolved from past to present to future? What is the significance of Jeremy Rifkin’s article?

Explanation / Answer

Background:

An economy is considered to be efficient if all its resources are in their highest value uses, although it is not hundred percent achievable but businesses and corporations take it as a benchmark in operating the business in a country and aim towards converting the most low valued assets to high valued ones.

Now, United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are universal set of goals and targets that member states of United Nations are expected to use to formulate their agendas and policies over the next 15 years.

The proposal contained 17 goals with 169 targets covering a broad range of sustainable development issues including ending poverty and hunger, improving health and education, sustainable cities, fighting climate change and so on.

Main Solution: The UN SDGs are not consistent with the business principle or lesson of wealth creation. The reasons are highlighted below:

Practicality: Business and corporate houses make plans on the basis of practicality while the Sustainable Development Goals are abstract in nature and depends a lot on the priorities of the society.

Long List of Goals: 17 goals and 169 targets are a long list for any corporate houses to deal with while making business decisions.

Trade-off and Cost: While making a transition to sustainable practices, the business houses could face trade-off and have to deal with higher cost which they may not consider it as feasible.

Technical Ambiguity of the goals: Some of the sustainable development goals are technically ambiguous in nature and could lead to difficulty in integrating them to business practices.

Corporate Social Responsibility: Business houses would put the goals under their corporate social responsibility themes and would not integrate in to their day to day operations as sustainability with growth is still a very debatable topic in the world today.

However, in recent times lot of support has come up for the integration of SDGs to business and create a profitable model but practical achievement is far from satisfactory.

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