This course is intended for Master's-level students who seek to engage with humanity's great sustainability challenges by creating and scaling a successful organization. The course material deals with both the transformation of existing organizations to succeed by being more sustainable, and with 'ecopreneurship' - the creation of a new organization aimed at successfully advancing environmental sustainability. The course is built on two very different bodies of research, one dealing with success and the other dealing with sustainability: Regarding success. The course draws on the extensive literature in strategic management and entrepreneurship. This work gives us specific, actionable lessons that you can use when creating and scaling your organization. These lessons increase the chances that your efforts will lead to an organization that spectacularly changes the world. Students interested in generating comfortable, incremental change should not take this course. Those interested in creative destruction - overturning the status quo with radical, innovative transformation - should take the course. Regarding sustainability. The course is informed by the experiences we are seeing among changemakers all over the world, as they tackle humanity's great sustainability problems. These include climate change and the energy transformation, of course, but more broadly also include a wide variety of other issues: biodiversity loss and regeneration, waste and the circular economy, food security and our need for water, human conflict and displacement, environmental justice, our oceans, preservation and conservation, and adaptation and resilience, among other topics. And the organizational forms we consider will also be varied. We will study companies that seek to make money in the capitalist economy by competing on the basis of environmental sustainability. But we will also be looking at non-governmental organizations, social movement organizations, public-sector organizations, and organizations involved in health and education as they also play a central role in the transformation of our economy and society to be more sustainable.
2 units · GSB Letter Graded
This course is intended for Master's-level students who seek to engage with humanity's great sustainability challenges by creating and scaling a successful organization. The course material deals with both the transformation of existing organizations to succeed by being more sustainable, and with 'ecopreneurship' - the creation of a new organization aimed at successfully advancing environmental sustainability. The course is built on two very different bodies of research, one dealing with success and the other dealing with sustainability: Regarding success. The course draws on the extensive literature in strategic management and entrepreneurship. This work gives us specific, actionable lessons that you can use when creating and scaling your organization. These lessons increase the chances that your efforts will lead to an organization that spectacularly changes the world. Students interested in generating comfortable, incremental change should not take this course. Those interested in creative destruction - overturning the status quo with radical, innovative transformation - should take the course. Regarding sustainability. The course is informed by the experiences we are seeing among changemakers all over the world, as they tackle humanity's great sustainability problems. These include climate change and the energy transformation, of course, but more broadly also include a wide variety of other issues: biodiversity loss and regeneration, waste and the circular economy, food security and our need for water, human conflict and displacement, environmental justice, our oceans, preservation and conservation, and adaptation and resilience, among other topics. And the organizational forms we consider will also be varied. We will study companies that seek to make money in the capitalist economy by competing on the basis of environmental sustainability. But we will also be looking at non-governmental organizations, social movement organizations, public-sector organizations, and organizations involved in health and education as they also play a central role in the transformation of our economy and society to be more sustainable.
Offered in Spring 2026 at Stanford University.