Green Management

Green Management

“-Being green is in”

The environment is one important lever of prosperity for modern society. Increasingly, managers have begun to consider the impact of their organizations on the natural environment which is called green management. The world is going green and it appears that the Bhat Bhateni Supermarket is starting to get the message as well. Since June 2009, Bhat-Bhateni has been promoting the 'Just Say No to Plastic Bags' campaign.

How can organizations apply these “green” concepts to the management discipline? One obvious way is that we can manage green projects more efficiently. The point about green management is not making every decision in favor of the one that is most environmentally friendly. The point is starting to take the environment into account instead of ignoring it.

In fact, the demands on companies to "Go green" are steadily increasing. The most obvious benefit for a firm is to trim costs by cutting down on resource consumption through efficient usage, but there are other factors that can spur more environmentally friendly business practices, such as government regulation and heightened investor and consumer awareness. Bhat-Bhateni is encouraging the use of recyclable and environment friendly shopping bags instead of plastic bags throughout its stores. Funds collected through the sale of the environmental friendly bag (15 rupees per bag) will contribute towards improving the environment.

A model may use terms shades of green to describe the different environmental approaches an organizations may take. The legal approach is doing what is required legally, the market approach is responding to environmental preferences of customers. Stakeholders approach is meeting environmental demands of stakeholders while activist approach looks ways to protect the earth’s natural resources. The ISO 14000 environmental management standards exist to help organizations (a) minimize how their operations negatively affect the...