[MUSIC] Hi, this is Mike Rosenberg and I'm very excited you start session two of the series Strategies and Sustainability. If you recall, the overall course is divided into six parts. The first session was business and the environment. This one is look at five strategic issues which I believe are important for business, regardless of again ones politics or ones convictions. These are things I think that every CEO, members of boards, and senior vice presidents need to worry about anyway, which are deeply connected to environmental sustainability. In further sessions we'll talk about strategic options, environmental interest groups. We'll look at differences, and finally we'll look at how to develop a sustainability strategy. But let's dive into these strategic issues. Now this session is just an introduction, but we'll be looking at six parts, or six segments. This session's just an introduction, but in these different segments we'll be looking at each one of these issues in some detail catastrophic risks and how to manage them. What's often called the license to operate, the social license to operate. The way consumers seem to be responding to these issues, that there's a challenge of technological innovation and finally the issue of globalization. So again like in session one this session will have six different segments. This is the introduction. And really just to situate the issue again and to kind of recap a little bit what we covered in terms of governance and in terms of the way businesses run in section one. And we have strategic issues and operational issues in running companies. Strategic issues include material impact on the firm, issues about the medium and the long term. Things about the scope of the activity, its geographic region, the size of the company. And these issues are typically things that the board of directors, or whatever you call the board of directors, or whatever kind of body oversees the running of the company, in whatever part of the world you're in. These are the issues they need to worry about, whereas as the vice presidents or the directors of a company are very much focused on the operational issues, compliance, energy usage, waste management, design of products and services, risk, etc. What I have observed is increasingly it seems that the board is somehow disconnected from some of these other issues. So the CEO or the managing director of the firm is situated in between these two groups because he or she of course has to deal with everything. So what we're trying to do is distinguish between issues which are truly strategic and those which are operational. One of the reasons why it's so important for the board to get involved in and this I'll develop more in session six is because many of these things have enormous costs, potential benefits, which are sometimes hard to see in the future, and tremendous risks involved. And really, I don't think it's fair for those risks to be run by operational managers. I don't think it's fair for operational managers to have to fight to commit funds to do what maybe is needed to improve a company's footprint without direct support and knowledge of the people who own, run, or provide oversight for the company. So it's critical, again, this issue of governance is critical to have a long enough view of the world, in order to be able to think these issues through. But, again, we'll come back to this quite a lot in session six. [MUSIC]