Reflective Essay
I first heard the term sustainability while I was doing my undergraduate in Electronics and Communication Engineering. We were taught that any system which is in stable equilibrium is sustainable and any system which is in unstable equilibrium is unsustainable. That concept made me wonder about when a sustainable system gets altered into an unsustainable system. After finishing my undergraduate degree I started working for a major manufacturing firm in India. There the term sustainability meant to decrease the scrap or waste from the manufacturing process in order to reduce cost. After working for a year I decided to pursue my Masters in Human Resource Management from XLRI which is located in India. Here again sustainability had a different interpretation and it essentially meant how long an implemented recommendation would hold under varied circumstances. As part of the course I had an opportunity to go for an exchange program to Aston University Birmingham. I had an option to choose from over 30 different modules as I was doing the masters exchange program. I wanted to select a module which was related to sustainability as I still did not have clear idea about what the word meant. Moreover, I wanted the module to integrate it with different aspects of the business, i.e. be interdisciplinary in nature. Hence I chose strategic business sustainability with the objective of understanding the true meaning of sustainability. To be honest before the course I never really thought about the environment before the course. I never switched off fans and lights when not needed. I didn’t even know what the three different dustbins indicated. I would randomly put waste in any dustbin.
To my surprise after the first class I was more confused. There were numerous definitions for sustainability by different scholars. I realised that even defining