Gracious Growth: How to Manage the Trade-off between Corporate Greening and Corporate Growth

Organizations are increasingly turning to sustainable practices. A significant challenge in the endeavour to embrace sustainability relates to the trade-off between corporate greening and corporate growth – i.e., the difficult task of achieving growth while being truly sustainable. Through an in-depth study of Brunello Cucinelli, one of the world’s leading companies in the luxury fashion industry, we introduce the management philosophy of “gracious growth” to help organizations manage the green-growth trade-off and pursue substantial rather than symbolic sustainability. We offer actionable recommendations and present a process framework that organizations can adopt to implement “gracious growth”. Generating new insights about how growth and sustainability can be simultaneously achieved, this article provides ideas that can help managers enhance their organizations’ economic and environmental performance while also avoiding the legitimacy risks associated with greenwashing

HIV Vaccine Trial Exploits a Dual and Central Role for Innate Immunity

Limited understanding of correlates of protection from HIV transmission hinders development of an efficacious vaccine. D. J. M. Lewis and colleagues (J. Virol. 88:11648–11657, 2014, doi:10.1128/JVI.01621-14) now report that vaginal immunization with an HIVgp140 vaccine linked to the 70-kDa heat shock protein downregulated the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) coreceptor CCR5 (chemokine [C-C motif] receptor 5) and increased expression of the HIV resistance factor APOBEC3G (apolipoprotein B mRNA-editing, enzyme-catalytic, polypeptide-like 3G), in women. These effects correlated with HIV suppression ex vivo. Thus, vaccine-induced innate responses not only facilitate adaptive immunity–they may prove to be critical for preventing HIV transmission