Center for Sustainable Business | A message from Amy Skoczlas Cole

Dear CSB friends and colleagues,

It is an honor to write to you as the new leader of the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business. For the last 30 years, I’ve worked across for-profit and non-profit spaces with one goal: unlocking the scale and innovation of the private sector to solve critical societal challenges by demonstrating that sustainability unlocks growth, opens new markets, drives productivity, and reduces shareholder risk.

I join CSB at a pivotal moment. The quieting of companies, geopolitical volatility, and outsized investment into AI have created a growing perception that sustainability is being pushed to the margins of business conversation and decision-making.

The irony is that in this moment of relentless and accelerating change, the underlying business imperative for sustainability has never been stronger.  

Volatility isn't receding, it's accelerating. Supply chain fragility, regulatory fragmentation, geopolitical instability, and relentless cost pressure are forces that originate outside the walls of business, but increasingly determine what happens inside them.  

At its best, sustainability is the discipline that brings external risks and opportunities inside the business model early enough to shape strategic action. Companies that deploy sustainability in this way anticipate disruptions ahead of competitors, protect the assets that their businesses depend on, uncover efficiency gains that traditional operations overlook, capture emerging demand for new products and services, and navigate cascading regulatory and policy shifts rather than reacting to each new shock. This is competitive advantage, not compliance.

Yet most companies are operating in the dark, unable to quantify the return on sustainability investments in the financial terms that executives recognize. The gap is costly, and the stakes are rising.

The systems that governed business for decades are giving way to something fundamentally different, and sustainability is designed to help absorb and navigate these systemic shifts. A profound reshaping of how firms and markets operate provides an opportunity to also redefine how sustainability is embedded into financial decision-making.

CSB is primed to serve as a critical enabler of this transformation. My goal is to leverage the decade of research demonstrating the financial value of sustainability strategies into scalable, market-facing solutions.

• First, we are continuing to develop and validate ROSI™ as the industry standard for sustainable value quantification — academically rigorous, industry-tested, and designed to work within traditional financial processes and metrics.
• Second, we are scaling access to ROSI™, addressing adoption barriers and creating technology-enabled pathways that allow companies, private equity firms, and institutional investors to embed this analysis directly into their existing infrastructure, operating cadences, and decision-making processes.
• Third, we are building universal fluency in quantifying the value that sustainability contributes to a business. Through CSB’s experiential education, robust community of practice, and integration with the Stern curriculum, we are arming future and current business leaders with the strategic and technical skills they’ll need to navigate the shifts in the operating environment ahead, regardless of where they sit in the organization. 

When these three strategies work together, we do more than change individual companies. We reshape how capital flows, what business schools teach, and the standard of practice across industries. 

I am deeply grateful to join this talented community of researchers, corporate partners, alumni, students, and philanthropic investors who have created this body of research and insight. I am clear-eyed about the headwinds we face, as well as the generational opportunity to significantly shift how business and capital operate. I look forward to building this future together. 

With gratitude and determination,
Amy Skoczlas Cole
Director, NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business
Clinical Professor of Business and Society, NYU Stern