Executing Sustainability
Where do we begin?
- Step 01: Begin with business
- Step 02: Green to gold
- Step 03: Sustainability leadership
- Step 04: Framework for sustainable strategic development
Begin with Business
- Identify specific and critical decision dimensions for the enterprise
- How is the enterprise structured, how are decisions made and what the specific enterprise considers a good decision, and what is success?
- What are the critical mechanisms for success?
- What are the key strategies, and can these strategies be grouped in buckets to define strategic principles?
- What does success looks like?
- How decisions are made within the enterprise?
Green 2 Gold
- What does success looks like when you take a sustainability perspective, and what the current principles for success are?
- What are the types of strategies that are essential for an enterprise and sustainability to achieve success?
- Consistent and rigorous method (Grounded with science and able to adapt to changing information and trusted across many organizations) for sustainability
- What are the tools enterprise uses to measure if they are heading in the right direction?
- Can the sustainability strategy be applied across multiple scales?
- Can the core of the sustainability strategy link people, enterprises, and natural systems?
- Integrate sustainability demands into strategic efforts
Sustainability Leadership
- Robust ways of predicting future sustainability embedded business potential i.e., sustainability in success is part of the purpose just as profit to help rethink boundaries and think globally, and new ways of doing business.
- What sustainability factors will be critical and imperative in the future, and what’s going to be at risk? Leadership needs to do it in a way where we don’t know all the answers, and it’s challenging.
- Utilize the ESG information to rethink the strategy
- Systematic step-by-step approach
- Evaluate trade-offs as strategic stepping stones for success rather than evil vs. good.
Framework for Sustainable Strategic Development
The traditional organizations were not built with sustainability as a knowledge base, strategic base, and as part of their success level. They don’t hear the “Knock.”
Traditional organizations haven’t thought of themselves as climate companies, waste companies, or water companies.
Strategic Sustainability: When companies think about strategic sustainability, they need to think about
- Where are economic opportunities
- Where are the needs
- Where are the resources
What is the organization’s fundamental value proposition, not just the business proposition?
- Start by thinking about how climate is material to the company
- Is the company overlooking climate risks – all companies rely on nature.- Water, Forest for carbon sequestration. Often these risks do not show in the balance sheet. This is a risk because we are losing nature (Water, forest, air quality) that business depends on as input.
- Companies need to be excited about potential innovation and be part of the solution
