Sustainable Business: cost or value?
Why you should look at sustainable business as a source of business value rather than a simply a cost of business.
Why you should look at sustainable business as a source of business value rather than a simply a cost of business.
Many people are driven by purpose, the ethical dimension of sustainable business. But all businesses need to make money, we explore where value can be found in sustainable business.
The business case for sustainability is (shockingly) still either not recognised strategically (i.e. it is understood as an additive factor for operational efficiency or marketing/PR but not as a strategic value creation/destruction factor), or in many cases it is little understood at all.
Sustainability is a transformative agenda. It requires companies to not only develop new priorities, but also to become corporate activists – to act to affect the wider system within which they operate.
While sustainability management has in many ways entered the mainstream, practitioners are often hampered by resistance, apathy and misunderstanding.
There are many examples of excellence in specific areas, but few companies are pursuing a transformative agenda at significant scale.
As the general acceptance and uptake of corporate sustainability has grown, we have seen a broad progression in adoption and maturity. However, most practice appears stuck in the middle, somewhere between compliance and greater adoption. There are still very few examples of companies taking a leading position in sustainability.
All UK companies with more than 250 staff must report their gender pay gap by 4th April 2018. The relatively small proportion who have reported are revealing a hugely asymmetric gender pay gap.
Profit isn't very useful for measuring sustainability, or even for telling us much about economic viability. Why? Because profit is a lagging indicator and sustainability is inherently about long-termism. Delivering sustainability requires forward-looking indicators.
In September 2017, we ran a Towards 9 Billion workshop on sustainable finance, to explore how the finance sector could build a sustainable future. To get the workshop report contact us.
What sustainability trends will be important in 2018? What questions does your company need to ask in 2018?
What did the 2017 budget mean for sustainability? A concise overview of what it means.
Population growth is routinely blamed for many sustainability issues - this video explodes the myth
A sustainable financial system requires both rethinking the very nature of value, as well as creativity in how we would project that value over time.