By : Bruno BERTHON
Sustainability as competitiveness is going to change everything
Can anyone still remember the workplace in 1994? No email, no internet, no mobile phones. Three or four news bulletins a day, maximum and obviously no social media.
But we did have computers. They were very slow and they weren’t connected to each-other but they were much better than their predecessors. Back then, no-one would have imagined that consumer brands without physical shop floors would be among the biggest companies in the world within 20 years. Imagine the leap of imagination it would require to even grasp the concept of Facebook, let along imagine it being capitalised at more than Boeing.
To the executive of 1994, today’s situation would seem bewildering. He or she would have been in meetings where “telesales” departments would have been set-up or bolstered. But no-one would have suggested shutting down the shop-floors and shifting solely to internet sales. Well. Very few. The internet hadn’t even started to become widespread.
And yet within four years we had Web 2.0, Google and Amazon (actually founded in 1994). The rest is (becoming) history.
When it comes to sustainability and business strategy, I actually think we’re at a similar tipping point. We’re not up to web 2.0 but we’re getting there. CEOs, investors and strategists are understanding the idea that sustainability can no longer be ‘operationalised’ through bolt-on departments with “Sustainability” on the door. This requires change right through the core of the organisation, just as progressive companies grasped that ‘the information superhighway’ was going to change everything about their businesses – not just their old telesales teams and ICT departments.
Fully 78 per cent of the 1000 CEOs we surveyed last year viewed sustainability as a route to growth and innovation, and 79 per cent believed that it would lead to competitive advantage in their industry. CEOs also understand that the modern – connected – consumer is ever more demanding of transparency and responsibility. They won’t pay a premium for sustainable products because they don’t think they should have to.
As Peter Bakker, President of the World Business Council of Sustainable Development said in one of the sessions at Sustainability24 last week, “in a world of radical transparency, the only way forward is for businesses to redefine value to include the social and natural capital returns that business has”.
This is why I think that incrementalism when it comes to sustainability is as outmoded as some business’ attempts to address the digital revolution by setting up (only) an ICT department. Now is the time to embrace transformation fully.
This article was taken from here.