Corporate Sustainability Strategy - Top Five Reasons Why You Need One

Resource: www.ezinearticles.com

There is growing evidence that corporate sustainability is creating a significant competitive advantage and higher profits for organizations willing to modify their mindset and corporate culture to the realization that doing the right thing for the environment and society makes good business sense. Climate change, the global economic crisis, geopolitical instability, national security, and socially unfair trade and labour practices are all prominent issues that continue to fuel the global drive toward sustainability. Stakeholders, including customers, investors, financial institutions, employees, communities, NGOs, regulators and the media all have growing expectations for companies to examine and address the broader impacts their businesses have on the environment and community.

Whether your stance is based on ideological beliefs and values or on improving bottom-line numbers it can be difficult to get internal and external buy-in for the benefits of developing and implementing a corporate sustainability strategy. Many still believe that there must be a trade-off between business profitability and environmental and social responsibility--- this is false. Here are just five of the many reasons why an effective corporate sustainability strategy should be part of every organization's drive to deliver higher value to all stakeholders:

1. Retain Top Talent and Increase Employee SatisfactionWell-developed and visible corporate sustainability initiatives are extremely appealing criteria for attracting and retaining the best employees. Today's workers increasingly expect more than just a safe workplace, competitive salaries and job security; the overwhelming majority of candidates prefer to be part of a company that has a positive impact on the environment and society. Human capital is critical to business success and it is relatively easy to quantify the value of attracting and retaining top talent, along with achieving high employee motivation, productivity and satisfaction.

2. Better Management of Business Risks

In an attempt to remain competitive in an ever-changing global marketplace, many companies are realizing the value of proactively anticipating, managing and responding to business risks. With a corporate sustainability strategy as the guide, a company can be ready for changing expectations, trends, drivers and regulations in their industry. This helps to ensure that potential risks and liabilities are accounted for along the company's entire value chain, decreasing the severity of those risks and even achieving preferred status for financing and insurance in the process. This can mean the difference between maintaining and increasing profitability or going out of business.

3. Product/Service Differentiation

Companies that offer environmentally and socially responsible products or services can gain an entire new class of loyal customers, thereby increasing market share and tapping new markets. People want to feel good about what they are buying, so it is no longer enough to simply deliver high-quality products and services at fair and competitive prices. To adapt to this change in customer expectations, companies must innovate to create new products and re-engineer old ones to reposition themselves as leading the way in sustainable practices. Although complete redesign will require an initial investment, the resultant savings and profits can far outweigh the costs of incremental improvements to old products and processes. The environmentally and socially responsible nature of these new products and services can differentiate companies from their competition, command higher selling prices, increase customer loyalty and market share, to produce a high return on investment.

4. Reduce Operating and Manufacturing Costs

Reducing energy, water and materials consumption, and decreasing emissions and waste generation contributes to lower operating and manufacturing costs, directly improving a company's bottom line. Energy and water-efficient appliances and equipment, waste reduction and recycling programs and other simple cost-reduction techniques are immediately quantifiable and can motivate the company to pursue further cost-saving practices. Furthermore, forward-thinking companies not only optimize efficiencies in their operating and manufacturing facilities but they redesign products and processes to be eco-efficient, which will lessen future costs and have a positive impact on customer and shareholder value.

5. Enhance Image, Reputation and Brand RecognitionA successfully implemented corporate sustainability strategy positively impacts a company's reputation and brand image by demonstrating that the company is taking responsibility for its actions and embracing change for the greater good. In fact, an essential part of a company's success is the engagement and development of strong relationships with internal and external stakeholders based on trust, respect, and cooperation. Nike's experience is a perfect example of this. Do you remember how badly tarnished the reputation of Nike became in the 1990's with accusations of the poor working conditions of their suppliers? Since then, Nike has made efforts to ensure that their own and their suppliers' operations have a positive impact on the community and environment, and have demonstrated greater accountability to their stakeholders. Their hard work has helped them regain the trust and respect of millions of customers around the world, while achieving even greater profits than before through the development, implementation and enforcement of their corporate sustainability strategy.

Step one of the journey toward corporate sustainability is comprehending and communicating the immense benefits of implementing an effective corporate sustainability strategy built on a foundation of enhancing business growth and profitability. Demonstrating a business case tailored to your organization's needs, issues and challenges that clearly shows the financial benefits of addressing environmental and societal impacts is essential. It is critical to understand the elements of an effective, integrated corporate sustainability strategy and the structured processes involved in order to derive the greatest value for all stakeholders.

Best Business Books 2009

Strategy+Business Magazine

No matter what the future holds, the Great Recession of 2008–09 has had a seismic impact on the global business landscape and has called into question its philosophical and systemic foundations.

Certainly, it has been keenly felt among publishers and booksellers. In May 2009, year-to-date sales of professional books in the U.S. were down 6.8 percent from the year before, according to the Association of American Publishers. The recession also colors the writing — and the reading — of this year’s s+b best business books essays in ways both obvious and subtle.

The most direct manifestation is evident in the appraisal by Financial Timescommentator Clive Crook of the books that seek to make sense of the recession, its implications, and its ramifications. In barely more than a year, the business section has become crowded with such books, but with the story still unfolding, none of them yet are comprehensive. Crook’s picks provide the multiple levels of perspective needed to appreciate the recession’s many facets.

Ayesha Khanna, managing director of Hybrid Realities, and Parag Khanna, New America Foundation senior research fellow, team up to review books on the changing topology of global business. They find changes in regional trading patterns and increasingly dynamic emerging economies that will challenge any established player — all evidence of an ongoing shift in competitive power that is sure to accelerate if the U.S. economy remains stagnant.

As one might expect, our management and leadership essays are rife with recession links. In the former, Judith F. Samuelson, the founder and executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program, searches out books that reveal the recession’s silver lining: its challenges to outmoded ways of thinking about management and governance. In the leadership essay, Charles Handy, whose memoir was one of 2008’s Top Shelf selections, mines books on topics as diverse as America’s Puritan settlers and the Buddhist Tzu Chi movement for insights into how to begin mending the torn fabric of leadership.

The University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business professor James O’Toole grounds his review of this year’s best biographies in a hefty tome about a 19th-century prime mover, John Stuart Mill, whose advocacy of free markets and private ownership resonates amid the dramatic government response to this economic crisis. IMD professor Phil Rosenzweig returns for an encore performance in the strategy category, pointing us toward books on intellectual property and dynamic capabilities in an effort to identify enduring strategic advantage. Rosenzweig also recommends a new book on Enron that takes us back to the last recession and explores the perils of stretching any strategy too far.

Marketing maven Catharine P. Taylor is back as well, with a proposition that should raise executive eyebrows: Branding is becoming an open source endeavor. She calls out Twitter — the subject of almost as many new books as the recession — as one of the leading technological mechanisms enabling this phenomenon. Steven Levy, senior writer at Wired and newcomer to our pages, broadens the thesis by reviewing books that explore the disruptive power of technology and what happens when companies such as MySpace don’t heed that power.

This year’s best business books help us understand current conditions and chart a secure course forward. With luck, next year’s best books will offer similar insight into a recovery of historic proportions. Click Here.

Talks Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when

Asia's rise -- how and when

Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us will have their perspectives shifted by Hans Rosling. A professor of global health at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did. What sets Rosling apart isn't just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You've never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling's hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture — usually hazy at best — snaps into sharp focus. Rosling's presentations are grounded in solid statistics (often drawn from United Nations data), illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends clear, intuitive and even playful. During his legendary presentations, Rosling takes this one step farther, narrating the animations with a sportscaster's flair. Rosling developed the breakthrough software behind his visualizations through his nonprofitGapminder, founded with his son and daughter-in-law. The free software — which can be loaded with any data — was purchased by Google in March 2007. (Rosling met the Google founders at TED.) Rosling began his wide-ranging career as a physician, spending many years in rural Africa tracking a rare paralytic disease (which he named konzo) and discovering its cause: hunger and badly processed cassava. He co-founded Médecins sans Frontièrs (Doctors without Borders) Sweden, wrote a textbook on global health, and as a professor at the Karolinska Institut in Stockholm initiated key international research collaborations. He's also personally argued with many heads of state, including Fidel Castro. As if all this weren't enough, the irrepressible Rosling is also an accomplished sword-swallower — a skill he demonstrated at TED2007.

Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen

Six Thinking Hats from Edward de Bono

How the Creative Economy is Making the Place Where You Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life.

It’s a mantra of the age of globalization that where you live doesn’t matter: you can telecommute to your high-tech Silicon Valley job, a ski-slope in Idaho, a beach in Hawaii or a loft in Chicago; you can innovate from Shanghai or Bangalore.

According to Richard Florida, this is wrong. Place is not only important, it’s more important than ever.

Globalization is not flattening the world; on the contrary, the world is spiky. Place is becoming more relevant to the global economy and our individual lives. The choice of where to live, therefore, is not an arbitrary one. It is arguably the most important decision we make, as important as choosing a spouse or a career. In fact, place exerts powerful influence over the jobs and careers we have access to, the people meet and our “mating markets” and our ability to lead happy and fulfilled lives.

Who’s Your City? provides the first ever-rankings of cities by life-stage, rating the best places for singles, young families and empty-nesters. And it grounds its new ideas and data to provide an essential guide for the more than 40 million Americans and over 4 million Canadians who move each year. The book shows readers how to choose where to live, and what those choices mean for their lives, happiness and communities.