Strategic Sustainability

Why it matters to your business and how to make it happen

Alexandra McKay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351275385
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

In many businesses sustainability is one person's passion and responsibility. A large part of their job becomes selling sustainability to other people in the business.This book offers arguments, information and tactics will help that person get the buy-in they need to move sustainability forward in their business.Strategic Sustainability: sets out why sustainability matters to businesses – the benefits to you and your stakeholders; shows how to identify the biggest issues, impacts and wins  for your business; helps you identify the resources you will need to put sustainability at the heart of your business; outlines key reasons why businesses that are not multinationals should take action on sustainability, and how to do it; looks in detail at how to integrate sustainability with business strategy and mission.Sustainability is of strategic importance to a business. This book makes an airtight case for why action is essential and how sustainability can help a business not only survive but thrive in competitive marketplaces.

CHAPTER 1
Why Sustainability Matters to Your Business

PEOPLE AND BUSINESSES GET INVOLVED in sustainability for very different reasons.

Generally, individuals are emotionally or morally driven to act – to improve or protect the world for their and their children’s future. This may be a long-term concern or something triggered more recently – an epiphany moment – caused by something they have seen or experienced. Whatever their concern or why they feel driven to act, it is fair to say that they believe taking action to make our world fairer and more sustainable is the right thing to do.

While they may not use the terms themselves, they believe we have a moral obligation to take action. While these motivations make perfect sense for individuals, the same cannot be said for businesses. Businesses may just be a collection of individuals, but hierarchy and bureaucracy require very different motivations to change or take action.

Large-scale changes have been made to businesses because of one person’s epiphany moment – for example, that of the late Ray Anderson, Founder and Chairman of Interface FLOR – but more often a sound business case and strategic purpose is required. In the face of business’s primary aim – and legal and moral obligation – to protect and enhance shareholder value, ‘it’s the right thing to do’ does not carry much weight. This book will help you develop a business case to convince the most sceptical Finance Officer or Chief Executive Officer that sustainability can offer real value to a business.

First, we need to understand what makes businesses tick and how sustainability can help deliver that. From saving money in operations or production, attracting new customers, retaining existing customers, protecting and improving brand, sustainability can help.

What is sustainability?

Definitions of sustainability in a business context do vary. I am taking the broader view of balancing and enhancing the social, environmental and economic sustainability of the business. This is also known as the triple bottom line, referring to a business’s economic, environmental and social impacts, summarised as the three Ps – People, Planet, Profit.

Some businesses take a narrower view of sustainability, focusing just on environmental issues, and perhaps include their community investment or health and safety activities. I prefer the broader view, as it represents the full spectrum of risks and opportunities open to businesses, and really gets to the heart of what it takes to make a business successful over the long term.

For the sceptic

So what if the above doesn’t apply to you? You’ve had no epiphany moment, and this sustainability stuff has been dumped on you by an enthusiastic manager.

The purpose of this book is to help you get started; to explain the benefits of sustainability and build a business case. I hope at least some of it will ring true and you will finish a little less sceptical than you began and a little more convinced that sustainability can bring real benefits to your business. I will show that this isn’t some ridiculous fad but a sensible approach to doing business. I’m sure you will find that your business is tackling many of the issues to a greater or lesser extent. I’m convinced that by thinking about sustainability in a strategic way you can reap more benefits and transform your business into a leaner and more flexible organisation, and more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable.

Steps

To develop and implement a sustainability programme into your business you need resources, both people and money. Unfortunately, to convince people and get those resources, you need to have an idea of what it is you can do – itself a process which may require people and money. In many ways this is back-to-front as once your team is in place you will want to go through the same process in greater depth using their experience and input. The things you need to have a good grasp of before you begin are:

1. Why the issues matter generally.
2. At a high level, the issues that are material to your business.
3. The resources you are likely to need – both people and money.
4. Understanding your business, business objectives and audience.
5. Making the case.
6. Developing a strategy.
7. How to implement it!

In this Dō Short we’ll be focusing mostly on steps 1–5.

Benefits: Why sustainability matters...

You’ll soon find that sustainability takes effort and input from all kinds of people from both inside and outside your business. It is important to understand how and why your sustainability programme matters to these groups and how taking action can benefit your business.

... Operationally

When first looking at sustainability most companies look to their operations and specifically the savings that can be made. More often than not there are many quick wins to be made; costs are easy to see and measure; and the changes are more or less under the business’s control.

Obviously, the operational savings that can be made vary greatly from company to company and industry to industry. However, the principles are broadly the same:

Saving money: Many of the world’s resources are finite and yet we are often totally reliant on them, oil in particular. You are probably aware of the idea of peak oil, the point where oil production reduces as a result of reduced reserves, making it more difficult to extract and therefore more expensive. Oil is obviously essential to our daily lives as a source of energy and in the production of many materials. While the idea of peak oil is quite common other resources are also becoming scarcer. Warnings have been made about the supply of helium, for example, which, other than filling balloons, has a number of uses including medically in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines and in leak detection.

If we are to be sustainable we need to reduce our reliance on these materials, and do more with less. The joy of this is that it will save you money: by printing on both sides of a piece of paper you need to buy less paper; by switching things off when you don’t need them you save electricity, reduce your energy bills and your carbon footprint; if your staff travel less they use less fuel and reduce unproductive travel time. To begin with at least, it’s very simple. Although once you’ve picked this low-hanging fruit some capital investment may be needed to see further reductions.

How do you start identifying where savings can be made? Energy, water and waste tend to be good starting points – just ask what can get switched off, where can we use less, what don’t we need to use or buy? With waste don’t just think about segregation. Most of what you throw away you bought at some point, so can you reduce waste higher up the chain by not buying it in the first place? Or is there a more sustainable, cost-effective alternative?

Look at your costs. The places where you spend generally give the greatest opportunity for savings. Walk through your operations, looking at and questioning everything. Tip: don’t make yourself too annoying, as you’ll want these people on your side later.

Making money: Sustainability isn’t just about savings. The three pillars are environment/society/economic or people/planet/profit. Sustainability gives each equal weight and is about bal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Abstract
• About the Author
• Contents
• 1 Why Sustainability Matters to Your Business
• 2 Identifying Your Material Issues
• 3 Identify Resources
• 4 Issues You May Look At - and How to Link Them to Your Business
• 5 How to Make it Happen
• 6 Common Arguments
• Conclusion
• A Case Study - Yearsley Group
• B Building a Business Case
• Resources
• Notes