Sustainability Programs

A Design Guide to Achieving Financial, Social, and Environmental Performance

William Borges, John Grosskopf

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781394307388
• eBook ISBN: 9781394307401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development

Go-to guidance for designing, implementing, and managing effective sustainability programs and their management systems

Moving past vague concepts, buzzword overloads, superficial efforts, and flavor-of-the-month misdirections, Sustainability Programs presents a pragmatic, step-by-step approach to creating and managing adaptable, organization-wide sustainability programs to achieve People, Planet, and Profit (3P) objectives with least cost, effort, and risk. Key steps covered in this book include reaching a programmatic "Go" decision, developing sustainability policies, designing an organizational framework, defining the most pressing sustainability needs, and cascading 3P goals, tactics, targets, and initiatives into business units, functions, and departments to create new capabilities and improve performance.

By following the principles and practices in this book, any organization can better achieve sustainability's full promise of social responsibility, environmental stewardship, and financial performance. Written by authors with a wealth of practitioner experience in the field, Sustainability Programs explores topics including:

• Creating social, environmental, and financial strategies, tactics, targets, and initiatives that create new capabilities and resolve 3P performance issues
• Avoiding ad hoc projects that fail to address critical sustainability issues, wasting valuable resources and squandering competitive advantages
• Overcoming technical professionals' lack of business management experience and helping management professionals understand sustainability's benefits and intricacies
• Understanding sustainability through the management lenses of risk reduction, improved efficiencies through eradication of wastes, increased revenues via innovation, and enhanced competitive advantages fueled by greenwash-free transparency.
• Responding to the demanding data capture, analysis, and reporting challenges of environmental, social, and governance (ESG).

Acknowledging that one size does not fit all, this book delivers individual concepts and methods adaptable across any organization's value chains. It is an essential read for leaders and practitioners working within private and public enterprises of all types and sizes, especially those with 2, 000 to 5, 000 employees.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Acronyms
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Essential Sustainability Management System Concepts
• Chapter 3 The Importance of Change Management
• Chapter 4 Sustainability Management System Design Considerations
• Chapter 5 The Sustainability Program Go‐Decision and Policy Development
• Chapter 6 A Model Sustainability Management System Organization Structure
• Chapter 7 The Sustainability Management System's Initial Needs Assessment
• Chapter 8 Define the Sustainability Management System's Strategic Goals
• Chapter 9 Define the Sustainability Management System's Tactical Objectives and Targets
• Chapter 10 Capability Creation and Performance Improvement Initiatives
• Chapter 11 Annual Administrative Assessment and Improvement of the SMS
• Appendix A Origins and Evolution of the SMS Model
• Appendix B Essential Change Management Concepts
• Appendix C Sustainability Learning and Information Resources
• Appendix D Special Considerations Regarding ISO Management System Standards
• Appendix E Examples of Project Planning Worksheets
• Appendix F An Advanced Needs Assessment Method: Life Cycle Assessment
• Glossary
• Biographies
• References
• Index
• EULA