Sustainability is here to stay as a central business issue, yet many corporations do not have the right resources or organization to comply with the new demands efficiently or, more importantly, to turn them to business advantage. I have found that companies not ready for this challenge typically show one or more of these five traits:
* Responsibility for sustainability issues is fragmented. Many organizations scatter responsibility for sustainability so thoroughly — in operations, legal, compliance, government affairs, corporate communications — that it only comes together at the CEO level (or, worse, in an ad hoc group set up by the CEO).
* No one at the top understands the potential for competitive advantage in sustainability. The company's leaders view sustainability as a set of technical compliance issues (for energy systems or smokestack scrubbers, for example) and delegate them to lower levels to execute.
* There is no sustainability tab in the business plan binder. There are no explicit processes making sustainability a business issue, leaving no one responsible for pursuing such a strategy. Sustainability, if it makes the business plan at all, is an add-on issue.
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