Winning Sustainability Strategies: Finding Purpose, Driving Innovation and Executing Change, reviewed

By @SimonCocking, review of Winning Sustainability Strategies: Finding Purpose, Driving Innovation and Executing Change. 

Despite recent optimism and global initiatives, the implementation of corporate sustainability programs has been slow at best, with less than a third of global companies having developed a clear business case for their approach to sustainability. Presenting numerous award-winning cases and examples from companies such as Unilever, Patagonia, Tumi, DSM and Umicore alongside original ideas based upon 20 years of consulting experience, this book reveals how to design and implement a stronger sense of focus and move sustainability programs forward. This proven combination of purpose, direction and speed is dubbed “Vectoring”.

Based upon practitioner cases and data analysis from the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, Vectoring offers a plain-spoken framework to identify the relative position of companies compared to their peers. The framework and its 4 archetypes deliver insights for practitioners to locate inhibitors and overcome them by providing practical suggestions for process improvements. This includes designing and executing new sustainability programs, embedding the SDGs within company strategy and assessing the impact of sustainability programs on competitiveness and valuation. Offering directions for CFOs to shift companies from integrated reporting to integrated thinking in order to accelerate their sustainability programs, Winning Sustainability Strategies shows how to achieve purpose with profit and how to do well by doing good.

While there is a lot of doom and gloom about the environment, albeit with good cause (no climate change denial going on here), there are also a lot of really positive things happening too, by humans and businesses to do what they can to help the environment. As with the famous maxim, we do over estimate what we can achieve in a year, but also under estimate how far we can come in ten to fifteen years. In the early 2000s there was a clear awareness of the need for change in terms of business practices and the environment. Now, as you fly over Europe for example (yes we’re aware of the carbon footprint of doing this, but you might as well at least be aware of the view if you can stand sitting in a window seat), the amount of wind energy projects is truly impressive. The % of our total energy supplied now generated by renewables continues to rise and rise. We may not have solved all of the challenges we face, and global warming is a clear and present danger, however there are also a lot of very positive initiatives taking place, led by progressive businesses who wish to ensure that their bottom line is more than just profits based.

This is a timely, important and uplifting book. It is also encouraging to be reminded that even if one individual company is not necessarily buying into the importance of having a proactive sustainable strategy, they have often been compelled to raise their game due to supplier conditions of other companies they are working with. In this way one major company, such as Apple or IBM, with a long and extensive supply chain, has often managed to achieve effective and positive change far beyond it’s own factory walls. Books like this are important, even if it is to remind us of the blindingly obvious that there is no ROI in destroying the planet we live on. Read it, apply the insights, and together, hopefully we might not drive ourselves into extinction.

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