Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Make sustainability a core part of your business

From today's Management Tip of the Day from the Harvard Business School:

Sustainability is here to stay. Yet too many organizations treat sustainability as a temporary compliance issue. Use these three tips to make sustainability central to your business:

  1. Elevate responsibility for sustainability to the C-suite. Everyone at the top of the organization should be focused on sustainability, but ultimately, responsibility should lie with one person. Establish a Chief Sustainability Officer and fill the position with someone who has the expertise and power to make it an influential role.
  2. Treat sustainability like a product or service. Incorporate the "triple bottom line" into the company lexicon. Ask people to think about economic, ecological, and social returns.
  3. Establish permanent partnerships with the sustainability community. Identify the NGOs who have influence in your field. Treat them like critical customer accounts and cultivate relationships that allow you to identify win-win solutions to problems.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sustainability is a lifestyle and, to me, common sense. I believe anyone who succeeds this downturn will have already been practicing sustainability. Aren't most businesses, systems and even organisms always looking for ways to sustain their being? Isn't the promotion of sustainability stating the obvious? Maybe the message is for those who rode the wave of free credit and business expansion without realizing economics 101 says that for every period of growth is a period of contraction.

 
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