Tag Archives: profitability
In this third installment of our series, we consider how a materiality analysis can leapfrog companies over common roadblocks to developing a sustainable business strategy—and position them for integrated financial and sustainability reporting.
Crafting a comprehensive sustainability strategy isn’t easy (indeed, to quote Ken Frietas of the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship: “It’s a long, hard, slog!”) Companies face several challenges to successfully incorporating sustainability risks and opportunities into their business strategies, including:
Information overload: the sustainability “umbrella” encompasses a huge array of potential social, environmental, and economic issues.
Squeaky wheels: the most vocal stakeholders may be focused on issues of relatively minor importance
Limited resources: organizations must choose carefully where to allocate scarce resources
Turf wars: there may be internal conflicts over the importance of specific sustainability issues
A materiality analysis is useful in addressing all of these challenges. It provides… More
As alluded to in the BSR conference theme: “Reset Economy. Reset World.”, we’ve entered a brief period where business and society is re-examining core assumptions about how we live and work. There’s a realization that the concept of sustainability is vital and relevant, and that sustainability integration is a business imperative fundamental to innovation, profitability, and ultimate long-term survival.
But it’s not as easy as pressing a reset button (there is no sustainability CTRL-ALT-DELETE key sequence!) In a sense, what we’re talking about is systems redesign. Embedding sustainability is very difficult, not least because of the fundamental culture change that accompanies efforts to integrate and operationalize sustainable business practices. Join that with barriers to implementation ranging from existing political frameworks, lack of scale, and an entrenched system of investor valuation that excludes most social and environmental factors, and the true nature of the challenge becomes apparent.
The BSR conference… More
