Sustainability Reimagined
7 March 2024
Sustainability is on the top of the strategic agenda everywhere. Frontrunners are moving fast to reduce harmful impacts on people and planet. Even laggards are forced to act due to regulatory changes and demanding stakeholders. Becoming more sustainable is a given.
However, all organisations are facing a significant strategic choice: “Will sustainability invite us to rethink fundamental strategic choices and change everything? Or will we address the issue through an isolated sustainability strategy to get on par?”
Faced with an explosion of stakeholder requirements, there is a risk that many organisations are merely scratching the surface of sustainability. They try to keep up. But what if we used the sustainability agenda to profoundly reimagine why our organisation exists and how we operate?
We believe that organisations of the future do not have a sustainability strategy. They have a sustainable strategy. They do not take incremental steps towards what is good for them. They dare to unleash transformational change towards a brighter future that is better for us.
Let’s explore the future together and reimagine sustainability.
Featured:
#5 Business Models Reimagined
#5 Business Models Reimagined
What if organisations of the future reshaped linear business models to make them fully circular while exploring new commercial opportunities – and put an end to the days of carbon tunnel vision and wasteful use of valuable resources?
Explore how we have helped organisations0 4
#1 Value creation reimagined
What if organisations of the future redefined their strategic choices to create long-term value for all stakeholders – and abandoned short-term optimisation of performance to serve shareholders?
Strategy is about making choices, and in a world of constant change, every organisation must continuously evaluate and renew strategic choices about where to focus and how to succeed. But to consistently make great choices, the process of making choices itself must be guided by a set of fundamental principles about what constitutes good or bad choices. If not, choice-making will be subject to randomness or biased opinions.
Discover in the interviews below how Too Good To Go and Novozymes have adopted a sustainable approach to their strategic initiatives.
Mette Lykke, CEO, Too Good to Go
Too Good To Go is the world’s largest B2C marketplace for surplus food. Present in 17 countries, including the U.S. a...
Interview with Mette Lykke
How can sustainability initiatives be scaled to create impact?
Length: 5 min. 01 sec.
Amy Byrick, EVP of Strategy & Business Transformation, Novozymes
Novozymes is the global market leader in biological solutions, providing enzyme and microorganism technologies to a w...
Interview with Amy Byrick
What does it take to make a sustainable strategy work?
Length: 9 min. 52 sec.
#2 Organisational purpose reimagined
What if organisations of the future reimagined their purpose by shifting their focus towards solving deeply worthwhile problems – and firmly refused to produce whatever the customer considered they wanted?
Boiled down to the essence, all businesses quite simply exist because they are solving problems for their customers. They flourish if they either solve problems better than the customers themselves - or do it in a better or cheaper way than the alternatives already available in the market.
Want to know more about how to reimaging organisational purpose?
#3 Leadership decision-making reimagined
What if organisations of the future integrated multiple bottom-lines and externalities in all decision-making processes to make truly sustainable choices – and asked the finance department never to produce a simplistic financial business case again?
In every organisation, myriads of decisions are made each day. Some decisions are tactical and simple, typically based on straight-forward intuition and experience. Other decisions are strategic and complex, often demanding sophisticated problem-solving and careful testing of critical assumptions.
However, looking across different types of decisions, typically we as leaders apply financial reasoning to make the decisions. Ranging from “please provide me a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation” to “we need to do a detailed investment business case projecting future cash flow” to make decisions. Financial logic is omnipresent and everywhere to inform and guide decision-making.
Discover in the interview below how Rio Tinto has reimagined decision-making processes to prioritise truly sustainable choices and stakeholder value for all.
Jakob Stausholm, CEO, Rio Tinto
Rio Tinto is a leading global mining and materials company. They operate in 35 countries and produce iron ore, copper...
Interview with Jakob Stausholm
How does a company truly change direction to create stakeholder value for all?
Length: 6 min. 48 sec.
#4 Collaboration and ecosystems reimagined
What if organisations of the future collaborated closely across value chains and ecosystems to accelerate systems-level change towards a greater good – and stopped fighting competitors and caring only for “what’s in it for us”?
Words and concepts matter. They frame our worldview and construct the world around us. Examining the vocabulary of business strategy is a case in point and the need to rewrite the rules of business in an age of alarming planetary and societal issues seems urgent.
One of the most prominent thinkers in business strategy, Michael Porter, has taught us that the primary job of great leaders is to build “sustainable competitive advantage.” And in this context, the word ‘sustainable’ means getting above average industry profits in the long run. Business conceptualised as a pure profit maximisation game.
Want to know more about how to reimaging collaboration and ecosystems?
Discover how Novo Nordisk has built an ecosystem to drive circular transition0 1
Novo Nordisk - circular zero
Blazing the trail towards circularity and sustainability.What does it take to put sustainability at the core of your strategy?
Watch snippets of our Sustainability Reimagined event below held in March 2023, where we engaged in conversations to get inspired by bold moves that emerge when you reimagine sustainability.
Keynote by Sheva Rostam and Christian Romer Vingtoft, Implement Consulting Group
What if we used the sustainability agenda to profoundly reimagine why our organisations exist and how we operate?
Length: 10 min. 15 sec.
#1 Roger Martin
What does it take to put sustainability at the core of your strategy?
(Part 1)
Length: 6 min. 42 sec....
#2 Roger Martin
What does it take to put sustainability at the core of your strategy?
(Part 2)
Length: 5 min. 28 sec....
#3 Roger Martin
Choice-making is the CEO's core job
Length: 5 min. 05 sec.
Roger Martin
Professor Roger Martin is a writer, strategy advisor and in 2017 was named the #1 management thinker in the world. He is also former Dean and Institute Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada.
Roger Martin is a trusted strategy advisor to the CEOs of companies worldwide, including Procter & Gamble, LEGO and Ford.
He has written 30 Harvard Business Review articles and several books, e.g.: A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Management Effectiveness, When More Is Not Better, Creating Great Choices, Getting Beyond Better and Playing to Win.
