Sustainability Strategy and Management Resources
Corporate Responsibility Best Practices, Setting the Baseline (NYSE Euronext, Corporate Responsibility Officer Association, 2010)
In the first quarter of 2010, the Corporate Responsibility Officers Association (CROA) commissioned a study by SharedXpertise on the state of practice in corporate responsibility (CR) among companies around the world. Working in cooperation with NYSE Euronext, SharedXpertise and the CROA developed a data instrument (via electronic survey as well as direct interview) to gather a baseline data set. We sent survey to every firm traded on the NYSE Euronext Indices as well as the CRO Association’s entire database. We had response from 650 companies, making this the single largest sample size of its kind.
The Governance of Corporate Responsibility, A Doughty Center “How To” Guide (Doughty Center, Cranfield School of Management 2010)
Imagine a Financial Times reporter asking you critical questions on corporate responsibility (CR) issues of your organisation’s strategy and your governance arrangements for this strategy. How comfortable would you feel being a board member of a CR leader or a laggard? Corporate governance for CR can make a significant difference! This is especially true as CR has become part and parcel of good business and risk management and therefore, should be managed as such.This guide aims to explain how to integrate CR and sustainability issues within the governance framework of an organisation, providing some answers from CR leaders as well as outlining some potential pitfalls.
The 21st Century Corporation. The CERES Roadmap for Sustainability. (CERES, 2010)
Ceres has released the 21st Century Corporation: The Ceres Roadmap to Sustainability as a vision and practical roadmap for integrating sustainability into the DNA of business—from the boardroom to the copy room. It analyzes the drivers, risks and opportunities involved in making the shift to sustainability, and details strategies and results from companies who are taking on these challenges. This Roadmap is designed to provide a comprehensive platform for sustainable business strategy and for accelerating best practices and performance.
Michael Hopkins, "8 Reasons (You Never Thought Of) That Sustainability Will Change Management," (MIT Sloan Management Review, September, 2009)
As sustainability affects how the world works, so will it affect how business works in the world. Here are eight changes that smart managers are already talking about.
This past August, in first a blunt report and then a trail of media appearances and press interviews, U.S. military and intelligence analysts made an announcement: The changing global climate now poses a threat to U.S. national security.
By way of explanation, the officials expressed alarm (though they expressed it in their usual calm, matter-of-fact tones) about the directly threatening consequences of such phenomena as rising sea levels and melting ice. Some key military bases could go underwater, other bases are jeopardized by increasingly extreme storms and in the Arctic there will be sea lanes to protect where until recently the sea had no lanes.
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Michael Hopkins, “Sustainability, but for Managers,” (MIT Sloan Management Review, April, 2009)
There’s a big—and getting bigger—public discussion about sustainability, but it’s not the one managers need. Here are some early findings from a different kind of inquiry.
About halfway through the Wall Street Journal’s recent ECO:nomics conference—a confab of several hundred A-list corporate executives and several dozen green-strategy headliners—there was A Moment.
On stage was Al Gore—Nobel laureate, Oscar winner, global warming frontman and, before all that, a high elected official. He was being interviewed, and he’s good at it. Equal parts zeal and data, he touted his plan to get utilities off carbon fuels within a decade. He described the end of polar ice. He talked about how the systems engineers in NASA’s Houston control room when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon were an average age of 26—“which means,” he said, “that when they heard [John F. Kennedy’s go-to-the-moon] challenge, their average age was 18.” Which means, he was implying, that if you think his climate goals are too high, it’s only because your notion of what’s possible is underdeveloped. There’s help coming, Gore was telling us, and the people bringing it will be more capable—or at least less daunted—than we are.
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Doing Good, Business and the Sustainability Challenge, Economist Intelligence Unit (The Economist, 2008)
Being a good corporate citizen has never been so challenging. Companies have long been under public scrutiny for practices ranging from recruitment to workplace safety, from attitudes to overseas investment to environmental pollution. The emergence of climate change as a mainstream political issue, however, has served to drive home the breadth of ethical issues with which firms must now grapple. The business—and societal—implications of how companies address these are so far reaching that a new area of management practice has come into being to manage them, known by many as “corporate sustainability”.
Eric Riddleberger and Jeffrey Hittner, "Leading a Sustainable Enterprise Leveraging Insight and Information to Act," (IBM Global Business Services, IBM Institute for Business Value)
Organizations have recently sharpened their focus on sustainability, primarily in response to consumer and stakeholder expectations. Consequently, they face an entirely new set of decisions. However, most lack the information required to make these strategic choices. Based on what we’ve learned from outperforming organizations and leading CSR organizations, we believe businesses should develop new sources of operational, supply chain and customer information to gain new levels of insight for meeting strategic sustainability objectives.
