Conventional sustainability excels at marketing and reputational value but misses most tangible financial and social value.
To capture full sustainability value, build marketing and reputational value on tangible financial and social value instead of scores and labels.
Direct and exclusive focus on protecting and creating tangible value enables easier, more profitable sustainability.
We help investors and companies sort worthwhile from wasteful to get more from sustainability for both the bottom line and society.
The sustainability field is dominated by well-intentioned initiatives that distract from meaningful action and do not efficiently benefit investors or society. The most prestigious sustainability frameworks are grossly inefficient and ineffective at improving sustainability performance.
Beyond the alphabet soup, sustainability can be a powerful corporate governance and strategy tool, driving organizational effectiveness and protecting and creating financial and social value.
Conventional approaches to sustainability focus insufficiently on tangible outcomes and incentivize paper pushing, box checking, window dressing, glossy reports, and lip service instead of effective management of sustainability issues. This wastes investor and corporate resources and fails to capture the long-term financial and macroeconomic benefits of effective sustainability work. Investors, companies, and society cannot afford suboptimal sustainability efforts.
We help boards and executives drive laser-focused, supremely efficient and effective sustainability activity.
There is a way to do sustainability that creates more business and societal value. We help investors and companies achieve it.
The PIM-C Approach:
Prioritize – Integrate – Measure – Communicate
Our approach is driven by four key elements:
1. Prioritization
2. Integration
3. Measurement
4. Communication
Prioritization, business integration, performance-focus, and communication are crucial to sustainability effectiveness.
Sustainability efforts create the most value for investors and society when they are focused, performance-based, integrated into business processes, and strategically and effectively communicated to talent, customers, investors, and the public.
We help focus and strengthen sustainability endeavors so they can be supremely efficient and impactful.
Doing sustainability right is better for shareholders, the macroeconomy, and stakeholders from employees to retirees.
1. Prioritize
Prioritization is often not made a priority; we believe strongly in and go to great lengths to exercise the discipline of prioritization.
As Jim Collins wrote in Good to Great, “If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.”
2. Integrate sustainability into strategy and process
Thoughtful, well-planned, systemic approaches yield far more business benefit than perfunctory, cosmetic sustainability efforts.
Doing sustainability in a way that optimally serves the bottom line and society requires thorough integration of sustainability considerations into policy, processes, and management systems. Upfront deliberation pays off in long-term efficiency and effectiveness.
3. Measure performance
“When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates.” (Thomas Monson)
4. Communicate
Reporting can be powerful but easily becomes counterproductive if it is unfocused, voluminous, disorganized, manipulable, obfuscatory, or otherwise lacks rigor. We believe that sustainability reporting should focus heavily on performance measurement and should include subjective information only as necessary to support understanding and evaluation of performance data.
Benefits
The more investors and companies evaluate actual sustainability performance, the more they encourage efficient, profitable, impactful sustainability efforts over glossy photos, cosmetic policies, and attractive but sub-optimally effective programs, and the more they capitalize on the long-term financial benefits sustainability provides.
Utilize long-termism to strengthen your organization: sara@schoensustain.com
Sustainability as an organizational effectiveness catalyst
Pursuing sustainability unfailingly reveals opportunities to uplevel organizational leadership, relationships, communication, culture, and processes.
Sustainability is extraordinarily cross-functional, insider-outsider, and on both the dance floor and the balcony. These unique traits position sustainability as a powerful tool to uncover and address organizational issues, tensions, and opportunities to improve effectiveness and profitability in unexpected ways, far beyond what is typically thought of as the scope of sustainability.
Sustainability can increase organizational fitness, adaptability, innovation, relevance, and talent and customer engagement. It can be used to drive organizational redesign around the activities that create the most business and societal/reputational value.
Approaching sustainability as strategic change management maximizes organizational, financial, environmental, and other societal benefit. Thorough systems thinking yields high-quality solutions for efficient, impactful, and lasting change.
Utilize long-termism to increase management capacity, advance organizational performance, and strengthen companies.
Sustainability pain
Change hurts. A quality-over-quantity approach with clear communication reduces employee and community confusion about and unproductive time spent on sustainability initiatives (“sustainability pain”). The key is well-thought-out rather than hastily-applied plans, policies, systems, and processes. Upfront deliberation results in long-term time- and cost-efficiency, reduces stress, and enables greater and faster progress.
Business and society
Business has tremendous power to impact human well-being, particularly via the macroeconomy and the natural environment on which they both rest. The reverse is true as well: macroeconomic, environmental, and other aspects of societal health affect long-term corporate and investor prosperity, not only in terms of profit but also quality of life beyond finances. A healthy society, economy, and environment benefit investors financially and otherwise.
Sara Schoen is an organizational change agent who helps boards and executives utilize sustainability to create financial and societal value. She founded Schoen Sustainability to help investors and companies integrate long-termism into strategy and process and focus on performance instead of the many distractions typical of the sustainability industry. Sara is passionate about the power of long-term opportunity and risk focus to advance organizational and societal health and prosperity. She can be reached at sara@schoensustain.com.