ABSTRACT
As an organization moves through its sustainability journey, reaching the transformative stage is the “sweet spot” where business and sustainability strategies are aligned to create sustainable strategy. Adoption and integration of sustainability strategy transforms an organization’s strategic focus to include environmental and social issues in order to maximize long-term business value. It is at this point that sustainability moves from playing a supporting role in achievement of business strategy to becoming the foundation of business strategy. Sustainable strategy is a multiyear, cross-functional approach to creating business value through addressing material business, social, and environmental challenges. The approach focuses on identifying material industry, community, and business issues and creating programs and projects to address these challenges. Adoption of sustainable strategy focuses on developing policies, changing people and process, creating opportunities, and addressing global sustainability challenges. At the point of sustainable strategy adoption, organizational leaders understand that sustainability and business value creation are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they address challenges and opportunities through a sustainability lens, creating new options, solutions, and benefits. Adopting sustainable strategy has preserved industries and allowed individual firms to flourish in the face of rising regulatory and customer concerns about their operations’ impact on natural and social capital. Developing a sustainable strategy requires approaching business operations with a more holistic view, including looking both internally and externally for solutions. Adopting sustainable strategy requires changing organizational perceptions, priorities, and behaviors. This change management process benefits from utilizing project management methodologies, techniques, standards, and protocols. Organizations with mature project management practices, mature benefits realization processes, high organizational alignment, and mature program and portfolio practices have an advantage in adopting and executing sustainable strategy.
