ABSTRACT
In order to engage the C-suite and garner their support and sponsorship, the sustainability champion must create a program proposal that aligns sustainable strategy with the core business mission and demon strates value creation for the organization. Making the case for sustainability involves demonstrating the impact of sustainable strategy on key areas such as revenue growth, brand value, risk mitigation, operating performance, talent management, investor relations, finance, and technology. Sustainable strategy is a business methodology that engages both external and internal stakeholders on a variety of environmental, social, and economic issues in order to establish strategic priorities and better manage threats and opportunities to the organization. The key to a successful sustainable strategy is to identify issues that are material for the organization from an industry, management, and stakeholder perspective and then to assess their impact on the organization. A successful sustainable strategy then focuses on how best to support and implement a strategy that addresses these material issues through C-suite sponsorship, cross-functional support, change management, and process and program changes. For an effective sustainable strategy, the C-suite needs to embrace the triple bottom line (TBL) philosophy and agree to systemic changes and resource reallocations to support adoption of a sustainable approach. Many barriers stand in the way of adopting sustainable strategy, but utilizing the tools and techniques in this chapter will help to facilitate moving a sustainability agenda forward within an organization. As management’s experience with sustainability grows and the organization moves forward successfully on its sustainability journey, the process becomes more embedded into the culture and operations. As a result, sustainability becomes part of the management processes and cascades throughout the organization. The change management process, especially in terms of program and project management, begins to consider sustainability in terms of defining value creation, cost calculations, stakeholder engagement, risk management, timelines, and operational process. Ultimately, the portfolio management process for portfolio component selection, approval, and funding adopts sustainability criteria as a key part of the process. However, the first step in becoming a sustainable organization is garnering board of directors, CEO, and C-suite support. For long-term strategic organi zational change, the sustainability champion must begin at the top of an organization to make the business case for sustainability.
