What I Do: Assist and train clients to co-create business profit and tangible social value.
Shared Value is about meeting the needs of your business, community, or community-serving organization by improving sustainability performance and collaborating with others to co-create business profit and social value.
Why do or don’t people live sustainably?
I’ve researched this issue over the course of my professional career and I have found 5 main interrelated challenges to achieving a sustainable society.
1. Governmental Policy
2. Accountability of Financial and Investment Institutions
3. Corporate Governance
4. Citizen Education on Sustainability
5. Collaboration across Sectors
But, why are things the way they are? And, what is required to change entrenched mindsets and habits to new ways of thinking and doing that transform these challenges into opportunities?
Cause and Effect
The challenges we face in achieving sustainability didn’t just create themselves. In large part, they are symptoms of Industrial Age design for wealth creation: vertical business structures with hierarchical, command and control systems that operate from rigid strategic plans that tend to separate thinking from doing. This model is not well suited to address the multidimensional nature of sustainability challenges and opportunities that require networked collaboration framed by shared ownership, accountability based on trust, connected thinking and doing, linked and leveraged resources, and flexible plans that change with circumstances.
Sustainability as Innovation
To a degree, the situation has begun to solve itself. The old economy is giving way to the Innovation Economy where networked collaboration drives wealth creation by capitalizing on different value lenses, promoting free competition of ideas, and linking and leveraging assets to increase efficacy of planning and action to multiply impact. In this newly realized Age of Interdependence innovation can come from anywhere.
In the 21st century, the response to sustainability challenges and opportunities must unfold within this emerging formative field of collaborative thinking and networked doing and seek solutions outside the confines of old mindsets and habits.
Aligning Societal Impact with Business Value
To meet this opportunity I developed a simple three-point vision framed by sustainability performance standards from Ceres and guided by The Natural Steps' sustainability principles and application of systems thinking. This approach is not a process but intended as a strategy. Its robust and flexible design will assist an organization to develop a unique roadmap to sustainability according to its mix of assets, needs and culture and then guide it along the journey.
Three-Point Sustainability Vision
1. Open: sustainability necessarily involves everyone
2. Systemic: sustainability integrates social, economic and environmental performance
3. Collaboration: sustainability benefits from open networks that link & leverage resources
My services include sustainability assessments, sustainability roadmaps, and steering collaborative action across open networks. I also provide an additional set of skills and knowledge designed to assist businesses, communities, and community-serving organizations to do what they do better through increased sustainability performance.
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