CORPORATE STRATEGY

A solid grounding of the growing influence and significance of sustainability principles and of implementing an effective corporate sustainability strategy can give your organization a stronger position in the marketplace and a distinct competitive advantage. An effective corporate sustainability strategy benefits companies in many ways that can significantly boost profitability and value:

• Attracting and retaining top talent
• Increasing employee productivity and satisfaction
• Proactive management and response to current and emerging business risks
• Increasing market share and new markets via product and service differentiation
• Reducing operating and production costs; and
• Enhancing image, reputation, and brand recognition

 We can accelerate your efforts to embrace sustainable business practices, and gain profitability and growth, while satisfying growing stakeholder demands to safeguard and restore the environment and improve quality of life for their communities and society.

Innovation and Leadership

Creating a sustainable business requires innovation and leadership. We can help you make the Case for Change, translate your Vision into Action, and rejuvenate your entire organization. As a sustainability leader, you must be adept at collaborating and influencing others in the course of the transition from unconscious to conscious reactivity. This will lead your sustainability efforts toward a powerful mandate that is pervasive throughout the organization.

As your vision moves throughout your organization, commercial orientation becomes the key competence in aligning sustainability initiatives and value creation. Now the task is to translate high-level commitments into a comprehensive change program with clearly defined initiatives and hard commercial targets. To make this happen,you must excel at delivering results, and they must have a strong commercial awareness. Such success will lead your organization to being consciously proactive on sustainability across its footprint and tracks economic, environmental and social metrics over the business planning cycle. The need for commercial orientation continues unabated but is now matched by a strong strategic orientation.

As the organization continuously raises the bar and leverages sustainability to create competitive advantage, it increasingly views sustainability as a strategic opportunity and gauges its progress with metrics that reach beyond the short and medium term. As such, you must be adept at anticipating and evaluating long-term sustainability trends, spotting new opportunities and developing strategies to reposition the organization to benefit from them.
The goal is to embed sustainability in your organization’s DNA, much like quality or financial control, such that it is a core value and your organization is proactive about it.

OPPORTUNITY AND RISK ANALYSIS

The health of you business is dependent on the health of the environment. Our environment provides numerous benefits or and services. Forests supply timber and wood fiber, purify water, regulate climate, and yield genetic resources. River systems provide freshwater, power, and recreation. Coastal wetlands filter waste, mitigate floods, and serve as nurseries for commercial fisheries. Environmental changes can pose a number of risks and opportunities to corporate performance. We can help you identify these risks and opportunities, and mitigate the risks and seize the opportunities.

The risks and opportunities are dependent on the type of business you are in, but here are some samples to consider.

Risks

Operational - Higher costs for freshwater, lower output for hydroelectric facilities due to siltation, or disruptions to businesses due to flooding
Regulatory - Legal Fines, user fees, government regulations, or lawsuits
Reputation - Nongovernmental organization campaigns for unsustainable purchasing practices or such as using old growth forests for pulp
Market and Product – Customers switching to suppliers that offer eco-certified products or governments implementing new sustainable procurement policies
Financing - Banks and Insurance companies implementing more rigorous lending requirements based on sustainability practices

Opportunities

Operational - Increased water-use efficiency, using natural features to maintain building comfort
Regulatory - Engaging governments to develop policies and incentives to protect or restore ecosystems your business needs
Reputation - Implementing and communicating sustainable purchasing, operational, or investment practices in order to differentiate your corporate brand
Market and Product – Launching new products and services that quantifiably reduce impacts on ecosystems, and by participating in local efforts to restore the environment
Financing - Banks and Insurance companies offering more favorable loan terms or investors taking positions in companies supplying products and services that improve resource use efficiency or restore degraded ecosystems

INTEGRATED REPORTING

We can help you better identify, describe, and confront the issues of environmental and social sustainability whose demands are steadily increasing and becoming more prevalent. Our approach is to create One Report, which integrates information about financial and nonfinancial performance into a single, jargon-free document. Currently, “nonfinancial” information is typically provided in a sustainability report regarding its performance in environmental, social, and governance terms. The King Code of Governance for South Africa 2009 describes the problem in a way that is applicable to every listed company in the world.

Such integration allows companies a clear view of risks to and opportunities in their own strategy, and it speaks with one voice to all stakeholders, who can even engage with the company via Web 2.0 tools and technologies. This approach is an essential element of demonstrating and building transparency and trust.

By creating an integrated report, you gain:

• Greater clarity about the relationship between financial and nonfinancial key performance indicators.
• Better management decisions as better measurement leads to better decision-making.
• Deeper engagement with the broad stakeholder community by having them focus on more than short-term returns, better understand the investments necessary to ensure long-term viability, and appreciate the need for a company to make a profit to create long term value.
• Lower reputational risk as stakeholder engagement leads to better mutual understanding. Clear and consistent communications leads to a constructive two-way conversation.