Sustainability: business, life, environment

In a 2008 survey by Pinnacle Worldwide, 45% of businesses reported to have a sustainability strategy already in place and another 27% responded that they were working on one.  However, a strategy is only as good as the ability to implement and continuously manage its progress. 

As we have discussed in a recent post, business sustainability is a mind-set change that may be consistent and in alignment with traditional strategic decision making and continuous improvement effort in the company.  While the decision criteria might vary, the business processes may be the same.

Leveraging a traditional strategic management process, businesses are applying the four development steps to business sustainability planning.  These steps can be applied to sustainability concepts when developing or reevaluating a business sustainability plan. These applied steps include:

•    Situation Analysis: analyze the current state of the organization’s internal and external environment.  Through key engagements define a sustainable direction.

•    Strategy Formulation: strategies based on operational, competitive, and corporate sustainability goals.

•    Strategy Implementation: the key elements of implementation are a executive leadership, consistent action, clear communication, and stakeholder engagement.

•    Strategy evaluation: a continuous improvement loop to examine strategy implementation and resulting outcomes relative to goals.

As a provider of both large and small business resources, we advise our clients to recognized the importance of stakeholder engagement throughout the process.  Strategy management requires the involvement of the entire organization.  Managing sustainable change requires specific actions for organizational buy-in.

At Taiga Company, our sustainability consulting works with clients to develop strategies that meet specific needs.   We utilize processes and tools to engage the organization in a way that most efficiently generates defined results.