Sustainability is Business

Business leaders worldwide face the dual challenge of managing stakeholder business governance expectations while still delivering a return to shareholders. This difficult balance has prompted a reexamination of core corporate values. Within this context of reassessment, sustainability has emerged as a necessary and important ingredient for defining a company’s long-term success.
Of the more than 1,250 responses to the Accenture Strategy’s 2016 survey of CEOs of the world’s largest companies, 80 percent said they believe that “demonstrating a commitment to societal
purpose is already a differentiator in their  industry.” In addition, 97 percent felt that sustainability is critical to the future success of their business, and nearly as many (95 percent) felt a personal responsibility to ensure their company has a core purpose and role in society.

Sustainability has evolved from simply being the “right thing to do” to being the “right thing to do to grow business.”

In point of fact, sustainability has evolved from simply being the “right thing to do” to being the “right thing to do to grow business.” Sustainability efforts are particularly embraced by companies that have implemented
business digitization. By replacing manual processes with software, digitization allows businesses to automatically collect data that can be mined to better understand process performance, cost drivers, and causes of risk. These digitization efforts have enabled sustainability programs to have a more robust impact on corporations and to do so at a substantially lower cost of implementation.

Digitization is already starting to transform the competitive sustainable landscape, which will require all companies to change the way they think about products, technologies, processes, and business models. It therefore comes as no surprise that 75 percent of CEOs see digital technologies as enabling more sustainable business models. Beyond sustainability-driven bottom-line and top-line returns, sustainability has proved
to be a major contributor to organizational and technological innovation. Sustainability serves as a lens through which business leaders are able to identify opportunities that might otherwise have been missed — to cut costs, reduce risk, and generate higher revenues. New revenue generating opportunities are appearing through the creation of better products that appeal to new audiences. In an effort to support corporate
innovation efforts, forward-thinking companies are now treating sustainability as a source for future product and process innovation.

Taken a step further, a customer-centric approach to sustainability creates differentiation far beyond the typical corporate attributes of price, quality, and convenience. To gain this advantage, businesses must be willing to explore sustainability strategies that emphasize the customer and help drive revenue by building
long-standing, trust-based relationships with clients. These new points of differentiation are based on delivering products that require fewer resources to create, offering a lower total cost of ownership, and providing healthy and safe solutions. In the case of thoughtfully designed products, especially those that require energy,  the reduced operating expenses over the lifetime of the product can be considerable and may factor heavily into its long-term affordability. The benefits of selecting such products also offer brand enhancement, which is perhaps less tangible but no less important. Beyond the positive environmental, social,
and governance impact they hoped these efforts would yield, forward-thinking companies are being rewarded with long-term economic gain and competitive advantage. Pursuing sustainability has evolved into being the right thing to do to grow business, and the reality is that doing the right thing yields both immediate and long-term rewards.

In its four sections, this report explains trends that are significantly affecting the business world of today.

• Living in a world of data, where digitization is a sustainability enabler
• Living with finite resources, offering strategies for sustainable resource utilization
• Living by principles, and building business resiliency through increased circularity
• Living with integrity, adopting sustainability as an integral part of business risk mitigation

Each section highlights opportunities these trends are creating, along with strategies for making the most of them, and how businesses that adopt these strategies in the pursuit of greater sustainability are minimizing risk, saving money, and creating new business value.