CMA Management Magazine

(The Canadian magazine for Certified Management Accountants)
August-September 2005
Making sustainability mainstream
Not everyone's convinced that sustainability belongs on the agendas of the C-suites.
"The NEXT Sustainability Wave" explains how it is becoming a strategic imperative
A review of "The NEXT Sustainability Wave: Building Boardroom Buy-In,"
by Bob Willard, 2005, 368 pages.
Reviewed by ANNE PAPMEHL

Most people who retire after 34 years of service with a company spend their days indulging in leisurely pursuits. Not Bob Willard. This Ontario resident and IBM retiree has launched not one post-retirement career but three: author, scholar and environmental activist.

His first book, "The Sustainability Advantage: Seven Business Case Benefits of a Triple Bottom Line," published in 2002, was one of the first books to quantify the business benefits of environmental sustainability.

His second book, "The NEXT Sustainability Wave: Building Boardroom Buy-In," published this year, in conjunction with his doctoral thesis, explains how to achieve those bottom line benefits, and, more importantly, how to sell the idea to very skeptical and busy senior executives. One could easily call it a sustainability sales manual, but that would do a disservice to the scholarly rigor and research that supports the book. A more appropriate description would be a business field guide that gives sustainable business advocates the tools to bring sustainability into the business mainstream.

Common goals

Willard hopes to bring sustainability into the mainstream by explaining the goals environmental activists and business professionals actually have in common. He has nothing against the profit motive. On the first page of the book, he identifies a common goal among corporations, societies and the environment to survive and prosper and be sustainable enterprises, social systems and ecological systems, respectively.

But Willard is equally cognizant of the world's troubling ecological challenges, and their risks to business. He asks rhetorically: "Are the sustainability goals of corporations, societies and the environment mutually sustainable? If not, who dominates this complex and dynamic interplay of systems?"

The answer is clear. "Business is a direct or indirect contributor to most 21st-century ecological and social challenges." The solution? Sustainability strategies that give corporations the opportunity to get ahead of the curve, define new rules, and be rewarded by their stakeholders for behaving responsibly. Bringing sustainability into the mainstream, considered this way, is simply good for the environment, society and the long-term survival of the business.

Of course, it's not easy to change a mind-set that sees environmental stewardship as the cost of doing business rather than a bottom line enhancer. Willard spends considerable time analyzing why companies have resisted for so long sustainable strategies that could profit both the planet and the firm.

Finding a common language

The trouble with sustainability and its many semantic cousins, like corporate social responsibility, corporate responsibility and environmental stewardship, is that the terms carry more of a ‘saving the planet' than ‘saving the business' connotation. For this reason, hard-core bottom-line-only types find it hard to accept sustainability as a business driver.

Willard learned this from personal experience. In 1997 he wrote a letter (excerpted in the book) to then-president of IBM, Lou Gerstner, asking him to embed sustainable development into IBM's business strategy for the good of the company and the planet. "It failed," writes Willard. "My proposal was treated as a philanthropic request, not as a strategic business suggestion." But Willard learned a valuable lesson. "This frustrating experience reminded me that it is important to speak executives' language and relate any proposition to their current business challenges".

Saving the planet doesn't make the list of what results drive a company these days. Here's what does: revenue improvement, expense reduction, profit, share price, growth, market share, leadership, vision, attracting and retaining good customers, good employees, regulatory compliance and quality of products and services, and a host of others enumerated by Willard in the introduction.

The good news, says Willard, is that sustainability is a means to achieve these business ends, and he provides a wealth of information on how to help business decision makers see that, in a language they understand. Sustainability proponents "need to help executives tune into WII-FM (What's in it — For Me?) instead of WII-FW (What's in it — For the World?)."

Of course, it's not always easy. As the author points out, companies are at different stages in their sustainability efforts and the top issues for the head of a marketing and sales group will differ from those of the head of human resources or head of operations. But Willard proposes practical and thoughtful suggestions on getting around these hurdles that few (if any) other business thinkers have expressed.

There are six chapters to the book. Chapter one discusses some of the history, problems, skepticism, and drivers of sustainability. In chapter two, Willard discusses the three drivers of the first wave of sustainability (founder's personal passion, public relations crisis and regulatory pressure) and in chapters three and four, he discusses two emerging drivers — one related to threats and the other to opportunities. In chapter five, Willard provides an objection-handling clinic on inhibitors to the next wave. Here he presents an entire gamut of possible objections — not unreasonable ones either — and a series of smart strategies for handling them.

Despite the apathy of many captains of industry towards environmental stewardship, Willard is optimistic that things are starting to turn around. In his conclusions, he presents five signs of hope that we are getting closer to the tipping point — where sustainability becomes fully integrated into the corporate ethos and modus operandi. That, by the way, is the next sustainability wave.

While tailored to the sustainability champion, the book is also an excellent primer for the sustainability skeptic. The book follows an unusual format. The left hand side pages contain quotes from thought leaders and literature, as well as cartoons, tables and charts to supplement the point made on the right side. Each right-hand page is a self-contained thought or idea, designed for quick and comfortable reference. By employing this format, Willard has managed to distill complicated concepts into bite-sized pieces. One reviewer wrote that this book should be read by every executive that cares about the planet. Equally, it should be read by every executive that cares about business.

Anne Papmehl is a London, Ont.-based writer and consultant.

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