Business leaders are pressured more and more to redefine the role of business in society.
The purpose of a corporation should no longer advance only the interests of shareholders. Instead, business leaders must also invest in their employees, protect the environment, deal fairly and ethically with their suppliers, and address issues of poverty, hunger and lacking education and health issues in areas around their offices and factories.
In a recent Business Roundtable, business leaders vowed to “protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses” and “foster diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect.”
It is good to note that sustainable development or a sustainability culture seems to be taking root. There are quite a number of companies in the Philippines that are subscribing to sustainability, focusing on both—profit and purpose.
Many issues have shaped it: changes in climate patterns, geopolitical conflicts, global media networks, innovations in the marketplace, the success of “green” business, and many other factors, including the need to address poverty, hunger, bad health and limited education among the less privileged.
There is also a set of initiatives for further reducing social and economic inequities. There is a need for public-private initiatives to reducing the rate of preventable diseases and to facilitating access to clean drinking water for all people. Much will depend on the actions businesses, government (both national and local), educational institutions, NGOs and other stakeholders will take to address the most demanding Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United National, to which the Philippines is subscribing.
If these entities can work together to align their values and organizational processes around sustainable principles, then there is a greater chance of addressing, ameliorating, and sometimes even solving a range of social and environmental problems.
As sustainability principles are well supported by the scientific and managerial literature, many of them seem likely to be adopted by the wider culture. There are also indications that individual employee values are already well aligned with sustainability principles. We saw the beginning in millennials but see a much larger focus on sustainability in centennials, who insist that tech-touch must be accompanied by human-touch.
It’s good to see that the SEC has issued guidelines on the implementation on “sustainable development”!
It is also good news, from a sustainability point of view, that high-performing organizations have sustainability qualities to a larger extent than low-performing organizations. That is, the degree to which sustainability practices and strategies are being implemented—and the extent to which those strategies reportedly produce benefits—are stronger among the organizations reporting higher performance in the areas of revenue growth, market share, profitability and customer satisfaction. Whether or not sustainability practices actually result in better market performance remains an open question, but at least it becomes clearer that sustainability qualities do not prevent organizations from achieving market success.
On the contrary: when implemented wisely and well, sustainability-related strategies and practices are simply very good business!
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