3 Is Where You Start

- by Jin Kong


GDP is the typical standard we use to judge an economy’s health, but most economist would apply only a single bottom-line to conduct assessments.


That's right, the mighty "$".


Sustainability advocates often cite to the triple bottom-line: people, planet and profit. Capturing these, consultants often use an Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performance matrix to judge the long term performance of a company and make recommendations accordingly.

The long term ESG assessments, when appropriately used, should be catered to the specific industry sector to make the analysis meaningful enough to be useful. But there are common considerations across the industry spectrum and these include:

1. resource efficiency, 
2. business model resilience, 
3. innovative capacity and mentality, 
4. brand strength, and 
5. overall corporate culture. 

These factors can give a company a good starting point in incorporating its financial metrics in the broader sustainable demand trend to actualize a new value proposition. Implementing the method effectively with a continuous improvement control process is the key to this exercise. This is not just about an assessment and empty promise to be better. Otherwise the effort would be nothing more than a marketing ploy. You can only sell so much of those and probably less than the bottles of snake oil you can sell these days.

No, marketing is about showing a slice of what you do and true sustainability oriented changes require you to connect the slices of your operation to make sense of its eventual outcome. To really make the ESG analysis model itself sustainable and impactful, stakeholders have to agree together to pursuit a common mission in a long term frame of mind to think differently about the world around them. The company stakeholders will have to come to agree on a very aggressive public disclosure plan and the managers who will have to lead point on this initiative and should be equipped with the right tools and consistent support to implement changes. Additionally, your stakeholders must learn to share a common core vision for a strategy to identify new value drivers continuously from the moving targets of stakeholder interests, the changing competitive environment, and evolving organizational marching orders.

Perhaps more important than anything else in this modern 2.0 social digital age is the trust you must have in making full disclosure of all of this and intertwine educational material for your stakeholders to ask them for help with your on-coming challenges. A company must learn to use transparency and big data as hammer and nails to empower stakeholders to leverage organic growth. This, after all, is better than keeping them in the dark and slowly alienating them into your competitors’ shops.