A Business Playbook for Sustainable Success

The ongoing environmental and social crises are presenting business leaders with an unprecedented strategic challenge. We are facing a foundational change that will risk most currently successful business models becoming obsolete. At the same time, we are provided with avenues to new value creation opportunities should we succeed with repositioning our business within the evolving business environment. This calls for explorative strategy execution guided by clear future scenarios. However, few business leaders are fully aware of these emerging opportunities and the drivers behind them. This is only natural, as the emerging sustainability drivers are fundamentally changing the value exchange mechanisms between a company and its various stakeholders. As a result, most business leaders need to reconfigure their thinking in order to succeed with these new rules of business. This book is an essential guide for any present-day business leader looking for actionable insights to help with this change towards sustainable success. It provides an overview of how the ongoing environmental and social crises impact macroeconomics and what their impact is on business level. These three layers are intertwined together. Sustainability issues are collective action items that require policy-level intervention to help fix market deficiencies typically associated with tackling such collective action issues. These policy-level interventions have an impact on economics. And that, combined with public awareness, will have an impact on business. This book consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 provides a story of how I personally arrived at the conclusion that we are facing the most profound change the business world has ever experienced due to the emerging environmental and social crises. I will share some of the conclusions I have developed via the combination of my readings, my experiences with clients and my discussions with other likeminded people. I will provide plenty of book references and other reading recommendations in case you want to follow some of my footsteps with your own insight development process. Chapter 2 provides an analysis of the drivers behind this change. What are the drivers behind the environmental and social crises? How do they behave? What makes them different from some of the other drivers we have previous experience with? What are some of the unique challenges with these types of problems? How do they behave on macroeconomic level? What are the available tools and methods that we can use to tackle these problems? Chapter 3 attempts to create the currently missing link between the environmental and social crises, their macroeconomic impact, and their combined impact on the overall business environment. This is obviously a challenging piece to write as we are discussing emerging new business dynamics resulting from the over-arching change. There is only a little empirical evidence to rely upon, requiring many of the ideas to be generated from logical reasoning. At the end of this chapter, I provide a section with a list of predictions, their business implications, and the emerging opportunities that they will unlock as we witness the anticipated level of disruption progress across the business environment. I call business strategies that help solve for the environmental and social crises while generating value to shareholders, strategies for sustainable success. They are strategies that enable businesses to do well while doing good. They are true win-win-win strategies for all the stakeholders involved. They are synergistic across all the stakeholders. They are, I do believe, the future of business.