Winning Sustainability Strategies: Finding Purpose, Driving Innovation and Executing Change

Despite recent optimism and global initiatives, the implementation of corporate sustainability programs has been slow at best, with less than a third of global companies having developed a clear business case for their approach to sustainability. Presenting numerous award-winning cases and examples from companies such as Unilever, Patagonia, Tumi, DSM and Umicore alongside original ideas based upon 20 years of consulting experience, this book reveals how to design and implement a stronger sense of focus and move sustainability programs forward. This proven combination of purpose, direction and speed is dubbed ＂Vectoring＂.

Based upon practitioner cases and data analysis from the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, Vectoring offers a plain-spoken framework to identify the relative position of companies compared to their peers. The framework and its 4 archetypes deliver insights for practitioners to locate inhibitors and overcome them by providing practical suggestions for process improvements. This includes designing and executing new sustainability programs, embedding the SDGs within company strategy and assessing the impact of sustainability programs on competitiveness and valuation. Offering directions for CFOs to shift companies from integrated reporting to integrated thinking in order to accelerate their sustainability programs, Winning Sustainability Strategies shows how to achieve purpose with profit and how to do well by doing good.

Benoit Leleux is the Stephan Schmidheiny Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he was also director of the MBA program (2006-2008) and director of Research and Development (2004-2008). He is currently the co-Director of Foundations for Business Leadership (FBL).

Jan van der Kaaij co-founded his advisory firm in 1997. Today Finch & Beak has grown into a European consultancy specialized in accelerating sustainability. Jan managed numerous consulting projects for major companies such as McDonalds, SwissPost and DSM. Since 2004 he is associated with IMD Lausanne on sustainability.