That question came from one of the participants in a workshop we held a couple of weeks ago. In all its simplicity, it made us stop, because it is as far from simple as you can get. Is sustainability expensive? Or is it more expensive to refrain from taking it seriously?
This week’s post is about money, simply because we feel that there has been a shift in the approach to sustainability lately. In the past, most people chose to work with sustainability because it was a way of saving money: energy efficiency and less waste for instance. Do you remember? Today, however, very few people see savings as the main driving force in their sustainability work.
Save money or make money
And no, humanity has not become altruistic idealists who only think about saving the planet. It is still all about money, but the momentum has gone from saving money to making money, or simply avoid losing money.
We had a customer recently who lost a procurement because they didn’t meet the sustainability requirements. To complicate matters, this particular company is good at sustainability in most aspects but had not been able to communicate it well enough. The alarm clock started ringing when the job went to a competitor – it was time to take the sustainability issue seriously. Other customers feel that competitors are running faster and therefore need to act. Positioning is in progress.
Because it’s all about risk, or as Niklas Ekman, equity analyst Carnegie, put it at a Mistra seminar that we attended this week: For investors, it’s a matter of finding winners and avoiding losers. He described that the sustainability issue is becoming absolutely crucial to the existence of companies. The financial industry is rarely first on the ball; Niklas described it as reactive, but when you reach the tipping point, they act quickly. Because no one wants to end up with a looser.
Of course, you still save money to run your business sustainably, but the momentum has definitely changed. We have reached the tipping point (hence the image selection if it felt far-fetched).
Exciting, isn’t it?
