The Sustainability Imperative
As organizations struggle to define a strategy that balances purpose and profit, opportunities are increasingly emerging to take the lead in sustainability initiatives. Front-line advances in areas such as net-zero emissions, AI-powered solutions for the underserved, precision agriculture, digital healthcare, and more are delivering business benefits, while simultaneously contributing to the realization of the UN’s 17 SDGs. We provide the expert thinking, debate, and guidance to help your organization reposition and transform in the era of sustainability.
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Blockchain-based IoT's ability to provide end-to-end supply chain information in real time supports the circular economy paradigm. It allows businesses and consumers to shift from a linear take-make-dispose model (which relies on large quantities of easily accessible resources) toward an industrial model where effective flows of materials, energy, labor, and detailed information interact with each other in a restorative, regenerative, more sustainable system.
If we want to incorporate sustainability into process improvement, we must develop a toolkit and integrate it with existing Lean processes and methods, such that they work together to produce the results we’re seeking. Importantly, many practitioners believe muri is the true root cause of many other forms of waste. If we follow that line of logic, we should find a great deal of opportunity for improvement by actively controlling it.
Discover a strategic approach that recognizes the business drivers for biodiversity, creates space for stakeholder engagement, and acknowledges the power of corporate culture.
In Part II of this Executive Update series on operationalizing sustainability, we set out key recommendations to unlock the benefits of sustainability by adopting an ecosystem approach, integrating sustainability reporting, redefining culture, and focusing on innovation.
This Advisor looks at two traditional approaches to corporate innovation (the stage-gate model and design thinking) and where they went wrong.
ADL recently ran a global study exploring organizations’ current maturity in integrating sustainability into their business models. This two-part Executive Update series analyzes the results of that survey and offers insight into operationalizing sustainability. Here in Part I, we explore the current state of sustainability as well as challenges to effective business sustainability.
Businesses are being forced to respond simultaneously to climate change at the macro (external) level and the micro (internal) level. This Advisor looks at four main lenses through which businesses should view their macro and micro climate-related goals: climate science, climate governance, business stakeholders, and community stakeholders.
This Advisor presents two examples that illustrate how a new breed of business organizations is pushing beyond traditional boundaries by explicitly incorporating their understanding of nature into their strategies. These stories also demonstrate that a large-scale, system-level change toward more ecologically sustainable production systems is an evolutionary process, one that requires organizations to access as many sources of ecological knowledge as possible.