HBR Sept 09

HBR Sept 09

BD Believe highly recommends getting your hands on a copy of September’s Harvard Business Review.  The leader is a piece from 3 very clever chaps, who essentially argue that, going forward, you can only deliver competitive advantage for a company if sustainability is central to any strategy.  Here’s a couple of paragraphs from the summary:

“Sustainability isn’t the burden on bottom lines that many executives believe it to be. In fact, becoming environment-friendly can lower your costs and increase your revenues. That’s why sustainability should be a touchstone for all innovation.

In the future, only companies that make sustainability a goal will achieve competitive advantage. That means rethinking business models as well as products, technologies and processes.”

So, BD Believe concurs vehemently. The article then identifies a 5 stage process to becoming sustainable. It’s not the first process we’ve seen, and it won’t be the last, but there’s a lot of sense in it. Obviously, the HBR is an academic tome, and maybe a bit removed from those of us who work day-to-day to make businesses more sustainable and responsible.

Digging down into their model, you do find key points that are 100% relevent to BD Believe.  The central stage, Stage 3, is “Designing Sustainable Products and Services”. The competencies required to achieve this include “The ability to generate real public support for sustainable offerings and not to be considered as “greenwashing”. We interpret this to be much more than simply communicating what you do, but a mandate to involve your markets and consumers as stakeholders in the business models themselves.  This is the premise that Believe is founded on.

If you can’t get hold of a copy of the Harvard Business Review this month, pop round to BD towers and you can borrow ours.

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