It’s funny how words get hi-jacked with time and the ebb and flow of economic and societal change.

15 years ago I was working as a sales & marketing consultant to OEMs in the Automotive Industry and the term ‘sustainability’ was much in use as a one-word driver for commercial action.

At that time, we were introducing planned trade cycles as a means of building sustainability into the automotive sector; making it possible for buyers to change their cars every 2 or 3 years by giving them a guaranteed future minimum value for their car to enable a regular change of car to a new or nearly new one.

Sustainability was a term that implied that business activity was centred round actions that made the company a leaner organisation, making best use of its resources and developing those resources (human and material) to build long term growth into any business strategy… something our Japanese counterparts had been doing for centuries.

Today, the definition of sustainability is probably best summed up by the Brundtland Commission’s Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future,

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:
the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and
the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.”

And it is this second key concept that informs much of the sustainability debate today; Google the word and you are presented with conferences on the subject (and none of them are cheap!) about how business is killing the planet, how business must include environmental considerations into all its activities and there’s even a consulting company that has taken the name… which was only a matter of time.

This terminology saturation has done little to endear the true (and economically sound) meaning of sustainability to financial officers who feel they are constantly being beaten around the ears with this to the extent that they feel that the only effective form of defence against this onslaught is offence; hence some of the quite aggressive backlash in the media.

A good definition/explanation that should resonate with us all and brings the two concepts back into a unified business strategy to be treated seriously, however, is the one provided by Business Link, a government organisation that does a lot of good (and often, unreported) work to support the small business sector in the UK,

“A sustainable approach like this isn’t just a question of spending money to minimise any harmful impacts from your business. It’s also about making the most of opportunities to reduce unnecessary costs and risks, and responding to what customers and other people involved with your business want.”

Any financial officer will recognise sound business practice here and need not wait for the CEO to have an environmental epiphany on his personal tree-hugger lined road to Damascus before injecting sustainability into the spreadsheet.

Sustainability has always been about sound business practice; it happens also to reduce a company’s carbon burn. After all, the green issue is as much about maximising the efficiency of diminishing (and finite) resources as it is about CO2 emissions.

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