Where the Quality and Sustainability Movements Converge

For those of us who lived through the "Quality" movement during the 1980s and 1990s, the similarities with the sustainability movement are striking.

David Lubin and Daniel Esty highlight commonalities in a recent Harvard Business Review article, which is good reading for executives and sustainability leaders. Highlights include:

• Most corporations are flailing around with a hodgepodge of sustainability initiatives

• Sustainability, like quality, is a mega-trend for corporations for which adoption moved from defense to offensive tactics

• The sustainability movement, like the quality movement, will follow four stages:

1.  Cost and risk reduction
2.  Redesigned products and processes
3.  Revenue growth strategies
4.  Differentiated value propositions that provide sustained competitive advantage

• Value creation is driven through executive buy-in and execution throughout the organization. Similar to chief quality officers, the chief sustainability officer must lead an effort to institutionalize this new thinking and processes into the company.

Critical roles for the sustainability executive are:

1.  Securing CEO commitment to integrating sustainability into strategy and operations
2.  Guiding the CEO and management team through the four stages listed above through education, visualization of goals, specifying accountability, reward systems and tracking results and successes
3.  Ensuring that results and best practices are disseminated widely, especially to employees
4.  Driving a process for developing shared goals with management and a broad set of stakeholders
5.  Develop key performance indicators (KPI) that support a differentiated strategy

Paul Baier is vice president of sustainability consulting at Groom Energy.

Image CC licensed by Flickr user Aerokev.