Attention to sustainability provides opportunities

By Lewis E. Gilbert

"Sustainability" is sometimes criticized as a concept that has so many meanings as to be meaningless.

This might be a strength rather than a weakness; at its root, most of these definitions have concepts of longevity and health. These roots give us a platform on which we can begin to work.

I believe one of the best books on sustainability is a business literature classic: "Built to Last" by Collins and Porras.

This book reports the results of a detailed comparative study of companies that have been successful for long periods of time against similar companies whose success is less spectacular.

The authors delve into the details of company culture and history, and tease out a handful of fundamental characteristics of companies that have managed to sustain their position at the forefront of their niche.

Forces of excellence

Among the points that Collins and Porras make is that sustained excellence is driven by culture and discipline, and that short-term financial return is not a predictor of long-term sustainability.

Companies that adapt to external forces while preserving core values tend to do better than those that don't.

John Elkington in his book, "Cannibals With Forks," takes the analysis a step further. Elkington is an early articulator of the triple bottom-line concept. He argues that successful companies must attend to three bottom lines: the financial, the environmental, and the social.

They must include their impacts (both positive and negative), the natural services they use (clean water and natural resources inputs as well as waste disposal), and their contributions to the well-being of the communities in which they manufacture and sell.

Improves performance

One of the big changes in this thinking in the last decade has been the realization that attending to the triple bottom line can actually improve company performance, where historically caring for the environment and communities have been seen as costs only.

Groups such as Innovest and the Dow Jones Sustainability Index have shown that companies that score high in measures of sustainability tend to do as well or better than indexes of overall market performance such as the S&P.

This brings us back to the meaning of sustainability. I will posit the following: Sustainability is about the future, and it is about doing better in the future than we are doing now.

There are many measures of what "doing better" means and those measures may change with time. To be sustainable now is to ensure that those measures improve and that they change in ways that express our hopes for our offspring.

With our historical connection to the land, abundant natural resources, evolving economy and a strong university system, the state of Wisconsin is in a strong position to lead and innovate in the emerging business environment.

S.C. Johnson and other Wisconsin-based companies are already leaders in implementing and benefiting from triple bottom-line concepts.

At the Nelson Institute and UW-Madison we are partnered with other state agencies and local business interests to build teaching, outreach and research programs that support the knowledge needs of our state.

Our goal is to ensure that Wisconsin capitalizes on the opportunities provided by the attention to business, environmental and social sustainability.

Lewis E. Gilbert is the interim director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

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