A.T. Kearney announced a particularly interesting founding in the report “Green Winners: The Performance of Sustainability-focused Companies in the Financial Crisis”. Companies focused on sustainability outperformed their competitors by 15% in average market capitalization. In order to determine this, the report looked at the 99 companies with the greatest Sustainability Index as defined by Goldman Sachs (I understand that this definition of sustainability-focused company is highly arguable).
Still, it is important to outline what all of these companies have in common. In all of them, sustainability goes beyond being just environmentally friendly. Relevant points are: they focus on long term strategies and not just on short term goals, they present strong and responsible corporate governance and they have risk-management practices.
I want to focus a bit now (and probably in future posts) in the fact that these companies were trained in order to face crisis situations. This successful trend is not just a coincidence. Training managers to acquire rapid response skills, having a team working on possible scenarios and action plans associated to them are practices a sustainable company must have. A sustainable business is NOT one that isn’t modified by changes in the environment. Change is inevitable. But we can be prepared when the moment comes. You can’t change the direction of the wind, but you CAN modify the orientation of your sails!
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