{"id":1859,"date":"2020-11-04T07:02:16","date_gmt":"2020-11-04T06:02:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mesg.ch\/?p=1859"},"modified":"2020-11-04T15:29:39","modified_gmt":"2020-11-04T14:29:39","slug":"sustain-your-ability-for-sustainability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mesg.ch\/en\/sustain-your-ability-for-sustainability\/","title":{"rendered":"Sustain your ability for sustainability"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

2020\/11\/04<\/p>\r\n

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von Dr. Gunter Nittbaur<\/a><\/p>\r\n

Sustainability has been one of the hottest buzzwords on management floors in the last couple of years. Not only products and services needed to be sustainable but also processes and systems, leadership styles and employee behavior. Every presentation and every report had been loaded with sustainability related statements and the term advanced to eye-level status with other buzzwords like \u201cagility\u201d, \u201cdisruption\u201d or \u201ceco-system\u201d.<\/p>\r\n

However, the notion of sustainability recently lost its appeal, not only because of COVID-19 and other game changing incidents in the economic and political realm. Sustainability increasingly became \u201cnice to have\u201d, defamed as an add-on with little to no real impact for the bottom line or for the creation of a competitive advantage. Many companies moved their sustainability activities into the done<\/em> drawer once the energy consumption had been marginally reduced or the introduction of a digital signature helped to make printouts of documents dispensable. Not without good reasons have these activities been denounced by critics as mere \u201cgreenwashing\u201d with a prime focus on their marketing benefit.<\/p>\r\n

But moving sustainability too quickly to the graveyard of management fads would be wrong. The term \u201csustainability\u201d itself consists of the words \u00b4ability\u00b4 and \u00b4sustain\u00b4 where the latter according to Wikipedia means \u201cto cause or allow something to continue for a period of time\u201d. In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution called the 2030 Agenda<\/em>. This resolution consists of a total of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), many of which can be directly adopted by companies of all kinds, e.g. quality of education, gender equality, clean energy, responsible consumption or the sustainable design of industry, innovation and infrastructure.<\/p>\r\n

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So what would be required in order to ensure the truly sustainable<\/em> anchoring of sustainability in corporations? We recommend the following:<\/p>\r\n