Sustainability Programs: A Design Guide to Achieving Financial, Social, and Environmental Performance

"Rejecting the notion of sustainability as a burdensome add-on, the book provides a flexible, step-by-step, continuous-improvement 'Sustainable Management System' model that mitigates risks and unlocks new opportunities. The authors emphasize that genuine sustainability within a value chain reduces costs and expenses, increases revenues, and gains competitive advantages through greenwash-free transparency... Ultimately, 'Sustainability Programs' presents a clear, how-to-do-it framework for transforming organizations into more responsible, resilient, and financially successful entities."
Salem Afeworki, MSc, Municipal Energy and Sustainability Services Division Manager, Global 40 Under 40 and Top 100 Environment + Energy Leader

Go-to guidance for designing, implementing, and managing effective sustainability programs and their management systems

Moving past vague concepts, buzzword overloads, superficial efforts, and flavor-of-the-month misdirections, Sustainability Programs presents a pragmatic, step-by-step approach to creating and managing adaptable, organization-wide sustainability programs to achieve People, Planet, and Profit (3P) objectives with least cost, effort, and risk. Key steps covered in this book include reaching a programmatic "Go" decision, developing sustainability policies, designing an organizational framework, defining the most pressing sustainability needs, and cascading 3P goals, tactics, targets, and initiatives into business units, functions, and departments to create new capabilities and improve performance.

By following the principles and practices in this book, any organization can better achieve sustainability's full promise of social responsibility, environmental stewardship, and financial performance. Written by authors with a wealth of practitioner experience in the field, Sustainability Programs explores topics including:

• Creating social, environmental, and financial strategies, tactics, targets, and initiatives that create new capabilities and resolve 3P performance issues
• Avoiding ad hoc projects that fail to address critical sustainability issues, wasting valuable resources and squandering competitive advantages
• Overcoming technical professionals' lack of business management experience and helping management professionals understand sustainability's benefits and intricacies
• Understanding sustainability through the management lenses of risk reduction, improved efficiencies through eradication of wastes, increased revenues via innovation, and enhanced competitive advantages fueled by greenwash-free transparency.
• Responding to the demanding data capture, analysis, and reporting challenges of environmental, social, and governance (ESG).

Acknowledging that one size does not fit all, this book delivers individual concepts and methods adaptable across any organization's value chains. It is an essential read for leaders and practitioners working within private and public enterprises of all types and sizes, especially those with 2,000 to 5,000 employees.