The Adventure of Sustainable Performance
"The Wisdom contained in this brilliant book will become seminal, and its impact, transformational"
Perfect for executives, managers, directors, and other business leaders, The Adventure of Sustainable Performance is an actionable guidebook for the implementation of value-add sustainability programmes.
The Adventure of Sustainable Performance seeks out bold pioneers or forgotten pioneers who need reinvigorating and to be inspired with renewed purpose.
Leaders who want more than just modest incremental efficiency gains, who want to create value, to deliver positive impact and meaningful change, should welcome this book. In a time of disruption like never before, boundaries will need revisiting, systems need reimagining, and assets need repurposing through wise stewardship.
This book starts by highlighting the reality of now. Then, by guiding the reader through the challenges of ESG compliance, it presents this new landscape as a platform for value creation. Finally, it uncovers the opportunities of net-zero, circular business models and a more just and inclusive capitalism as having huge potential in a new emerging era. Having interviewed dozens of C Suite officers in different industries and based on decades of experience as guides to progressive leaders and pioneers around the world, the authors distil the need and show the way.
As a manager and as a CEO, my management is so much easier because all I'm asking for from my team is to do what’s right. My job is mostly about reminding and seeing how I can help them remove some of the blockers. Of course, at no point is there an illusion that we’re no longer looking at profits, profit is absolutely vital. But we’ll be making profit by putting the spotlight on where the costs and the opportunities are and then seeing how we can navigate this, and we have to make tradeoffs. We can't do everything today.
Geoff van Sonsbeeck,CEO and Co-Founder of House of Baukjen
As a business leader you’re going to be saying, ‘I’ve got climate risks, I’ve got supply chain risks, I’ve got human capital risks,’ they all point to the same thing, which is we’ve just been extracting too much too cheaply.
Rather than having separate sectors doing different things we need to have all of those businesses looking at their resource base, their consumption, and saying, ‘How can I turn my business from being a consumer-based linear flowing business into a regenerative business which can take back materials, can backup reserve materials, get our own plastics back and turn them back into new products or turn them into products in a parallel sector?’
Bruce Bratley, CEO of First Mile
ESG is how a company delivers its goods and services. So every company in the world can improve its ESG score because it’s about how you look after your employees, how you engage with the environment, relations with suppliers, and your governance protocols etc. That’s applicable to every business. We invest in companies that create social or environmental change as the core activities of that business. So it’s about what the business does, and where we can drive value through that mission.
Beth Houghton, Head of the Impact Fund for Palatine
We want to comply, and we are aware that a new compliance cost can trigger a source of value from it and ultimately it will open up new wider opportunities for us to innovate and grow.
Guillaume Le Cunff, CEO of Nespresso
Leaders, in all walks of life, should see their contribution in making the future better as a categorical imperative embedded in the very nature of their position. Moral leadership thus becomes a prerequisite ingredient in any contemporary effort to further sustainable development. Today, in a world which is confronted by so many fast-changing and difficult issues, moral leadership is indispensable to induce change and in a direction that will further the common good. Leadership education needs to be infused with case challenges that call for just and responsible decision-making beyond abstractions and models of leadership.
Henri-Claude de Bettignies, Emeritus Professor of Leadership and Responsibility at INSEAD
There’s a lot of evidence about supply chains already in play. I think it’s beholden on companies to understand what intelligence is available and to use the best of that intelligence to dig deeper, because the process of digging deeper and understanding more about the impact on your stakeholders, and particularly your supply chain as well as your products, leads to a more enlightened approach to running your business. It ensures that you have a strategy that is adaptive to the future and transformative in terms of identifying opportunity.
Richard Mattison, President of Sustainable 1 at S&P Global
Be in no doubt, The Adventure of Sustainable Performance describes an adventurous journey, uncomfortable at times, where a new and cold reality is dawning. But, in a period when the world will continue to play at denial or talk more of ruins, this book helps leaders to instead see foundations. Foundations upon which the new era will be built, and new systems of value will be realised.
Stuart is a proven business leader with over 30 years experience in the ESG and sustainability space. He is a founder and CEO of Anthesis Group, one of the fastest growing companies in Europe. Prior to this, Stuart was a Director on the Board of WSP Group PLC. Passionate about moving from talk to action he has dedicated his career to proving how business can be a force for good, and how superior financial returns are available as a result of authentic purpose.
Dean is Chief Enterprise Officer at Anthesis. He started his career at Jacobs Suchard in brand marketing before setting up GoodBrand in 1997. He has 25 years of experience in building sustainable performance strategies for some of the world’s leading multinational consumer brand companies. Dean serves as an Honorary Fellow at Durham University Business School.