Sustainability—balancing social, environmental,
and economic factors for short and
long-term performance—is a critical
issue for the world and for business. We
interviewed key executives at nine of the world’s
most “sustainable” companies to examine important
issues about their sustainability journeys
and the role Human Resources is playing. We
confirmed that these companies exhibit first-class
sustainability results on a variety of dimensions.
We identified a pyramid of seven core qualities
of sustainable enterprises that appear to be amenable
to managerial intervention, and mapped
out the specific HR-related actions to help develop
these qualities: inculcating sustainability-oriented
values, helping to elicit senior management
support for making sustainability central to business
strategy; supporting the development of metrics
and systems alignment around sustainability;
and enabling the organization to achieve broad
stakeholder engagement and holistic integration.