Ensuring Corporate Sustainability: Strategic Perspectives for Developing a Sustainable Organisation

The commitment of companies to deliver corporate sustainability has been frequently discussed in theory and practice. This commitment however demands a strategic approach to ensure that corporate sustainability is integrated as part of the business leadership, processes and model. As governments and consumers begin to hold companies across industry accountable for their sustainability practices and carbon output, researchers must increasingly focus on a need to establish a template for change, which considers the previous successes and future challenges associated with true environmental sustainability in business. The corporate sustainability race which many companies find themselves in today is due to the immovable deadlines for each sector set by governmental bodies. The transition process to meet these deadlines and become a sustainable business is the focus of our research. Using judgement studies conducted with eighteen industry experts, we explore the key obstacles faced by organisations when pursuing transformative sustainability initiatives, and report these across three specific domains: leadership, business processes, and business models. Our findings subsequently reveal eight specific themes (lack of internal knowledge, side project mentality, leadership structure, complexity, mindset shift, transformation, cost barriers, and renewability) across these areas and highlight the need for organisations and decision makers to develop mitigation strategies if they are to see their sustainable efforts become successful. We argue that companies must avoid these pitfalls within these core areas of the organisation in order to enact lasting change to an organisation, and that this multi-layered perspective offers a useful interpretation for transitioning to a more sustainable model.