Sustainable Value is divided into three parts. Part I is a management fable about Deena, a young CEO, and the challenges she faces to profitably address her company’s impacts on society and the environment. Her story is one of personal empowerment, of finding balance and connection to what is important in life. It’s also a tale of corporate profit and growth.

What makes Deena’s story unique is that her eventual success—personal, financial, and corporate—is the result of “doing good.” She is a talented but ordinary human being who demonstrates leadership in a time of heightened global problems ranging from poverty to the energy crisis and climate change.

In telling her story, I’ve drawn a composite picture based on business leaders I’ve been fortunate to know and work with over the past 25 years.

These corporate chieftains face many challenges in their personal and business lives related to a world deeply in crisis. A small but influential group, they are now reinventing the role of business in society. They are shifting the focus away from minimizing negative impacts (such as brutally downsizing employees or unintentionally contaminating soil and water) to offering new solutions to global problems that the public sector has been unable to tackle alone.

In the new competitive environment, stakeholder value—based on the economic, ecological, and social impacts a company has on its diverse constituents—is becoming a way to achieve competitive advantage. Issues such as climate change and global poverty are introducing greater levels of complexity into strategic decision-making and often have far-reaching implications for companies in today’s competitive environment.

The real-life sustainability stories of DuPont, Wal-Mart, Lafarge, and Cargill’s NatureWorks are guided by top management with profit and loss responsibility. Unlike smaller niche players in the 20th century, they do not rely solely on a visionary founder—nor do they depend on the director of sustainability—to “green” the company or to adopt greater social responsibility.

As industry leaders with tens of thousands of employees and businesses that span diverse supply chains across the world, these companies seem incapable of being paragons of virtue. Their blemishes and occasionally deliberate mis-steps, such as Toyota’s push into large gas-guzzling SUVs1 in the same time-frame as their roll-out of the hybrid drivetrain, are part of their quest for competitive advantage in markets that still reward short-term shareholder value even if it incurs a substantial cost to society.

But, warts and all, these behemoths promise a renewed relevance for business in society: they represent the most powerful institution on Earth shaping a better future for everyone, everywhere.

Part III offers a toolkit and process for mainstream business managers who want to know how they can take advantage of the new competitive environment. It provides a guide to creating shareholder and stakeholder value in a broad range of sectors. Taking advantage of sustainability as a new source of competitive advantage requires a change in the mind-set of leadership and a disciplined approach to integrating stakeholder value throughout the business.

This section of the book introduces “sustainable value” as a distinct approach to managing value creation. It provides a step-by-step approach—based on delivering consulting engagements and hundreds of executive working sessions in Fortune 1000 companies—to building sustainable value inside large complex organizations. It is designed to help managers identify how and where they can do well by doing good—providing the practitioner with the means to compete effectively in the 21st century. ...

Download Sustainable Value: How the World's Leading Companies Are Doing Well by Doing Good

EXCERPT, PDF format, 434KB, 28Pages.

Chris Laszlo
with a Foreword by Patrick J. Cescau, Group Chief Executive Officer, Unilever
Stanford Business Books, 2008.

Contents:
Foreword
Patrick J. Cescau, Group Chief Executive Officer, Unilever . . . . . . . . 11
Foreword
Tyler J. Elm, Senior Director, Corporate Strategy & Finance,
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. . . . . . . . . . . .  . . . . . . . . . 15
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Part I Deena’s story . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . 27
1 Life at the top. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2 Turning point . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . 39
3 Rebirth of the sustainable company . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Part II Mainstream companies that are
doing well by doing good. . . . . . . .  . . . . . . . . . 73
4 The new competitive environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
5 DuPont . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
6 Wal-Mart . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
7 Lafarge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . 100
8 NatureWorks LLC, a subsidiary of Cargill. . . .  . . . . . . . . . . 109
Part III The sustainable value toolkit . . . .  . . . . . . 117
9 Introduction to sustainable value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
10 The eight disciplines . . . . . . . . . . .  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
11 Putting it all together . . . . . . . . .  . . . . . . . . . 178
Postscript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Business as an Agent of World Benefit: How the Holy Grail of business— innovation—can be magnified through the power of sustainable value creation Professor David Cooperrider, Founder and Chairman, Center of Business as an Agent of World Benefit, with Ante Glavas, Executive Director, and Nadya Zhexembayeva, Associate Director
Endnotes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

A small but influential group of mainstream global industry leaders are now reinventing the role of business in society by creating Sustainable Value. They are creating it through the provision of value to both their shareholders and their stakeholders – an ever growing list of diverse constituents impacted by the social, environmental, and financial performance of global business. In short, they are doing well by doing good.

In this outstanding book, Chris Laszlo defines, illustrates, and shows how business can action ‘Sustainable Value’ through a management fable, inside stories from some of the largest corporations in the world and with frameworks, tools, and methods that will make Sustainable Value creation concrete for business practitioners everywhere.

Visit Sustainable Value Book Website

About the author:

Chris Laszlo is the author of The Sustainable Company: How to Create Lasting Value through Social and Environmental Performance published by Island Press in October 2003 (paperback July 2005). A co-founder and partner of Sustainable Value Partners, he has trained thousands of Fortune 500 executives in “sustainability for business advantage” inside companies and at leading business schools around the world. He is a partner of Blu Skye Sustainability, the leading strategy consulting firm.

For nearly ten years, he was an executive at Lafarge S.A., a world leader in materials, holding positions as head of strategy, general manager of a manufacturing subsidiary, and vice president of business development. Prior to Lafarge, he spent five years with Deloitte Touche consulting.

Educated at Swarthmore College, Columbia University, and the University of Paris, Chris earned his PhD in Economics and Management Science. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Case Weatherhead School of Management in Cleveland, Ohio, where he is also Associate Director at the Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit. Since 2002, he has lectured at CEDEP and is a Visiting Scholar at INSEAD’s Center for Social Innovation.

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