What would a Triple Bottom Line Balanced Scorecard look like?
Building a Balanced Scorecard begins with the collaborative creation of a Strategy Map. The Strategy Map is a highly visual, and easily communicated, way to illustrate how the strategy of the enterprise translates into measurable objectives in each of the four perspectives – finance, customer, process, and organization – that together create a holistic view of sustainable organizational performance.
Sustainability is NOT a single objective with its own metrics. Rather, sustainability is a theme that is reflected in each of these perspectives.
- From a financial standpoint, sustainability means staying in business.
- From a customer standpoint, sustainability means satisfying, even delighting, the sustainability-conscious consumer.
- From a process standpoint, sustainability means we manage materials, energy, and waste in the most eco-efficient way possible.
- From an organizational standpoint, sustainability means creating a culture that values sustainability, reflected in the choices that employees make every day.
The Strategy Map tells a story about how we will collaborate to achieve all these objectives:
- We will build new sources of revenue by creating positive branding and customer experience connected with how we design and build our products, and how our customers use and dispose of them. This will be supported by appealing to emerging shifts in consumer tastes by pro-actively communicating our values, and our value, to targeted customers.
- We will reduce operating costs by improving efficiencies in the way we manage materials, energy, and waste disposal, and by the way we identify and manage enterprise risk. This will be supported by improved eco-efficiency of our products, supported by innovative product design, reduced product life-cycle impacts, and strong stakeholder partnering.
- We will reduce risk through a better understanding of the our environmental and social impacts, and through better relationships with stakeholders including NGO’s, lawmakers, regulators, and members of the communities we impact.
- Underlying all these activities is a commitment to build and reinforce a strong sustainability culture in our enterprise, supported by the right employee skills and knowledge, as well as information systems that give us the capability to measure both sustainability impacts and customer sentiment via social media analysis.
