Resilient Strategies: Managing Your Business for Sustainability, Social Responsibility AND Profitability
with Dan Montgomery
The “common sense” about business that has prevailed during the industrial age of the past 200 years has created unprecedented wealth, knowledge, and communication – along with pollution, overcrowding and social dislocation. At this point, with nearly 7 billion people on the planet, we are hitting the limits of the historically cheap resources that have powered our prosperity, including cheap fossil fuels, abundant water and land.
This “common sense” tells us that environmental and social concerns cost us money and detract from the bottom line. Might it be time to take a second look at our “common sense” about business, where that mindset came from, and why it won’t get us very far into the 21st century?
In this entertaining and provocative keynote or mini-workshop offering, Dan Montgomery outlines how insights from systems thinking and ecology reveal a new “common sense” about the relationship of profitability, social responsibility, and environmental performance (the so-called “Triple Bottom Line”), with critical implications for how you plan, lead and manage your business.
Triple Bottom Line (TBL) businesses are based on a vision that combines profitability with environmental stewardship and a social mission. These kinds of companies are typically run by leaders who are values-driven and are able to see the interconnected patterns that tie the human and natural world together.
Unfortunately, most business planning and management tools we are taught derive from an older, more simplistic way of doing business, in which social and environmental costs are externalized, and profitability and cash flow are the only metrics that matter.
How can we address social and environmental concerns, not as an “add-on”, but in a way that integrates with the rest of our business?
Dan will demonstrate how the Balanced Scorecard – a business planning and management tool used by over half of the Fortune 500 – can help you manage your business to the Triple Bottom Line.
What you will learn:
- Why “common sense” doesn’t always make sense
- How typical financial statements and organization charts obscure the real behavior and impacts of your business
- Why your business is more like a forest than a well tuned machine
- How sustainability can improve business performance AND valuation
- Why “Resilience” is a more useful idea than “Sustainability”
- The promise, and the limits, of TBL reporting tools, such as the Global Reporting Initiative
- How to recognize the value of “intangibles”, including Leadership, Culture, Brand Equity, and Consistent Execution
- Introduction to the four perspectives of a Balanced Scorecard: Financial Performance, Customer Value, Process Efficiency, and Organizational Capacity
- Key steps in a TBL planning process
- The critical role of metrics and feedback systems to keep you on track and agile
For a PDF summary of the talk, download here: Resilient Strategies Talk and Mini-workshop – Dan Montgomery
For a short audio sample, listen to Dan speaking with Larry Nelson of w3w3 Internet Radio:
The Three “C’s” of Sustainable Leadership – Audio Clip
Dan is also the host of “Sustainable Leadership”, a series of one hour internet talk radio interviews with leading thinkers, entrepreneurs, and activists, available for listening or download at:
www.blogtalkradio.com/sustainableleadership
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