Sustainability Programs: A Design Guide to Achieving Financial, Social, and Environmental Performance

Go-to guidance for designing, implementing, and managing effective sustainability management systems

Moving past vague concepts, buzzword overloads, superficial efforts, and flavor-of-the-month misdirections, Sustainability Programs presents a pragmatic, step-by-step approach to creating and managing adaptable, organization-wide sustainability programs to achieve People, Planet, and Profit (3P) objectives with least cost, effort, and risk. Key steps covered in this book include reaching a programmatic ＂Go＂ decision, developing sustainability policies, designing an organizational framework, defining the most pressing sustainability needs, and cascading 3P goals, tactics, targets, and initiatives into business units, functions, and departments to create new capabilities and improve performance.

By following the principles and practices in this book, any organization can better achieve sustainability’s full promise of social responsibility, environmental stewardship, and financial performance. Written by authors with a wealth of practitioner experience in the field, Sustainability Programs explores topics including:

• Creating social, environmental, and financial strategies, tactics, targets, and initiatives that create new capabilities and resolve 3P performance issues
• Avoiding ad hoc projects that fail to address critical sustainability issues, wasting valuable resources and squandering competitive advantages
• Overcoming technical professionals’ lack of business management experience and helping management professionals understand sustainability’s benefits and intricacies
• Understanding sustainability through the management lenses of risk reduction, improved efficiencies through eradication of wastes, increased revenues via innovation, and enhanced competitive advantages fueled by greenwash-free transparency.
• Responding to the demanding data capture, analysis, and reporting challenges of environmental, social, and governance (ESG).

Acknowledging that one size does not fit all, this book delivers individual concepts and methods adaptable across any organization’s value chains. It is an essential read for leaders and practitioners working within public and private enterprises of all types and sizes, especially those with 2,000 to 5,000 employees.

William Borges has directed and participated in 100+ sustainability and environmental management projects. His work includes restructuring departments during the financial turnaround of an eventual Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award winner in Silicon Valley, designing and introducing one of the first environmental management systems (EMS) at a United States military base, and initiating an EMS consulting practice at a major research institute. He has also designed and taught professional development and university-level sustainability courses.

John Grosskopf has helped hundreds of public and private organizations worldwide dramatically improve their environmental, health, and safety (EHS), security, and sustainability performance while simultaneously reducing their costs, risks, and impacts. He was a principal architect of General Dynamics’ pioneering EMS and its Zero-Discharge program. He is a management systems innovator that has advanced systematic and systemic EHS and sustainability management practices to help organizations better address climate change threats, ESG practices, and marketplace competitiveness.