Integration of Sustainability into the Corporate Strategy

Abstract

In order to successfully achieve sustainable corporate development, enterprises have to define and implement a pragmatic strategy. In that pursuit, the discussion of motivation and reasoning behind incorporating sustainability strategies serves as a prelude to the thematic examination of challenges and courses of action in corporate strategy development and implementation. Especially in the context of sustainability, additional legislative and stakeholder requirement considerations make managing these tasks effectively, however, much more challenging. The firm's overall objectives thus become multidimensional and have to be broken down to the individual departments and business fields. Consequently, considerable effort has to be devoted to the planning, measurement and evaluation, steering and control as well as optimisation and communication processes of the holistically defined corporate value creation. Furthermore, a solution for enterprise sustainability management and its evaluation is necessary for ultimately balancing economic, ecological and social performance factors, to ensure optimized decision-making. towards future generations is emerging, as insights on the long-term effects of over-exploitation and environmental pollution are increasing. In the context of the evolution of this responsibility towards internal and external stakeholders, enterprises are confronted with the imminent challenge of adapting strategic orientation and operative value creation accordingly. The linkage between the economic, ecological and social perspectives of the interaction of enterprises with their environment however, poses unique challenges in terms of potential internal conflicts of objectives. At the same time, it is questionable to what extent the attainment can be related to the three perspectives of sustainability. Thus long-term strategic orientation has to be recognised as a premise for sustainable development, so that potential short-term performance discrepancies are not misinterpreted as deficits, or implied as representing poor decision-making. This is assuming that sustainability is more than an ideological construct for the conscious influence and control of human and entrepreneurial behaviour. Instead, it has to be conditional to certain criteria and traceable or ascertainable. Numerous approaches for operationalising sustainable management are therefore focused on indicators, but remain, however, limited in their extent or integrity in order to avoid complexity. KeywordsThe three-dimensional differentiated approach requires the simultaneous safeguarding of the economic, ecological and social capacity of the respective system and its environment for both the current and future generations (Dyllick and Hockerts 2002). Building on the definition of the German Bundestag, safeguarding economic performance is herein based on ensuring an adequate competitive situation as a driver of innovation and as a price-building mechanism, without however at the same time limiting the welfare of the individual inv...

Integrative Sustainable Intelligence: A holistic model to integrate corporate sustainability strategies

“…“Integrative” is understood as the capacity to align different operational and functional factors to enable the connection needed to achieve the intended organizational goal, which will define the extension and scope of the integration required (Iraldo, Testa, & Frey, ; Oertwig et al, ).…”

The Managerial Aspects of Integrating the Sustainable Development Principles into Practices of Mining Companies

“…From a management perspective, to embed the sustainability principles into the corporate strategy and strengthen organizational performance purposeful actions need to be appropriately planned, coherently and specifically implemented and continuously monitored. Following the approach proposed by N. Oertwig et al (2017), the appropriate planning of operational actions of a company and the availability of evaluations for the systematic monitoring are identified as essential factors for a successful implementation of the sustainability strategy at the organizational level [10]. The adequate measurement tools, control mechanisms and communication with regards to the aspect of sustainable development require the interaction between various actors, evaluation methods and operational data in order to integrate sustainability into a comprehensive strategy of a company [10; 11].…”

Strategic Decisions between Short-Term Profit and Sustainability

“…For an overview, see e.g. (Schaltegger et al 2012;Lozano 2015;Oertwig et al 2017;Giunipero et al 2012;Epstein and Roy 2001).…”

“…Most studies focus on identifying key drivers and categorizing them. For example, grouping them into external and internal drivers (Engert et al 2016), ranking drivers into high, middle, and low effect drivers (Giunipero et al 2012) or introducing connecting drivers which would connect internal and external drivers (Oertwig et al 2017).…”