Leading a sustainable enterprise: Leveraging information and insight to act

Organizations have recently sharpened their focus on sustainability, primarily in response to consumer and stakeholder expectations. Consequently, they face an entirely new set of decisions. However, most lack the information required to make these strategic choices. Based on what we’ve learned from outperforming organizations and leading CSR organizations, we believe businesses should develop new sources of operational, supply chain and customer information to gain new levels of insight for meeting strategic sustainability objectives.

Today, more than ever, organizations are focused on environmental and social responsibility as a strategic objective. Our survey of senior executives worldwide shows that 60 percent believe that corporate social responsibility (CSR) has increased in importance over the past year. Only 6 percent say it's a lower priority. To be sustainable, businesses are now embracing a relatively new objective: optimizing their operations to improve environmental and social outcomes in a manner that maximizes overall performance.  As a result, executives face entirely new decisions and must manage an intricate new set of trade-offs. This new objective calls for new information, which many organizations are still missing, by a wide margin. Outperforming organizations, by contrast, have proved to be far better at collecting relevant and timely information from across their ecosystems, including their customers.  These organizations and leaders in CSR point to a path forward - developing new sources of information and new levels of insight for meeting strategic sustainability objectives.

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