How to change the way you think for innovation and sustainability

Understanding how profitability and sustainability work together is the critical factor that will define successful businesses for the rest of this century. While shareholders will always want profits, your employees and customers are expressing growing demands that businesses should also work to make the world a better place. The good news is these ideals are not in conflict; they actually support each other.

The challenge

As an exercise, ask yourself this question: Does your organization pursue both profitability and sustainability as something to be achieved together (a “both/and” mentality) or is it viewing them as conflicting efforts (a “profits vs. sustainable goals” mentality)?

We posed this question to executives in an IMD webinar, and found that 73% of participants indicated that they were striving to…