For many businesses, the road to sustainability is paved with good intentions.
After all, a sustainable business model can actually translate to long-term financial success for your business, even if you’re operating a small-to-medium enterprise. It’s no longer a case of “get woke, go broke”. These days, you could be doing your bottom line a disservice if you don’t take the leap.
However, transitioning to a truly sustainable business model without affecting your product, culture or customer relations is a complex process that’s challenging in many ways.
How do you put sustainability at the core of your business’s mission? The Guardian asked four graduates of Griffith University’s MBA program – ranked the world’s most sustainable MBA – for guidance on rising to this vital challenge.
Rachell Hansen, carbon neutral project lead
More than a decade in the public service and not-for-profit sectors gave Rachell Hansen an appreciation of the complexity of the climate crisis and the myriad ways it affects our lives.
The birth of her first child solidified her drive to embark upon a purpose-driven career that would make a difference in her community and to the future of our planet. At the moment, that’s helping the government organisation that she works for achieve carbon neutral status.
Hansen believes there’s power in knowing where you’re at from a sustainability perspective before investing time and money into projects and initiatives that might not shift the dial in the ways that you’d hoped.
She recommends engaging with carbon footprint measuring programs, which can help your business establish a view of emissions over time.
“The proof is in the pudding,” she says. “It gives you indications of where your pain points are.
“And when you start to know and understand the intricacies and the granularity of that information, you can really start to create a strategy and a carbon reduction management plan for your organisation. But more importantly, you can also even identify unique opportunities that maybe haven’t been explored before.”
Ronan Clinton, senior sustainability program manager
Ronan Clinton is working in a job that didn’t exist when he first became interested in sustainable business practices more than a decade ago.
But the initiative taken by people like him to integrate sustainability into their work has resulted in these types of roles becoming commonplace inside the world’s biggest companies. Undertaking Griffith’s sustainability-focused MBA has only made Clinton more motivated to keep pushing the boundaries.
Forging his own career path in sustainability has shown Clinton that many businesses fall down at the first hurdle: knowing where to start.
“There’s a general consensus that climate change and social wellbeing and economic growth are all complex issues that don’t necessarily have one single solution or outcome,” he says. “You need to look at it holistically across … the pillars that sit within your organisation.”
But don’t panic: the rapid evolution of sustainable business practices is such that an entire industry has sprung up around helping businesses get started, and Clinton encourages all business leaders to ask for help from outside sources.
“Leadership talks around sustainability and the impact your organisation can have … [can] create a greater awareness,” he says.
Clare Burns, corporate sustainability academic
Clare Burns describes herself as an “accidental academic”.
She completed an MBA through Griffith when she was ready to take the next step in her corporate consulting career. Inspired by the course’s content, Burns strayed from her corporate career to complete a PhD focused on corporate sustainability.
Now she works as a full-time academic in Griffith’s Department of Business Strategy and Innovation – a role that allows her to share and apply MBA principles in a bigger-picture way.
There are few people better qualified to help businesses on their sustainability journeys. Burns says it’s rarely practical challenges that prevent businesses from meeting this moment. Rather, it’s a clash of mindsets that can really hinder progress on sustainability.
How do you get everybody on the same page? Education is paramount, she says, to circumvent the short-termism of traditional financial models and stakeholder management, particularly where upper management is concerned.
“Being open to learning from and working with a broader range of stakeholders will be helpful in terms of really meaningfully addressing corporate sustainability,” she says. “I want [directors] to have confidence that they’re doing the right thing and asking the right questions within the organisation to start making change.”
Pamela Caspani, urban designer
Sustainability is a cause close to the heart of urban designer Pamela Caspani. While she enjoyed the work she did for much of her career, she felt there was potential to make a bigger impact.
The Griffith MBA opened up opportunities to pursue personal goals and remedy what she sees as a lack of women and creatives in leadership positions.
“Urban designers and planners have always been at the forefront of [sustainability],” she says, noting that that doesn’t necessarily translate to C-suite representation.
For that reason, Caspani believes seeking out expertise from all corners of your business – especially the “extremely knowledgeable” junior staff moving through the ranks – is key to building an authentically sustainable business.
“I think the business leaders are the ones that really need to be influenced and if you get the opportunity to influence them or be one of them, that’s where you have more of an opportunity to make significant change,” she says.
The lesson? Don’t be so quick to dismiss the people who bring non-traditional perspectives. Their passion could well be the missing piece in your sustainability puzzle.
Make it matter. Find out how Griffith’s MBA program could change your future.
