Strategy for Sustainability, Essay Example

In Chapters Three and Four, the author covers the basic principles of business sustainability plans to be adjusted to customer needs and business principles. Setting “North Star” goals and increasing transparency, engagement are the main thoughts of the book covered in the two chapters. They will be detailed below.

1. North Star goals are important initial strategic actions that connect the sustainability plan with the core of the business. They help executing sustainability strategies across the whole organization. They are suitable for mobilizing people, increasing transparency and engaging with suppliers to share the company’s mission.
2. The “Ten Cycle” stands for the three major initiatives that contribute towards the success of a sustainability strategy in the organization: transparency, engagement and networking. The three elements are extremely important in the context of business environments, as the author states that a company is unable to execute the plan alone. It needs to build a support network and gain commitment, engagement.
3. Transparency has a great importance in creating a sustainability strategy and implementing it throughout the organization. Sharing ideas with employees, business partners and customers, on the other hand, is a good way of engaging them and communicating mission, ethical principles, as well as the substance of the organization.
4. The phases an organization goes through until it achieves full sustainability through transparency are based on the completion of different steps to make a change. It needs to go from “blind spots” to “awareness” in order to be able to clearly outline the goals and objectives.
5. The four steps an organization needs to take to implement a higher level of transparency are: blind spots (recognizing risks of failure), awareness (auditing and documenting blind spots), compliance (ensuring that operations management is within the regulatory requirements and policies), and transparency (sharing information internally and with stakeholders outside of the organization.

Works Cited

Werbach, A. Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto. Ch. 3-4 Harvard Business Press. 2013. Print.