Core business strategy

The business objective as regards environmental sustainability therefore lies in the need to strike a balance between the profit objective and the moral objective. Overall the research indicates that firms that take sustainability seriously show major competitive advantages, especially with regard to production efficiency, supplier management skills and employee morale. Many companies are taking bold steps to incorporate sustainability into their core business strategy, reaping not only brand and customer benefits, but bottom line benefits as well.

Wicker also serves as a member of the UPS Corporate Sustainability Steering Committee. The physical design of communities to promote social sustainability will be the subject of my next column. Marketing strategy: many consumers evaluate a brand's sustainability in making purchasing decisions, weighing the company's eco-responsibility along with quality and price/value correlation.

This engineering group also oversees a cross-functional Sustainability Working Committee, focusing on key company performance goals and indicators. I'm confident we can make a difference to the growth of sustainability during our time together in Palm Springs by creating a TEDActive sustainability guide, a compendium of thoughts contributed by TEDActivists. A recent study, by Brandlogic and CRD Analytics entitled "Sustainability Leadership Report, Measuring Perception vs. Reality" seems to echo history's most famous expert on amoral leadership –companies that are seen as leaders in the area of sustainability are not always the greenest companies.The company has appointed Dr. Avinash Patkar as the Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) in addition to being the Head of Corporate Safety, Health and Environment (SHE). REINVEST at a Community Scale It is not sufficient to address sustainability on a piecemeal basis through individual building projects. Approximately 70 percent of all surveyed top executives consider sustainability efforts essential to long-term profitability.The organization decided to put more structure and emphasis on our sustainability program. In this series of four columns I will discuss the concept of social sustainability, the implications for urban design and planning, the "new economics" of environmentally and socially sustainable communities, and the integration of these concepts in a human development strategy.It should first be pointed out that there is much greater scope for sustainability when building new houses than there is when simply doing a green remodel of an existing dwelling - but that is not to say that there aren't things that any of us can do, irrespective of where we live. Classically, many native American tribes had a high respect for the sustainability of the world, making collective decisions about whether or not to continue a particular course of action based upon if it would have a negative effect seven generations into the future. Social media, education and mobility are just more, well, sexy, than sustainability.