This is a summary of the online course Corporate Social Responsibility at the University of Amsterdam (Semester 1 - period 2). The summary includes all the required lectures and all required chapters of the book for this course: Winning Sustainability Strategies - Benoit Leleux & Jan van der Kaaij ...
Winning Sustainability Strategies - Benoit Leleux and Jan van der Kaaij
- Chapter 1: Introduction
- Chapter 2: Patterns of Frontrunners
- Chapter 4: Focusing on Materialities That Matter
- Chapter 5: Sustainable Development Goals
- Chapter 6: ESG Ratings and the Stock Markets
- Chapter 7: Investors’ Perspectives on Sustainability
- Chapter 8: Encouraging a Culture of Sustainability
- Chapter 12: Stellar Performance from Sustainability Teams
- Chapter 13: Embedding Sustainability into the Business Core
Lectures
- Lecture 1: Introduction to CSR and Sustainability
- Lecture 2: KPN and the 7 Roles to create successful sustainability NS
- Lecture 3: Non-Financial and Impact Reporting (ABN Amro)
- Lecture 4: Future Metrics for Governments and Companies
- Lecture 5: Sustainability and Leadership (Rabobank)
- Lecture 6: Climate Change and Circular Economy (Accenture & KPMG)
Tutorials
- Tutorial 1: Corporate Social Responsibility
- Tutorial 2: Science-based targets and Climate-based Financial risks
,Winning Sustainability Strategies - Benoit Leleux and Jan van der Kaaij
Chapter 1: Introduction
Less than ⅓ of global companies have developed clear business cases or supported value
propositions for their approaches to sustainability; corporate sustainability programs are
slow, sloppy and ineffective at worst.
Companies and executives need to develop a new sense of urgency when it comes to
sustainability, moving it from the realm of compliance to that of a key driver of performance
and innovation, which requires imbedding it deeply into their new core strategies.
Vectoring: the effective combination of direction and speed, which generates impact in
sustainability programs
- It is also used as a term to refer to a transmission method that employs the
coordination of line signals for the reduction of crosstalk levels and overall
improvement of performance (noise cancellation for headphones)
Sustainability programs lack air traffic controllers or often pilots:
- They tend to have weak direction, with respect to the specific sustainability issues
(materialities) that will be most relevant and impactful
- The board of directors and CEO should assume the role of air traffic controller. The
absence of directional bearing, or the selection of inadequate ones, lead to
misguided, uncoordinated action and usually unsatisfactory results from the
sustainability initiatives.
Vectoring offers a practical framework for identifying the relative positioning of companies
compared to their peers. It delivers valuable insights for sustainability practitioners. It is also
a strategic tool, with numerous applications:
- Designing and executing new sustainability programs
- Embedding the SDGs into the company’s core strategy
- Assessing the impact of sustainability programs on competitiveness and valuation
The ultimate objective of vectoring is to provide a clear, potent framework that offers
directions for executives to help shift their companies from integrated reporting to truly
integrated sustainability thinking
- A vector is defined not only by its direction but also by its magnitude
Sources of Data and Methodologies
As sustainability issues or materialities differ for each type of business, industry-specific
questionnaires are used with different criteria and different weightings. Companies are given
two to three months to complete the questionnaire. When they do not respond, RobecoAM
retains the option to assess those companies based on publicly available data.
- Benchmarked companies receive a sustainability score between 1 and 100 and are
compared to their industry peers.
- MSCI’s Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS): a four-tiered, hierarchical
industry classification system established in 1999 by MSCI. This is widely accepted
and therefore used in this book.
To determine the company performance on risk reduction and opportunity seizing, two DJSI
experts independently rated the DJSI criteria for their potential contribution to either risk or
opportunity based on the questions in the questionnaire. After that, the expert assessments
1
,were compared, and the differences were settled. The next step is the construction of a
separate risk-opportunity matrix for each industry each year.
Two other sources of information were used extensively in the research:
1. Clinical case studies were conducted over the past decade in the area of value
creation from sustainability and innovation
2. Practical examples and tools accumulated over 20 years of sustainability consulting
hae been used to emphasize both diagnostic and prescriptive application of the book
Limitations of the Research
- Research data exclusively contain companies that voluntarily participated, which can
result in participation bias.
- Selection bias: to the extent that a full peer industry review was not conducted in the
identification of representative companies
- The RobecoSAM questionnaires evolve each year to address new issues and
emerging sustainability trends. Consequently, comparing results for specific
industries at a criterion level (governance, climate strategy, operational
eco-efficiency) from year to year was sometimes not possible
Chapter 2: Patterns of Frontrunners
In Bakker´s view (president of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development),
companies simply need to start changing much faster.
Sustainability has made a resounding entry into the boardrooms of companies worldwide.
Topics as climate change and labor conditions are inescapable corporate responsibilities.
The speed of adoption varies broadly by sector, industry, and company, leading to interesting
gaps between sustainability leaders and average performers.
- Costs of non-compliance have become astronomical.
It is critical to understand the characteristics and patterns of sustainability leaders and what
enables them to justify and succeed in their approaches to sustainability.
Climate strategy: an example of data analytics
Climate change is often portrayed as one of the most important and tryle global material
issues, with the intention to destroy entire nations, kill wildlife in places, dramatically change
agricultural practices or force massive migrations of people.
- To realistically assess the performance of companies on climate change, they
developed the CDP: carbon disclosure project; run a global disclosure system that
enables companies etc to measure and manage their environmental impact. The
survey includes detailed questions on topics such as transparency in disclosure,
emission target etc.
Identifying Key Success Drivers
Each company is unique and faces different challenges and opportunities in its sustainability
journey. But sometimes it is possible to identify the key genetic sequences in the DNA of
frontrunners
- Frontrunners: the companies that shine in their sustainability approaches
Research can be both descriptive and prescriptive:
Descriptive: deep dive into the fine mechanics of sustainability leaders
2
, Prescriptive: identifying the factors that underlie and drive the success of the most
ambitious sustainability transformations
To summarize some of the key findings, transformational companies have a much higher
sense of direction and accelerate execution by embedding sustainability into their core
business, not adding them as appendices
- Vectoring Step 1: Getting the Bearings Right
Less is more when it comes to selecting objectives. Focus helps in delivering a
clearer story to stakeholders. And shareholders react positively when companies
deliver on key sustainability issues.
- Frontrunners are obsessively focused on a limited number of critical, relevant
and material sustainability issues.
- Focus is the key to proper implementation and ultimately capturing value from
the efforts
- Vectoring Step 2: Accelerating Execution and Getting Momentum
Once the appropriate materialities have been selected, the concern turns to activities
required to develop and roll out strategies to capture the opportunities that arise from
sustainability activities.
- Frontrunners rigorously implement sustainability programs that deliver value
through reputation, cost reduction and/or growth (or all three)
- Laggards often limit their efforts at reporting activities as part of their
customary non-financial information cycle
- Reporting non-financial information can become addictive and very
time consuming
- Eco-efficiency can be a very good indicator of the maturity of the execution of
sustainability programs. The key focus here criterion on inputs and outputs of
business operations and questions that include topics as direct greenhouse
gas emissions etc: low hanging fruit
Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP): launched in 2010; often lauded as the
best-practice example of visions and strategy. It excelled not only through its clear corporate
focus, but also by fully integrating the underlying management structures into the
organizational framework of Unilever.
The Business Case for Sustainability
An intriguing discovery from the research is the sheer number of companies that lack
direction and momentum in their sustainability efforts. In many cases, the business case for
sustainability is so understated that it is hardly possible to muster the energy and resources
necessary to engineer fast and decisive change.
The absence of a clear business case for sustainability at the company level does not imply
that one cannot be built. It does put many sustainability programs at risk of turning into pure
communication exercises.
- Without the ability to connect sustainability to the bottom line, it is difficult to see how
sustainability can be made sustainable.
According to the Integrated Reporting (IR) Framework, a business case for sustainability can
be assembled from four distinct building blocks:
1. Cost savings from eco-efficiency (f.e. reducing waste, water usage or energy
consumption)
3
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