Creating Sustainable Organizations

By Chuck McVinney
©2001 McVinney & Company

3. The Challenge Ahead for Business is Immense: Change Your Core Values!

Sustainability is more than a strategy or a technique - it is an emerging core ideology that businesses will have to embrace in order to create the survival skills they will need to exist at all.

As an emerging core value, sustainability challenges many other more traditional core values that are already operating in organizations. For most profit driven organizations the notion of sustainability as an essential core value presents a significant problem. As all the literature on this topic suggests, changing core values within organizational systems is about the hardest shift that can be undertaken. The cultures of our business organizations have grown up around a broad worldview that systems theorists like to call a "cosmology." A cosmology describes why we exist, and what led to our birth and now drives our being. The cosmology most prevalent in business organizations is usually built on the basic acceptance of human greed and the derivative value of consumption. Matthew Fox and Brain Swimme in their many writings on our evolving cosmology have called the economy we live in the living "cosmology of consumption."

Sustainability challenges that cosmology. The new cosmology of sustainability acknowledges that the earth is an abundant and prosperous planet, but it is an oasis. Far flung as we are from the center of our own galaxy, relegated to the rural outposts of the Milky Way, we are, at least for now and the foreseeable future, alone. There are no friends from other worlds to share their experiences in solving the problems of growing population and shrinking resources, of rampant inter-cultural distrust and warfare, and ecological depletions like those we are dealing with on Earth. We have to go it alone, solving these things by ourselves, and if we ruin it - there is no place else to go. Creating a sustainable planet that nurtures and feeds a huge and diverse population of human beings is a challenge we have never before in history faced. It does not get solved the way other problems have been solved; it requires new ways of thinking, working and being.

In more concrete terms, sustainability addresses the use and preservation of everything from human energy to natural resources. The notion of sustainability is redefining the "bottom line" as a measure of how well we care for the source of our abundance as well as how much we "make" from it. As many others have noted, the new bottom line is as much about social and environmental success as it is an indicator of financial results. Recently, voices are raised for the fourth bottom line, the well being of spirit. This means creating work that has a sense of purpose and provides connections between the worker and what matters to humanity's survival. That bottom line, the spiritual, may be on the way to transcending all the others.

Furthermore, and central to our argument, organizations that embrace sustainable concepts and practices embrace the keys to their own survival. And not just survival of their specific enterprise, but, also of the context in which that enterprise lives and grows. Sustainable values contribute to organizational success and longevity by providing the basis for visions that mean something to people and motivate them to contribute, learn, and grow over time.

A living commitment to the principles and practices of sustainability supports traditional organizational goals, like recruiting members and retaining them, and building more and more viable relationships and solutions with and for customers. Some say, sustainability starts at home. By building it into the core fabric of the organizations self-image and identity, it allows the company to reach out into the world with "built to last" mind-sets and behaviors. What we are committed to for ourselves we can commit to for our customers and other stakeholders.

Sustainability is something more than a concept forming a new cosmology. It is something that can actually be done, and, we suggest, it has discernible components that drive action. These can become real to us in the everyday world of work and commerce. As such, they can become a new foundation for more socially conscious business communities, and enhanced profitability and durability, if we are willing to expand, not shrink, our understanding of sustainable behaviors. Many companies are moving toward more sustainable choices about use of raw materials, what gets left as waste, and how to creatively use and re-cycle those wastes. That is one element of what can be "done," and there are many others. Next, we begin to address further potential actions that can be taken by looking at the components of the sustainability value itself. >>