Coro Strandberg
President
Strandberg Consulting
When the Board Is on Board: Steering the Organization Towards Sustainability Leadership
Leadership / Boards are the last great sustainability frontier. They set the sustainability tone at the top, which then cascades throughout the company. It is essential for boards of directors to be engaged in the sustainability agenda. They define the long-term view, anticipating and addressing risks from social and environmental impacts. Progressive boards recruit and incentivize leaders to build sustainability into the company’s business model and value chains. And now that the sustainability ROI has been proven, sustainability has become part of the board’s fiduciary responsibility. - 3 years ago
Languish Anguish: Why Good Sustainability Strategies Stall
Organizational Change / “Our organization is totally supportive of sustainability as long as nothing else comes up or it doesn’t interfere with something the Executive wants to do!” Hands up if you have heard this before. Many organizations find that after the long process of building and adopting a sustainability policy or strategy, they stall. Sure, implementing and embedding sustainability into the business and day-to-day operational decisions is hard work, but that’s not the only thing holding up changes. Often, the environmental management or sustainability plan becomes siloed within the organization, resulting in delays and disorganization. As well, functional leaders don’t always understand the plan’s relevance to their area. - 3 years ago
Want to Attract Star Employees? The Role of the HR Leader as the Driver of Company Value
Organizational Change / Your company’s sustainability commitments help attract the best and the brightest, reduce turnover and enhance productivity. That’s the substance of consistent and compelling research that shows the power of embedding sustainability into corporate culture and its relationship to the bottom line. HR leaders can use this knowledge to create powerful recruitment, engagement and retention strategies. - 3 years ago
The Virtuous Circle Business Model: Social Purpose at the Core of Business Success
Product, Service & Design Innovation / Mention the term “corporate social responsibility” and you might hear something like: “It’s dead.” “CSR has stalled.” “CSR has not fulfilled its potential. It has failed us.” Why? Because even at its best, CSR is only a partial solution with incremental changes that are not putting society and business on a strong footing to enable nine billion people to live well on the planet by 2050. Despite the efforts of the past two decades, CSR is still marginal to corporate strategy — siloed and largely irrelevant to a company and its workforce. - 3 years ago
Gatekeepers to Gateways: Trade Associations Key to Gaining Ground in Industry Sustainability
Organizational Change / The recent launch of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the commitment last month of over 170 countries to the Paris climate agreement illustrate global consensus regarding the sustainability issues we need to tackle to put society and the planet on a secure path. - 3 years ago
Is Your Board Competent and Proactive on Sustainability? It Should Be
Organizational Change / It was the mid-‘90s. The Board of Directors at Vancity – a large regional financial institution based in Vancouver, Canada – was struggling to get management’s attention on its social purpose agenda. I and the other directors believed that marrying social goals with the company’s business could create a powerful vehicle for regional prosperity: attract customers, become a force for social progress and build business. The impasse continued until our Board identified a key leverage point: incorporating our social business objectives into the CEO’s incentive pay. That turned out to be the difference-maker. - 3 years ago
Why Sustainability Should Be Embedded in HR
Organizational Change / There’s an urgent challenge for human resources leaders: Ensuring their organizations anticipate and prepare for the inevitable effects of sustainability mega-forces. As globalization, shifting demographics and competition for the world’s depleting resources compel transformational change, companies will need enlightened and sustainability-savvy leadership to thrive in this brave new world. HR has a significant role to play to align talent with these emerging realities. - 3 years ago
The Bold Approach of Transformational Companies
Product, Service & Design Innovation / At age 27, I was the youngest director elected to Vancity Credit Union, the largest community-based credit union in the world. It was the late 1980s. I ran a seniors' agency, was chair of a provincial social planning group and had been a recent board member of the local United Way. In two and a half words, I was a "social do-gooder." My first board-management strategy session was spent discussing mergers, declining margins, capital adequacy and potential staff lay-offs. We were in a bad business cycle. An hour before the meeting was scheduled to end, we reached the final agenda item: "Other Business." - 4 years ago
Social Buying: Choosing the Right Cleaner and Caterer Can Help You Unlock Your Company's Innovative Potential
Product, Service & Design Innovation / My last social post explored how living wage employers benefit from higher productivity levels, lower hiring costs, better brand recognition and increased customer satisfaction. In this article, I focus on the importance of Social Buying, the third of the four core corporate strategies that I explore in more detail in my Social Value Business Guide, which examines why social businesses are more profitable businesses and explains how your company can become a change agent in the local community and a leader in the global marketplace. - 4 years ago
Living Wage: Key to Maximizing Morale and Driving Financial Value
Organizational Change / Around the world there is a growing consensus that a company’s social role goes beyond meeting legal requirements, complying with ethical standards, creating jobs and paying taxes. People everywhere now expect companies to act as social leaders, using their business expertise to lead social change.In response to people’s changing expectations, the world’s most innovative companies are building social value right into their core business strategies, not only to address poverty and other problems in their communities, but also to improve workplace relations, gain market advantages and grow profits faster. - 4 years ago
Community Hiring: The Labour Market Advantage Is in Your Own Backyard
Organizational Change / The world’s most innovative leaders know that social businesses are more profitable businessesConsumers around the world, from Vancouver and Toronto to Shanghai and New York, believe that a company’s social role goes beyond simply meeting legal requirements, complying with ethical standards, creating jobs and paying taxes. Research shows that consumers everywhere expect companies to act as social leaders, using their business expertise to lead social change. - 4 years ago
Marketing for Social Change: How to Profitably Use Your Brand Power as a Force for Good
Marketing and Comms / Today the ethical consumer market hovers between 10 and 20 percent. These numbers haven’t moved much since the term was first popularized 25 years ago. Yet market researchers such as Edelman and Ipsos Reid tell us that more than 80 percent of Canadian consumers want companies to champion social causes, lead social change and stand for something. Companies that figure out how to tap into this latent demand for corporate social purpose stand to win big. - 4 years ago
Future-Fit Businesses Include Sustainability in Leadership Competencies
Organizational Change / Over the past few weeks, several people have shared with me how they’re using my sustainability competencies research and guide to define the leadership skills and knowledge needed for long-term business — and societal — success. The feedback has been swift and promising. I am delighted (and encouraged!) to hear about the distinct and specific ways that these individuals are putting the competencies research to work for their organizations. - 4 years ago
The Social Purpose Continuum: Changing the Lens, the Focus, Everything in Our Approach to CSR
Organizational Change / For 25 years, I’ve developed CSR strategies. And now I see that CSR is becoming business as usual.You’d think I’d be celebrating. But I’m not — because CSR has stalled.This struck me in 2012 when I developed the Qualities of a Transformational Company for Canadian Business for Social Responsibility and started tracking corporate innovation in CSR (see 38 case studies of transformation in action at CBSR’s website). That’s when I saw where we needed to be. - 5 years ago
Introducing Sustainability Pay: Compensation for Holistic Corporate Performance
Organizational Change / When I was a director of a financial institution in the 1990s, we struggled in vain to get top executives to pay attention to the Board’s sustainability priorities. To no avail. Then we stumbled upon the idea of rewarding the CEO for long-term sustainability performance. The result? We saw a dramatic improvement in the company’s sustainability performance from then on (financial performance, too!). Once we realized the impact of this simple measure, the board quickly embedded the principle in its compensation philosophy, which, in turn, spread the concept throughout the management ranks.Investor scrutiny of “pay for breathing” practices shows results - 6 years ago