SUSTAINABILITY AND SHARED VALUE CREATION

Corporate Sustainability has assumed greater significance in most organizations around the world today. Most companies focus on activities on larger scale which are more often than not controlled from the corporate headquarters. These organizations should also capitalize on the opportunity to drive the concept of "shared value creation" as central theme of corporate sustainability to foster synergic relation between the company and interacting community. This also underlines the importance of decentralizing the efforts directed towards corporate sustainability by driving the actions through various layers in the organization. The ultimate aim should be that sustainability should be reflecting in actions of CEO as well as in those of the staff in frontline or on the shop floor.

First step in this direction would be an individual function or department in the organization to identify the key external stakeholders they interact with and group them into broad categories. For example, this may be truckers involved in transportation and farmers cultivating cotton for a garment manufacturing company and for a mining company, the key external stakeholders may be surrounding village community.

Then ; each function or department should look at ways in which they can actually enhance value to their key external stakeholders ( For ex : Donating funds for famers aimed to improve cultivation methods of cotton for the garment manufacturing company or Improving education facilities in the village community for the mining company)

This approach would have multifold advantages including but not limited to below:

 I) We are directly affecting the people/community at large who form integral part of business value chain 

II) Betterment of these communities would mean incremental business to us and hence it would be easy to demonstrate to our shareholders rather implicitly the concept of Responsible Social Investing often termed as RSI

III) This also means that the long term growth aspirations of the organization would be more of inclusive model by also lifting up the community status quo. The inclusive growth model is of high relevance as most of the multinational companies are increasingly investing in emerging markets. Through smart communication strategy; companies can showcase through media on how the company is being integral part of the growth story of a country (Ex ; Turkey/Russia/India etc) which would subsequently result in good will ; brand image  enhancement etc.