So it isn't any surprise to any of you who are interested in sustainability to know that the objectives of corporations and wall street don't usually include environmental and social unless it benefits the bottom line.
Avoiding risk is an easy sell for either, reducing costs helps on the environmental front and improving workplace moral and security benefits productivity. Social and environmental are almost always linked into their financial siblings success.
The interesting part about this is that we are chasing our tails and are too disconnected from our impacts to truly understand how we can manage environmental and social to our benefits.
Chasing our tail because there is a desire to make the company financially stable and then help the planet and its occupants, but then we are hurting before helping and growing in a way that builds bad habits. And we know all habits are hard to break.
Disconnected because we have no control when environmental destruction floods out the crops we rely on to make our products, or when poverty becomes too much and disease prevents workers getting to work, thus losing our delivered on time products.
Despite the world becoming so ever intertwined we have also become so fragmented into different cogs of different wheels.
Big companies are starting to invest themselves all the way through their supply chains to avert risks, and when they get down to the parts they never imagined many are having to adress the social and environmental ills they caused head on. Be it cleaning up local drinking water, providing education or health care.
While we see providing social and environmental benefits as a cost here in America, it will come full circle and bite us in the ass if we don't and it will be a lot costlier when we do. but for now the eye is on the financial gain, so we will continue to weave our social and environmental endeavors into this web. In some ways this is the easy way out, accounting is simple. Environmental destruction is a hard one to measure and when it comes to justice, everyone has an option on what is fair for the social good.
This is where it is going to get interesting - this is where leadership lies.
