How to change the way you think for innovation and sustainability

Understanding how profitability and sustainability work together is the critical factor that will define successful businesses for the rest of this century. While shareholders will always want profits, your employees and customers are expressing growing demands that businesses should also work to make the world a better place. The good news is these ideals are not in conflict; they actually support each other.

The challenge

As an exercise, ask yourself this question: Does your organization pursue both profitability and sustainability as something to be achieved together (a “both/and” mentality) or is it viewing them as conflicting efforts (a “profits vs. sustainable goals” mentality)?

We posed this question to executives in an IMD webinar, and found that 73% of participants indicated that they were striving to achieve both. This is a fantastic statistic, but when you dig a little deeper it becomes evident there is more of a conflict with this way of thinking than people realized.

Now ask yourself this: How do you envision moving forward with your goals? When launching your business, how do you think it is best to start?

1.       A focus on profits so you are able to then put resources into sustainability?

or

2.       Start with roots in sustainability, creating a product or a service aimed at improving the world, and then figure out later how to monetize it?

If you opted for the first choice, you are not alone: 68% of participants in the aforementioned webinar said that was their organization’s approach. In fact, this was a bit of a trick question to illustrate how most people are stuck in an old-fashioned, linear way of thinking. If you can change this, you can unlock innovative potential.

Think cyclical