Sustainability in Business Today: A Cross-Industry View
Sustainability has received a great deal of attention from the media and the business community for a number of years. Yet there are still those that believe sustainability is more of a public relations play than an issue with real implications for business performance. What does sustainability really mean in a business context? What are many companies doing about it? And what is the evidence that the business case for sustainability, in fact, exists?
To explore these and other issues around the view businesses have of sustainability today, Deloitte interviewed sustainability leaders at the U.S. headquarters of 48 large companies across five major industry sectors: automotive, consumer products, process and industrial, technology, and telecommunications. Our conversations with respondents left no doubt in our mind that these companies are interested and involved in sustainability, and most of them see a clear alignment between sustainability and their overall business strategy. On the other hand, our study also suggests that many companies have a clear gap between their leaders’ aspirations with regard to sustainability and the way that sustainability is enabled within their organizations.
