Sustainable Strategy Development and Planning

A fundamental starting point for fostering sustainability in organizations is to establish strategies and plans that address key sustainability challenges and opportunities. The integration of sustainability into the overall (business) strategy and plan for the wider organization is crucial. The deeper sustainability is ingrained into the organizational and business strategy and the more this integration is driven from the top of the organization, the better the outcome will be. Any sustainability strategy will fail if it is developed in isolation without executive buy-in or if it is added as an after-thought. In fact, such approaches often lead to supposedly large and well-publicized improvements, but lack substance and efficacy. This chapter describes how traditional business strategy development can be used for and enriched by sustainability.