The beginning of fall brings a new wave of students and graduates, all eager to learn about sustainability career options. Just last week, I received 10 LinkedIn invitations and 20 emails asking me about how to get hired for a sustainability job or internship.
The interesting part is that ‘sustainability career’ meant something different to each of these 30 students or recent graduates. Most of them believed that their only option is to be working in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) department at a big company. Such CSR jobs are very visible, and highly coveted. However, CSR jobs are only a sliver of the sustainability career options emerging and established leaders can compete for.
Generally speaking, sustainability careers can be defined as jobs that successfully blend financial return with social impact and environmental stewardship. Some sustainability jobs will focus on environmental sustainability (e.g. energy efficiency, renewable energy, cleantech, green packaging, green supply chain, green building). Some sustainability jobs focus more on societal sustainability (i.e. social innovation), including careers in poverty eradication, sustainable development, education reform, women’s empowerment, sustainable agriculture, or access to quality healthcare.
Furthermore, while CSR jobs are present at big companies, one can also choose to build a career in a company where every employee is a CSR manager. These for-profit companies can either be a sustainable business (e.g. Timberland) or a for-profit social enterprise (e.g. TOMs).
To clear some of the confusion around sustainability careers and provide resources for emerging leaders to explore sustainability career options beyond CSR jobs, Mark and I created the primer below. In less than 10 minutes, this primer will give your students and alumni a clear picture of the sustainability careers available to them across sectors, as well as 20 resources (e.g. books, online research tools, job boards) they can immediately leverage:
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Feel free to distribute this content to your students and alumni, we look forward to hearing their comments and questions, as well as yours.
Happy Fall!
Starting your presentation by saying there is a clear cut trade-off between sustainability and profitability is exactly the wrong message, and it flies in the face of key research. The Dow Sustainability Index has consistently showed that sustainability and profitability are correlated. If you had invested in Patagonia 5 years ago, you would have beat the market by 5X, and they are the model of a sustainable company.
In the long term, the accumulation of brand equity, employee satisfaction and cost savings through sustainable practices outweigh the upfront costs.
Dear Santiago,
Thank you for your comment, I agree with you that sustainable businesses such as Patagonia, Seventh Generation, and most Certified B Corps, there is a high correlation between profitability and sustainability. This is the point of our graph, and these companies are represented under ‘sustainable business’ and ‘for profit social enterprises’ in our graph.
Is it the continued growth of profit on the X-axis for traditional companies that you have an issue with? Are sustainable businesses or ‘Firms of Endearment’ as Dr. Sisodia from Bentley calls them more profitable than traditional companies? I would love to have a larger dataset to make this point and reflect this possibility in our graph.
If you have a study that show higher profitability for sustainable businesses than traditional business, please post it here as a comment and we’ll change our graph accordingly!
Warmly,
Mrim
This whole discussion seems to presume that sustainability is more expensive. While this isn’t true in every case, it is certainly true that pressure for productivity and profit has resulted in processes that are unsustainable (e.g. zero-sum games such as over-fishing and forest clear-cutting, and technological advances such as irrigation, fertilization, and GMOs).
Some companies have capitalized on the sustainability movement, but I wonder how much of their success is due to economies of scale (e.g., they can afford to offset carbon emissions because they have robust processes and plenty of capital) and/or market segmentation (i.e., appealing to consumers who were already sustainability-minded). For every loyal Whole Foods shopper willing and capable of paying a premium for sustainability, there are probably hundreds or even thousands of shoppers who are loyal only to price and convenience.
Hard to ignore game theory in this discussion. Setting aside for a moment those businesspeople who are both savvy and altruistic, the average business will only pursue sustainability if 1) the market demands it (through buyer demand, punishment for bad PR, or other reasons), or 2) a field-leveling rule is applied (e.g. a government regulation backed by penalties). To follow on the Whole Foods example, a government regulation mandating sustainably-caught fish imposes the same costs on everyone, so sustainability is built into a leveled playing field. However, unless a company is able to appeal to deeper-pocketed, sustainability-minded consumers (or is able to create more of them through, e.g., PR), the market is fairly limited, at least until the zero-sum game players run out of steam (cut all the unprotected forests and fish all the unprotected waters) or the technological players hit their limitations (e.g. expenses of irrigation/fertilizer, disease risks of homogeneous GMO crops, etc.). Sustainability is, by definition, a long-term play, but in a short-term, unregulated, play-for-keeps world full of non-altruistic players, the profit-sustainability tradeoff seems to be inevitable.
Dear Tim,
Thank you for your comment! I cannot agree with you more. Sustainable businesses can in fact be more profitable than traditional businesses. This is supported by at least three different sets of data and evidence-based research:
Dr. Raj Sisodia’s book ‘Firms of Endearment’ (https://faculty.bentley.edu/details.asp?uname=rsisodia) and the Conscious Capitalism Institute created around the principles outlined in his book (http://consciouscapitalism.org/) provide a valuable framework that demonstrates how higher sustainability standards lead to higher profitability. Dr. Sisodia and his colleagues included companies such as Whole Foods, Seventh Generation, Patagonia, and Panera in their studies.
The Benefit Corporation movement also conducts research to showcase that sustainable business that combine profit-driven pursuits with the highest levels of social equity and environmental sustainability gain higher consumer loyalty and return for all stakeholders. For more information, see for example http://benefitcorp.net/what-makes-benefit-corp-different/benefit-corp-and-nonprofits
Data from sustainable business leaders – For example, Gary Hirshberg’s “Stirring it up” (http://www.stonyfield.com/stirringitup/about.html) and Jeff Hollender’s “The Responsible Revolution” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-hollender/the-responsibility-revolu_b_476324.html) include numerous case studies and sustainable business best practices that provide anecdotal evidence to the hypothesis that sustainable businesses can be more profitable than traditional businesses.
My apologies if the discussion has made it come across as though sustainable business practices lead to smaller profits. It is not what accumulating evidence seems to suggest. It is my hope that policy makers will sooner rather than later pay attention to the evidence and make policy changes accordingly.