From the course: Navigating Environmental Sustainability: A Guide for Leaders

Business climate risk and opportunity

From the course: Navigating Environmental Sustainability: A Guide for Leaders

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Business climate risk and opportunity

- A lot of people want to know if there's a one size fits all strategy to dealing with sustainability inside of a corporation or a large organization. And, my answer to that is that yes there is a one size fits all strategy but it might not be what you think it is. Though one size fits all strategy that I always have in my mind and sits at at the top of our strategy at Microsoft is to align sustainability, with the core corporate competencies of your organization. Sustainability is this incredibly wide diverse topic that takes in pretty much everything, all life on earth. And so when we think about trying to distill down what any action, any particular organization should take it can become pretty complex, pretty complicated. But it gets a lot simpler, if you simply step back and assess what those core competencies of your organization actually are. What it is that your organization brings to the world, what makes your organization special? And you figure out a way for how to align those special skills and expertise that your organization has and bring them to bear for sustainability. If you're a technology company, the world needs technology solutions to environmental challenges. If you're a law organization, the world needs new legal approaches. If you're an accounting organization, we need better ways to account for and balance our environmental books. We often like to think about sustainability like there's one thing that the world needs to achieve. But the one thing that the world needs to achieve is actually everybody bringing the diversity of skills and experiences and expertise that they have and contributing them jointly to solving the problem. The first thing that I always tell people to focus on when they are looking to take their organization down a sustainability pathway is to really look at the issue through a bifocal lens. The lens of risk and the lens of opportunity. If the world doesn't get out ahead of its sustainability challenges, what risks does that pose for your business, today and into the future? And if your organization does contribute to helping the world solve its sustainability challenges, what new opportunities for your employees, for your business, for the market does that represent. When you combine that with an understanding of your core corporate competencies it really provides that initial framework. That you can structure all of your sustainability conversations, your programs and your processes around.

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