Sustainable Profitability: a Matter of Balance!
14. September 2018
The Swiss Green Economy Symposium 2018 was the occasion to literally show with David Dimitri that sustainable profitability is a matter of balance. To focus on balancing societal and economic goals makes us all progress on the sustainability path.
Do you want to take the slot and perform on a rope? We’re talking about a balance performance act. The Swiss Green Economy Symposium 2018 was the occasion to literally show with David Dimitri that sustainable profitability is a matter of balance. To focus on balancing societal and economic goals makes us all progress on the sustainability path. It is easy to understand but apparently more difficult to carry out.
Finding the balance between return on society, return on equity, return on environment is the challenge we all face. It is a real performance act. If we look at the performing arts, we see artists using their voices, bodies or inanimate objects to transmit their artistic expression. And at the Swiss Green Economy Symposium, there were the great occasion to see David Dimitri represent as a metaphor the need to find the right balance between the company and its environment.
This performance is an illustration that the world of possibilities is open. It is the illustration that a business is part of an ecosystem where each decision has a positive or negative impact. Neutrality does not exist in this environment.
If we are able to design in our minds the flows of values between capital market, enterprises, employees/citizen, society/environment, what do we see? An imbalance in the relationship between value and values. In fact we can oppose the value (money) to the multi-purpose value (human, societal & environmental values). Capital market is still 99,9% focused on value creation slugging multi-purpose values to churn it into money. To find the balance would mean that capital market should start integrate multi-purpose values. This signal would invite enterprises to invest into more multi-purpose value creation and break the vicious circle we’re in.