Sustainability Culture
Lessons from DSM’s Winning Sustainability Strategy
The roots of global specialty chemicals company Royal DSM are as a Dutch state-owned coal mining company that started in 1902. The company’s future, however, is far removed from its past. DSM’s Strategy 2021 describes how the company plans to drive above-market growth through developing innovative solutions addressing Nutrition & Health, Climate & Energy and Resources & Circularity, together with increased customer-centricity and large innovation projects. In this article, DSM’s approach is decomposed by looking at the elements of its sustainability strategy, and we provide tips how to replicate this.
How to Assess Your Own ESG Performance
ESG index funds are proving to be more crisis-proof than their less sustainable peers: with the average ESG fund falling by a mere 12.2% in 2020, almost half the decline of the S&P 500 according to Bloomberg. With the 2019 net money flows into these funds estimated to have almost quadrupled compared to 2018, companies are well-advised to advance their ESG performance. To help you do just that, this article provides four elementary questions and gives access to a newly launched online self-assessment, the ESG Acceleration Scan.
The Power of Diversity in the Board Room
When researching at board level the 24 banks from the collective gold, silver and bronze classes in the RobecoSAM Sustainability Yearbook 2018, a less than diverse picture appears. Analyzing the current day portraits from their annual reports, shows that bankers with beards are a minute minority. From the 24 banks researched, 309 portrayed board members appeared from either the supervisory board or board of directors. In total only 4.5% of them were bearded and just a meagre 28.8% was female, signalling an opportunity for diversity.
Finch & Beak Nests across Europe
We are proud as a peacock, or rather as a finch, to announce our two new nests in Rotterdam and Barcelona.
Carlsberg: Probably the Best Partnering in the World
As epitomized by Sustainable Development Goal 17, Partnerships for the Goals, today’s major sustainability challenges require tailored and collaborative solutions. This means that partnering is to become a part of the company DNA. By forging and maintaining partnerships, companies can achieve more sustainability impact while also gaining the competitive advantage they seek. Several sustainability leaders such as Novozymes, DSM and Umicore have made partnering centric to their sustainability program. In this article, the example of Carlsberg illustrates how this can lead to tangible results.
How Investors See Culture and Purpose as Keys to Profit
As over a quarter of assets under management across the globe are now being invested according to ESG principles, companies are well advised to maximize their ESG performance. However, straight-forward short-term improvement interventions will fall flat when your company is lacking a culture of sustainability that advances performance over the long-term. Investors are understanding this more and more, and are looking to understand what your company is doing to foster and cultivate a corporate culture that is aligned with the company’s strategy and purpose.
Embedding Sustainability in Company DNA
Great leaders are said to be of the essence in driving change and embedding sustainability in the core of the business. However, organizational commitment is vital in creating a true sustainability culture and facilitate effective execution of sustainability strategies. In this article we highlight what defines a company’s culture of sustainability and how this can be made measurable.
Winning Sustainability Strategies: Free Downloads
Co-authored by Jan van der Kaaij, Managing Partner at Finch & Beak, and Benoit Leleux, Stephan Schmidheiny Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at business school IMD, Winning Sustainability Strategies (Palgrave, 2019) is a book that offers practical suggestions for improved effectiveness of sustainability strategies based upon practitioner cases and data analysis from the Dow Jones Sustainability Index.
