Winning Sustainability Strategies Online Program: February-March 2021

The second edition of the IMD Winning Sustainability Strategies Online Program is a “how-to” guide that offers a very pragmatic take at how to integrate sustainability in your corporate strategy – while ensuring it has a strong business case. The program is aimed at business executives, strategy practitioners and sustainability professionals, who are looking to harness sustainability innovation and its strategic implications. Facilitated by the authors Jan van der Kaaij, Managing Partner of Finch & Beak, and IMD professor Benoit Leleux, this edition starts on 22 February 2021.

Be Good & Tell It: The Status Quo of ESG Equity Stories

As investors increasingly integrate environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria in their decision making processes, companies need to cater to this information need. Developing and transmitting a clear ESG Equity Story is key in this: communicating about the firm’s ESG approach and performance in a coherent and transparent manner toward investor audiences. Finch & Beak has assembled a pilot benchmark as a probe for the current status quo, assessing 21 companies’ sustainability programs (‘Be Good’) and their ESG Equity Stories (‘Tell It’). A striking finding is that companies appear to engage in ESG ‘greywashing’ (antonym of greenwashing), by underleveraging their ESG performance in the communication towards investor audiences.

ESG Acceleration Webinar: #BuildingBackBetter in the Decade to Deliver

During this webinar we'll zoom in on what companies can do to emerge stronger and more sustainably from the pandemic crisis, sharing take-aways for businesses from the 2020 Future Possibilities Report. This UN-sanctioned report explores the possibilities of tomorrow, and how countries can leverage them to reset their economies in the post-Covid world.

An Approach For More Efficient ESG Reporting

Identifying the right ESG topics for your business, performing well on them according to recognized ESG benchmarks, and communicating about it in the public domain are fundamental in tackling the increased stakeholder pressures on ESG integration. But with the growing array of rankings, ratings, pseudo-standards and benchmarks, the available ESG resources have not kept up with the soaring data demand. How can ESG professionals streamline their ESG benchmarking efforts and get more bangs for their bucks?

ESG Acceleration Webinar: Building Effective ESG Equity Stories

Momentum on ESG in the capital markets continues to soar. Companies have a powerful opportunity to pro-actively tell their ESG equity story to their shareholders, and chances are you are underleveraging your own IR-platforms in doing so. During this 1-hour webinar, we'll dive deeper in the key elements of an ESG equity story and share key take-aways and best practices from our recent benchmark study. Moreover, guest speaker Isabel Green, Head of Investor Relations at Rolls-Royce, will give her practical insights on effectively communicating on ESG with the investor community.

Start of the IMD Winning Sustainability Strategies Online Program

Following the publication of the book Winning Sustainability Strategies, IMD Lausanne is launching an online program aimed at business executives, strategy practitioners and sustainability professionals who are interested in the business case for sustainability and its strategic implications. Facilitated by the authors Jan van der Kaaij, Managing Partner of Finch & Beak, and IMD professor Benoit Leleux, the program starts on 21 September 2020 and is designed to help integrate sustainability in your strategy so you can maintain your competitive edge.

Keeping Up with the Rise of ESG Investing Strategies

As their customers are increasingly asking for greener portfolio options, investors are left struggling to integrate sustainability into their portfolio management strategies. The main challenge for investors is coming from ESG data itself, which has remained scattered, incomplete, incoherent, and unstructured.

Corporate Accelerators Spark Sustainable Innovation

Instead of innovating in isolation, multinationals are opening their doors and partner with startups to design solutions for their most pressing challenges. Coca-Cola, Google and Disney are only a few of the companies that have captured value of initiating these corporate accelerators. These accelerators increasingly focus on sustainability issues. One of the latest companies entering the stage is Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev). The global beer company has announced its 100+ Accelerator, aiming to address global challenges in line with the group’s 2025 Sustainability Goals.

Webcast on Human Capital Development & Eco-Efficiency

On November 30th, the last out of 5 webinars on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) 2017 results was broadcasted by RobecoSAM. The webcast covered the criteria of Human Capital Development and Operational Eco-Efficiency. Both criteria play an important role in the 60 industries addressed by RobecoSAM's questionnaire. As in line with the general trend of the sustainability assessment, those two criteria have shifted towards quantitative questions. Therefore, companies are required to have a data-driven perspective in order to accelerate its performance. In the download section of this article, you can find our summary of the webcast.

Liberty Global’s Quest for Leaner Sustainability Reporting

As a major company with over $19 billion in revenues, a workforce of 45,000 employees and 29 million customers in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, it can be easy to get lost in ambiguity when you talk about your role in society. Not at Liberty Global. The company recently released its compact Corporate Responsibility Report 2015, showing that even large, publicly listed companies do not need hundreds of pages to tell their sustainability story in a convincing manner.