Author: Brennan

The UN Sustainable Development Goals are a useful high-level framework for business to use in assessing its negative or positive social impacts. Global partnerships between government, NGOs, and the private sector will be required to achieve them by 2030.

The rise of community expectations around climate change and other ESG risks means that boards and senior executives can no longer function in “press release” mode when it comes to sustainability initiatives.

The management of ESG risk is a crucial part of your risk management framework, and firms need to identify and manage both quantitative and qualitative risks. The excuse that it is difficult to quantify some ESG risks will not cut it with stakeholders over the coming decade.

Institutional and retail investors will increasingly expect rapid and decisive responses to controversies, including the immediate resignation of directors and senior executives. “Riding out” the storm of displeasure will be very difficult given the increasing volume in the media on these issues.

One of the important considerations when thinking about sustainability reporting and the achievement of the UN SDGs by 2030, is that innovation and profitability in the private sector is a crucial success factor.

Many businesses have the opportunity to assess their current operating model, identify where and how they can make a positive social impact, and move towards implementing a responsible operating model that delivers for a full group of stakeholders while still generating an appropriate level of profit.

Goal 9: Build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation

Goal 9 of the UN SDGs is about how essential investments in underlying infrastructure are to enabling sustainable development. Technological efficiency, energy-efficiency, and increased productivity enabled by investments in transport, energy, technology, healthcare, education, and irrigation will all help developed and developing countries alike in improving their standard of living.

A lack of necessary infrastructure in developing countries means that their people are at a clear disadvantage when it comes to ease of access to more markets to sell their products and services. Sustained employment growth will become more realistic for some countries once appropriate infrastructure investments are made and brought online.

Environmentally sound infrastructure development will help achieve other sustainability outcomes while providing lower environmental impacts from infrastructure development. Firms who operate in the infrastructure sector will be able to share their best practices with developing countries to enhance ecological efficiency for new projects.

For firms operating in developed countries, assisting in developing countries and providing technology investments where feasible can help accelerate sustainable development. For example, substantial investment in mobile phone networks in Africa has enabled a wave of entrepreneurship and innovation to take place in previously unconnected communities.

Board and Senior Executive Considerations

Boards and senior executives in other sectors may not think they can have any impact on this particular goal. However, UN SDGs are a broad church of targeted outcomes for a global society. One of the more effective ways that any business can make an impact on these goals indirectly related to your business is through due diligence and standards for your broader value chain.

The first exercise is a current operating model assessment that looks at your present purpose, strategy, and operating model. The outputs of this exercise can be mapped at a high-level to each of the 17 UN SDGs to provide input into the next activity.

The second exercise is mapping the current operating model outputs to each of the UN SDGs and identifying the positive or negative social impacts your business currently has. There may be somewhere there are none, there may be others where some substantial impact is possible.

The third exercise is taking the first two exercises into account and re-examining the purpose of the business. Why do you do what you do? Is your goal relevant in the 2020s? Are you a sunrise or a sunset business?

The fourth exercise is then revisiting the business strategy. Does it help or hinder the achievement of sustainability outcomes? Are there any products or services that need changes or closing down in light of changes in community expectations today or anticipated changes in community expectations tomorrow?

Once the current operating model, mapping exercise, purpose re-examination, and strategy re-examination are complete, a broad group of stakeholders should participate in the development of a responsible operating model.

The current trend in transformation is to speak of the target operating model; however, in the 2020s, it will be necessary to design and implement a responsible operating model. Sustainability outcomes must be incorporated into the design and planning stages of any transformation program. If they aren’t, they won’t be delivered.

One of the changes in thinking about ESG risk is that the business case is about the enterprise value of the business itself. Issues that even five years ago may not have merited a mention in a footnote to a presentation could now present themselves as existential crises for a board of directors.

Over the past decade, the cost of implementing appropriate systems and controls to manage compliance risk has been billions of dollars for the financial services sector. The coming decade will see a further increase in required technology and project expenditure to give boards and regulators assurance that a framework is in place and monitored actively at all levels of a business when it comes to ESG risk.

Other industries have faced similar costs, such as the impact of health & safety legislation on the construction sector. But no one would argue that making sure everyone goes home from a worksite at night is less important than making a profit at any cost. However, 30 years ago, those arguments were undoubtedly being made by some construction sector executives and boards.

Times have changed, and old attitudes towards ESG risk will need to be updated. The current economic environment globally, where the asset markets have boomed, and many companies rebounded from the Global Financial Crisis after brief tests in 2008 and 2009 of their operating model, means that the next downturn will provide an opportunity for deep introspection and consideration of what a responsible operating model needs to look like for a secure strategic position relative to your competitors in the coming decade.

An environment of ever-increasing expectations on corporate leaders to do the right thing when it comes to sustainable business means it’s an issue to be taken seriously from the board-level down. The identification, active management, mitigation, or elimination of ESG risk from your operating model is a vital part of building a sustainable business that makes a positive social impact as well as delivering a profitable business for shareholders.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals provide a useful high-level framework for assessing your firm’s ability to deliver sustainability outcomes and is increasingly used by global firms as the core 17 areas for reporting their sustainability focus in their annual report.

You can map the 17 UN SDGs against your current operating model to identify the areas where your firm is making a positive or negative social impact. This exercise could assist in the analysis work before a transformation programme begins, ensuring that the development and deployment of the target operating model incorporate sustainability outcomes.

Ever-increasing community expectations around what businesses are doing to reduce ESG risks and deliver a positive social impact for a full group of stakeholders means that thinking about what a responsible operating model for your business incorporates can help the process of positioning your firm ahead of the curve.

Boards and senior executives might consider assessing their current risk management framework to identify whether the broad array of ESG risks as some choose to define them are present in their existing risk register.

Environmental, social, and governance risks can be much harder to quantify than many financial or operational risks. Firms should develop a defensible framework for estimating the cost of these risks and the severity of their impact on the operations of the business.

The business case for making significant investments into projects that reduce these risks and enhance the enterprise value of your business is clear. Increasingly, firms that do not take these issues seriously or engage in a press-release driven approach will find it difficult or impossible to raise capital.

Institutional investors in 2020 expect well-aligned corporate behaviours and communications on sustainability issues with their preferred responsible investing frameworks than even five years ago. Investor relations and corporate access teams at investment banks will have higher rates of inquiry from stakeholders who may previously never have engaged with them, and that means that the operating model for an investor relations function or corporate sustainability function needs to adapt and improve as part of the core operating model of the business, instead of being tucked away in a small department.

Goal 8: Promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all

Goal 8 is about sustainable growth that cares about people. Eradicating global poverty depends on increasing the quality and compensation levels of workers around the world through raising productivity and sharing some of those gains.

In many developing countries, having a job doesn’t mean that your family is out of poverty. Roughly half of the world’s population lives on less than US$2 a day even with global unemployment around 5.7% according to the UN.

“Sustainable economic growth will require societies to create the conditions that allow people to have quality jobs that stimulate the economy while not harming the environment. Job opportunities and decent working conditions are also required for the whole working age population. There needs to be increased access to financial services to manage incomes, accumulate assets and make productive investments. Increased commitments to trade, banking and agriculture infrastructure will also help increase productivity and reduce unemployment levels in the world’s most impoverished regions.”

Some of the detailed sub-goals associated with Goal 8 include per capita economic growth, higher levels of productivity supported by investment in technology, a focus on high-value-added services, implementation of development-oriented policies, and eradicating forced labour and modern slavery.

8.1 Sustain per capita economic growth in accordance with national circumstances and, in particular, at least 7 per cent gross domestic product growth per annum in the least developed countries

8.2 Achieve higher levels of economic productivity through diversification, technological upgrading and innovation, including through a focus on high-value added and labour-intensive sectors

8.3 Promote development-oriented policies that support productive activities, decent job creation, entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation, and encourage the formalization and growth of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises, including through access to financial services

8.4 Improve progressively, through 2030, global resource efficiency in consumption and production and endeavour to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation, in accordance with the 10-year framework of programmes on sustainable consumption and production, with developed countries taking the lead

8.5 By 2030, achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all women and men, including for young people and persons with disabilities, and equal pay for work of equal value

8.6 By 2020, substantially reduce the proportion of youth not in employment, education or training

8.7 Take immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms

8.8 Protect labour rights and promote safe and secure working environments for all workers, including migrant workers, in particular women migrants, and those in precarious employment

8.9 By 2030, devise and implement policies to promote sustainable tourism that creates jobs and promotes local culture and products

8.10 Strengthen the capacity of domestic financial institutions to encourage and expand access to banking, insurance and financial services for all

8.A: Increase Aid for Trade support for developing countries, in particular least developed countries, including through the Enhanced Integrated Framework for Trade-Related Technical Assistance to Least Developed Countries

8.B: By 2020, develop and operationalize a global strategy for youth employment and implement the Global Jobs Pact of the International Labour Organization

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/economic-growth/

Board and Senior Executive Considerations

Boards and senior leaders will see that, like the other SDGs, there are several areas where any business can make a positive social impact. Procurement processes need to ensure that risks such as forced labour and modern slavery are not in your supply chain.

When you assess your current operating model, the key areas to explore when considering Goal 8 include people and culture processes and policies. If you are in financial services, finding what actions you could take to support the achievement of goal 8.10 would be a key focus. If you are in transportation or travel, exploring sustainable tourism such as going beyond net-zero or carbon neutral and thinking about carbon-negative operating models that create local jobs where you operate your business would be worth consideration.

The use of the UN SDGs as a high-level framework to map your current operating model against the ability of your business to deliver a positive social impact is a useful exercise for businesses. Many leading global firms already incorporate this reporting in their annual reports.

The decade ahead will be necessary for firms as they strategically position themselves to be ahead of their competitors on ESG issues. Moving beyond reporting and engagement to actively choose where your operating model (people, processes and systems) can adjust to improve positive outcomes or reduce adverse consequences will be tables stakes.

Institutional and retail investors are growing their awareness of ESG risks and expectations of the pace at which boards and senior executives will respond decisively if any controversies arise. Waiting it out or sending out a press release won’t cut it. Resignations and ending supplier relationships will become far more frequent and building a responsible operating model with in-built flexibility that can respond if a critical supplier needs to be changed because of an unacceptable level of ESG risk will increasingly mark the leaders in this space distinctly from the laggards.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals are a useful high-level framework to assess your firm’s ability to make a positive social impact. They cover a wide area of topics including equality, energy, climate change, responsible growth and more.

There are many frameworks that governments and NGOs try and get business behind. Each has its pros and cons. The UN Sustainable Development Goals are a global framework which enables comparison sustainability reporting between companies that operate in different jurisdictions or industry sectors.

Boards and senior executives should assess their current operating model against the 17 high-level SDGs to capture a baseline. They can then identify the areas of their operating model that make a positive or negative impact on these goals and generate sustainability reporting to track their progress in moving towards a responsible operating model that incorporates sustainability outcomes into the transformation process.

Goal 7: Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy

Goal 7 of the UN SDGs is to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy. Almost 1 billion people still don’t have access to reliable electricity, half of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Energy production and consumption are responsible for nearly 60% of total greenhouse gas emissions globally.

Globally, not even one-fifth of global electricity production is from renewables. There are many areas of energy that will need to improve over the next decade including energy efficiency, battery storage technology, renewable energy production, and reliable energy supplies for developing countries that doesn’t cost too much.

The benefits of clean energy for our planet are enormous. Reliable and affordable energy sources mean that cooking, cleaning, and necessary business activities become possible for people in developing countries.

In developed countries, increasing energy efficiency, even more, means that marginal energy producers that rely on fossil fuels such as coal, natural gas, and oil can sunset older plants and invest in renewables such as solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower.

 Some countries have already made enormous progress in developing their renewable energy sources, including China which has some of the most significant solar and wind power initiatives in history in operation and under construction.

The ability to make an impact on goal 7 isn’t just for businesses in the energy sector. Responsible electricity consumption and energy efficiency initiatives are realistic in a company that uses electricity.

Thinking about the energy efficiency of your entire value chain including the energy efficiency of your suppliers and partners means that operational due diligence on suppliers should start to include questions around their electricity provider, their investments in energy efficiency, their analytics and insights into their energy use, and developing a strong understanding of their strategy to reduce their carbon emissions and increase the proportion of their electricity supply from renewable sources.

Board And Senior Leader Considerations

There are many different frameworks and reporting guidelines for sustainability and ESG risk. As at January 2020, there are no global standards like IFRS that enforce certain levels of disclosure. Some companies will not care about transparency on these issues because, for some, it could be “brand destroying” to be open about some of the ESG risks that exist in their value chain.

Boards and senior leaders should start with a high-level assessment of their current operating model. Working through the basics of your business model is necessary before launching into exhaustive ESG risk analysis.

• What is your purpose? Why do you do what you do?
• What is your business strategy?
• How do you deliver your strategy?
• Who delivers value to your customers?
• Where are your operations located?
• Who are your key suppliers?

The business model needs to be understood and decisions made on the boundaries of how much the board and senior leaders are willing to change the business model to achieve the targeted level of ESG risk in their business.

The risk management framework and risk registers will already include many of the risk themes that emerge during a strategic review of this nature. However, some of the ESG risks like social risk and environmental risk, are facing ever-increasing community expectations.

Boards and senior leaders need to be forward-looking in their identification, mitigation or elimination of these risks. They need to be ahead of the curve because an acceptable business practice today could be completely unacceptable from a social license point of view after one newspaper article or one tweet goes viral.

A great example of an ESG risk related to energy is the proportion of your electricity supply that comes from renewable sources. Some organisations have changed their procurement procedures to ensure that only the suppliers with the best effort on increasing renewable sources of electricity supply are even in the running for tender opportunities.

What does this mean? It means that because the era of the press release is over, boards and senior leaders need to be thinking long-term about how to position their business strategy so that their operating model does not give rise to any potential ESG risks that will put their economic engine at risk.

The business case for building a responsible operating model and reducing or eliminating as much ESG risk as possible is not just about return on investment. Customer satisfaction, shareholder approval, cost avoidance, revenue retention, regulatory compliance, social license maintenance, and employee satisfaction all have some elements that can be quantified to support the financial side of any business case for a programme of work to build your responsible operating model.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals have one significant advantage for boards thinking about how to measure and monitor their social impact. They are a global framework, and many major global companies already include their SDG reporting in their annual reports.

One consideration is that some companies are already so far ahead on adjusting their operating model to deliver better sustainability outcomes, that they could already “lock-in” a strategic competitive advantage.

Costs to businesses not taking ESG risk seriously can arise in visible areas such as the ability to raise capital. Look at how thermal coal companies are on the way to becoming unbankable as an increasing number of financial institutions globally stop lending, cut lines of credit, don’t take commercial paper, and don’t invest in equity or debt raises for thermal coal companies.

Thermal coal miners are currently losing their ability to raise capital. Retail and institutional investors will increasingly demand near-perfect delivery from boards and senior leaders on the reduction and elimination of their preferred definition of ESG risk.

The rising community expectations on these issues will impact a firm’s social license to operate, and focusing on short-term operating model changes that deliver outcomes will be judged better than long-term ambitions that will take decades to achieve.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals are a useful high-level framework for thinking about your firm’s ability to deliver a positive social impact. Goal 6 is to ensure access to water and sanitation for all.

In a world with ever-increasing stakeholder expectations, boards and senior executives must to actively engage with and ensure that environmental, social and governance risks in their organisations are identified, managed or eliminated.

Zooming out to consider the global context in which your firm operates is a helpful exercise. The UN Sustainable Development Goals help boards disclose these ESG risks because the 17 high-level goals align with the classification of the material risks your business faces.

Through embracing sustainability reporting with the UN SDGs as part of the reporting framework, comparability between businesses and across industry sectors and countries becomes possible. Over time, institutional investors will increasingly demand more disclosure around sustainability outcomes your business is delivering for stakeholders.

The current focus on ESG risk is predominantly on responsible investing. Setting up processes and frameworks for asset managers to consider whether or not a particular company is suitable to invest capital into or lend to is also known as impact investing.

The focus for the next decade will need to be on building a responsible operating model. A responsible operating model is an evolution of a target operating model that incorporates sustainability outcomes and positive social impact into the strategy, design principles, and execution of the new operating model.

An exercise for boards and senior leaders to run is an assessment of your firm’s current operating model against the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Once you have that, consider your purpose and fundamental value proposition for your customers. Are there parts of your operating model that could be modified or enhanced to deliver a positive social impact as well as deliver value to your shareholders?

If you are going through a transformation, it can be like turning a container ship in a large organisation. During the programme initiation and spin-up phases, the sustainability outcomes need planning and analysis. Projects required to enable these outcomes to be delivered will never be scoped, budgeted, delivered and used by the business unless they are there from the beginning.

Goal 6: Ensure access to water and sanitation for all

The goal of ensuring access to water and sanitation for all has particular application for some companies. They may operate in countries where clean water and adequate sanitation is behind the country where their headquarters are.

Poor access to clean drinking water, inadequate sanitation, and poor access to reliable water supplies at all are problems faced by hundreds of millions of people every day. Water scarcity affects almost 40% of the global population. Nearly 1,000 children die every day because of preventable water or sanitation-related diarrheal diseases.

If your business operates in the water, sanitation, or engineering industry sectors, there is a clear opportunity to deliver a positive social impact and support the achievement of Goal 6 by 2030.

A business doesn’t have to have an office in a developing country to help. They can use their people and resources to assist developing countries in improving water and wastewater systems. They can offer secondments to experienced engineers and technicians to assist impoverished communities. They can use their voice to lobby for global efforts that improve access to sustainable and affordable finance for water and sanitation projects in developing countries.

Many technologies can benefit from further investment in research & development such as water recycling, desalination, water and wastewater analytics, wastewater treatment, recycling and reuse technologies.

If you are running a business that works in an office in an OECD country, starting with the water and sanitation efficiency and sustainability of your building and any other premises you own or occupy is a vital part of any current operating model review.

You will need to work with your building manager and landlord to understand the sustainability performance of your office space. There are sustainability analytics tools that can assist in reporting on this. Some older buildings may not be able to deliver sufficient levels of water reuse and recycling without substantial investment from landlords.

If you are a manufacturing company, ensuring there is no environmental impact from water or wastewater pollution from your factories is table stakes for the 2020s. Ironically, many manufacturers are well ahead of many service industry businesses because of environmental regulation and stakeholder pressure over the past few decades in identifying and managing these risks.

Goal 6 is about water and sanitation, and every business will be able to do its part to identify and report how it is supporting the achievement of this goal. It may not be the highest priority for a business in terms of how it can help sustainability outcomes, but similar to supporting gender equality it is table stakes for being able to communicate to stakeholders how it holistically considers its overall social impact.

Considerations for directors and executives

Boards and senior leaders that decide to use the UN Sustainable Development Goals in their sustainability strategy and reporting should consider a wide-ranging review of their current operating model against the 17 high-level goals.

The active engagement and governance of ESG risks inside a business will become increasingly critical for boards of directors. Boards should consider how they want to incorporate ESG risk into their risk management framework and ensure there is sufficient budget available to spend on sustainability projects, reporting, and assurance.

 A decade ago, a business could respond to ESG risk issues with a press release. They could even donate to a project in a developing country. These PR focused measures did not involve deep introspection and analysis of their current operating model and its strengths and weaknesses when it comes to sustainability outcomes.

In the 2020s, from the board-level down to the operational level, the enterprise value of the business is increasingly going to be impacted positively or negatively by the ability of the company to deliver value to its customers through a responsible operating model that has sustainability outcomes considered, measured and achieved through the capabilities the business assembles to provide value to customers and a broader set of stakeholders around the world.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals are a useful high-level framework for understanding the breadth of issues facing our planet. The deadline for the goals is 2030, so the next decade is time for both the private and public sector to make changes to their operating models to support the outcomes of these goals.  

Board members and senior leaders are likely to have gender equality or diversity & inclusion policies already in place. They may even have taken decisive action to ensure a gender-balanced board of directors or senior management team is employed.

Both developed and developing countries still have great lengths to go in achieving gender equality with some of the appalling statistics noted by the UN when it comes to how women and girls are treated poorly around the world.

When it comes to reviewing a firm’s purpose and strategy, building a more diverse and inclusive organisation is one of a minimum expectation of any organisation wanting to make a positive social impact and help support the UN Sustainable Development Goal outcomes in 2030.

Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

• 5.1 End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere
• 5.2 Eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls in public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation
• 5.3 Eliminate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation
• 5.4 Recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate
• 5.5 Ensure women’s full and active participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decisionmaking in political, economic and public life
• 5.6 Ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights as agreed following the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome documents of their review conferences
• 5. A Undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance and natural resources, following national laws
• 5.B Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women
• 5.C Adopt and strengthen sound policies and enforceable legislation for the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls at all levels

Source: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/gender-equality/

Board and senior executive considerations

When a business wants to assess how its current operating model either helps or hinders the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, having female directors and female senior executives driving or heavily involved in the process would be an obvious consideration.

If there are no women currently on the board of directors or on the senior leadership team, this will be a significant problem with almost any stakeholders. Institutional investors who care deeply about the firm’s reducing ESG risk will undoubtedly call it out.

It’s no longer credible to argue that there isn’t a “pipeline” or “suitably qualified” available. There are large numbers of highly qualified women willing and able to work in these roles, and there’s no reason why they can’t be working for your organisation.

When it comes to assessing the organisation’s social impact, ensuring that there is a balanced consideration of potential sustainability initiatives is critical. For example, some organisations that have pay equity issues may need to radically rethink their operating model to be able to deliver a better outcome for their people.

Asset managers who currently work on ESG issues need to assess their operating models too: what is the compensation profile at their organisation? How is the bonus pool distributed? Are gender-diverse people treated fairly? Are there any red flags around hiring processes such as previous salary disclosure?

When it comes to supporting Goal 5, the organisation can consider how it can make a positive impact on women and girls in developing countries. There may be scholarship initiatives, knowledge-sharing programmes, or supply chain diversification initiatives that could help improve the wellbeing of women entrepreneurs.

Some organisations may revisit their purpose and find that because their target markets or primary labour pools are predominantly female, they may want to pivot their operating model to support women-owned businesses and redesign their entire value chain to promote greater gender equality.

Several specialist consulting firms can assist in this area to develop a policy, supporting processes and frameworks and provide assurance that positive gender equality outcomes are in the operating model of the business.

Increasingly, ethical considerations during tender processes mean that firms that are not living what they claim to in their marketing materials when it comes to gender equality may lose out on substantial new revenue. They may not make it past the first round of submissions, or the tenderer may not even invite them to tender for new business.

The business case for incorporating gender equality outcomes into your business’s operating model is quite straightforward. Revenue protection, cost reduction, cost avoidance, and new revenue opportunities are all categories of financial benefit that accrue to firms who take this issue seriously.

The development of policies that enable people to bring themselves to work and attain a reasonable work-life balance further enhance these goals. During reporting on these initiatives, there is no excuse for firms in developed countries not to be able to make a sizeable impact on many of these UN Sustainable Development Goals when many of the actions required on their part are merely becoming the minimum level that the community expects from them as corporate citizens.

Through thinking critically about the entire operating model of a business, and exploring in-depth how the strategy of a firm can be executed creatively, there are many avenues for a firm to adjust its operating model at the implementation layer that changes how its people, processes and systems work to make a positive social impact and deliver value to a broad group of stakeholders around the world, not just its shareholders.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals are a useful high-level framework for thinking about your organisation’s ability to make a positive social impact. The 17 goals cover a broad range of environmental, social, health, wellbeing, education and climate change-related areas.

Your business may be able to make a change to its operating model that could help at least one of these goals. In an environment of ever-increasing stakeholder expectations, particularly for financial services companies, revisiting your purpose and strategy to build a new target operating model that incorporates sustainability outcomes as a critical success marker is vital.

Boards and senior executives should be actively considering how their risk management framework accommodates the identification and management of environmental, social and governance risks. The focus on financial risks has moved towards a focus on operational risks in recent years, however many organisational-level risks still struggle to make appearances in the strategy documents and annual reports of some companies.

Many major global and local companies have gone back to basics and reviewed their purpose – why they exist, and which stakeholder communities they are delivering outcomes for. They want to make a difference for their customers, stakeholders, shareholders, employees, and countries where they operate. Some are clear in their aspiration to make a positive difference for the world as a whole.

A decade ago, these ESG issues were on the radar of boards and senior executives but typically dealt with by way of a press release or modest amounts of spending on a few sustainability projects. This approach will no longer satisfy rising community expectations around corporate behaviour. Their very license to operate in society is at risk if they don’t make changes to their operating model that reflect a higher level of community expectations.

Goal 4: Ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning

Goal 4 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals is about quality education and lifelong learning for all. Education is an integral part of building a country’s human capital and productivity.

In developed countries, lifelong learning is supported by many employers. In developing countries, rates of literacy and numeracy are still well below where they should be.

Getting a quality education is a vital part of sustainable development. Over 265 million children globally are currently not in school – 22% of them are primary school age.

The sub-goals include targets for raising technical and vocational skills as well as tertiary education. It won’t be cheap to increase investment in education facilities globally. But it’s an investment in the planet’s future.

Some board members and senior executives may believe that these social problems are for politicians and non-governmental organisations to resolve. This way of thinking is increasingly outdated and risks surprising the board and shareholders when a clear communication around increased community expectations is received.

An example of how this could manifest is through the employees of your business. The younger employees no longer want to come to work to be told what to do, receive their pay, and go home. They want to be supporting a clear purpose and strategy that not only helps them self-actualise but helps society.

In developed countries, there are still issues with education and vocational training. To support the Goal 4 objectives, considering how the organisation’s training and people policies support the lifelong learning of employees is one area of potential focus.

Another area of focus could be the provision of scholarships and vocational training support in your industry. Creating supportive pathways from education to valued work is essential to reduce the negative social consequences of people studying for qualifications that don’t land them an entry-level job.

As an example of how individual businesses can make significant impacts on some of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, consider an engineering consultancy. They could partner with a developing country education provider and provide pro bono or heavily discounted consulting services to support the development of educational facilities.  They could offer employees the opportunity to do a 3-month secondment without having to volunteer and incur financial impact.

If an engineering consultancy was to consider this, it communicates how it is making a difference through its actions. When it produces sustainability outcomes reports for stakeholders or needs to respond to questions in a tender response situation, having clear examples of projects its people do for others will increasingly become a vital procurement benchmark to reach.

Board Director And Senior Executive Considerations

From an operating model perspective, through sharing knowledge and undertaking projects in its niche in a developing country would build its employees skills and enable them to share knowledge with host country staff. While there are issues to work through, it should be clear to board members and senior leaders that using unconstrained thinking to decide how your business chooses to make a positive social impact can lead to credible, adjacent opportunities that are genuine win-wins.

 Small projects that are in line with your operating model can mean that helping improve sustainability outcomes is efficient for your business because its in line with the people, process and technology platforms that you have in place already. If your current operating model could support small adjustments to support part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, then that could be reported on as part of your overall impact.

The business case for many of these sustainability projects is reasonable. Enterprise value in 2020 and beyond will change based on the external perception of how board directors and senior executives identify and manage ESG risks.

If a business is clear about its purpose, value creation and the strategy it has designed accommodates for sustainability outcomes, then creating the right target operating model that ensures sustainability outcomes are delivered from Day 1 should be achievable.

One consequence of going back to basics and incorporating sustainability outcomes into the overall operating model design is that some clear decisions – like eliminating paper-based processes – obviously have a positive impact through reducing paper consumption and waste, but also lead to lower operating costs.

Boards and senior executives should ensure realistic cost-benefit analysis calculations are incorporated into business cases. The clear message from the community is that many groups of stakeholders are highlighting the financial risks to not actively considering ESG risks and adjusting your operating model to ensure that part of the value your business delivers to society is a positive social impact.

The Sustainable Development Goals are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. They address the global challenges we face, including those related to poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice. The 17 Goals are all interconnected, and in order to leave no one behind, it is important that we achieve them all by 2030. 

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/

Is supporting health and wellbeing solely the preserve of companies in the healthcare industry? Goal 3 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals is a complex and detailed one that highlights how far developing countries have come, but also how far they still have to travel to catch up to developed country data on health and wellbeing outcomes.

Increasing life expectancy and reducing infant mortality includes a target of fewer than 70 deaths per 100,000 live births by 2030.

Improving the financing of healthcare systems, boosting economic growth so that countries can afford better healthcare, increasing the number of medical professionals available in developing countries and improving sanitation and hygiene are all ways to improve global health and wellbeing outcomes.

The maternal mortality ratio is still 14 times higher in developing countries, which is a shocking statistic. The specific goals here highlight the enormous gap in health outcomes between developed and developing countries and the importance of taking action to reduce these gaps.

Goal 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

3.1 By 2030, reduce the global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100,000 live births.

3.2 By 2030, end preventable deaths of newborns and children under five years of age, with all countries aiming to reduce neonatal mortality to at least as low as 12 per 1,000 live births and under-5 mortality to at least as low as 25 per 1,000 live births.

3.3 By 2030, end the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and neglected tropical diseases and combat hepatitis, water-borne diseases and other infectious diseases.

3.4 By 2030, reduce by one-third premature mortality from non-communicable diseases through prevention and treatment and promote mental health and well-being.

3.5 Strengthen the prevention and treatment of substance abuse, including narcotic drug abuse and harmful use of alcohol.

3.6 By 2020, halve the number of global deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents.

3.7 By 2030, ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health-care services, including for family planning, information and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programmes.

3.8 Achieve universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential health-care services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all.

3.9 By 2030, substantially reduce the number of deaths and illnesses from hazardous chemicals and air, water and soil pollution and contamination.

3. A Strengthen the implementation of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in all countries, as appropriate.

3.B Support the research and development of vaccines and medicines for the communicable and noncommunicable diseases that primarily affect developing countries, provide access to affordable essential medicines and vaccines, following the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health, which affirms the right of developing countries to use to the full the provisions in the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights regarding flexibilities to protect public health, and, in particular, provide access to medicines for all.

3.C Substantially increase health financing and the recruitment, development, training and retention of the health workforce in developing countries, especially in the least developed countries and small island developing States.

3.D Strengthen the capacity of all nations, in particular developing countries, for early warning, risk reduction and management of national and global health risks.

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/health/

Board And Senior Leader Considerations

The specificity of the goals above might make you wonder how your firm can make a positive impact on these goals. What is the business case for a healthcare company giving away services for free, for example? That would be an incorrect take on the situation.

The business case for using the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a framework to understand how your operating model supports or hinders the achievement of the goals is compelling – enterprise value decreases through actions or activities that harm society.

In the current low-interest-rate environment, the discount rate to be used when assessing projects has fallen for many organisations. Higher spending on investment projects to deliver sustainability initiatives can make sense if the payoff to the firm is ongoing and has a long time horizon.

Lower cost financing of these projects is possible through the use of sustainable finance strategies such as the issue of green bonds. Alternatively, borrowing from a bank that focuses on supporting businesses wanting to invest in improving the sustainability of their operating model.

When it comes to reporting on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, an example of how an infrastructure firm that owns toll roads could make an impact on goal 3.6 – reducing global deaths and injuries from road traffic incidents – would be to highlight investments in safety on the toll roads they operate.

What is their safety goal? Zero harm on their toll roads? If so, thinking about how to centre their operation around zero damage to their staff, their road users and other stakeholders could lead to innovations in their operating model and capabilities they have around safety.

Infrastructure funds could use the health and wellbeing goals as part of their operational due diligence on prospective investments – at the business-as-usual level of a target company, are they helping or hindering the achievement of these goals?

The additional sunlight on some companies will highlight how their operations either do not help society outside of the shareholders who earn a return on their capital. These processes may lead to divestment or even shutdown of business units or operations that do not meet new community expectations around social performance.

Every business should at least consider thinking through the totality of the UN Sustainable Development goals and then focusing on those it can impact the most. The board should deliberate on whether the company’s purpose, strategy, and operating model are sufficient to maintain a social license to operate with ever-increasing expectations on the private sector.

The initial assessment of a business to identify its current operating model and how it either helps or hinders each of the 17 goals is a process achieved through workshops and interviews with the board and senior leaders.

The report prepared for senior leaders should drive further examination of the strategy and the portfolio of initiatives underway to realise that strategy help or hinder each of the 17 goals. This way, reporting in the management reports and annual reports can include these factors to be monitored by the board.

A business may find that considering a positive global social impact means that significant changes to parts of its operating model are required. Engaging with external support through this process, including setting up appropriate gateways and monitoring of portfolio, programme and project activity and outputs that take sustainability outcomes as crucial success criteria are essential.

In this series of posts, as I work through each of the UN Sustainable Development goals, it is clear that the ability of a business to positively impact the achievement of these goals is in one of the 2^nd level goals or through considering an alternative way of supporting the achievement of the outcome through clever use of scarce resources.

Focusing on the outcomes desired and creatively exploring ways to support them if applicable to your business or industry gives boards and senior leaders freedom to act boldly in a manner increasingly expected by stakeholders and an increasing proportion of shareholders, particularly institutional investors for whom ESG considerations are now standard due diligence for new or continued investment in any asset class.

The Sustainable Development Goals are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. They address the global challenges we face, including those related to poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice. The 17 Goals are all interconnected, and in order to leave no one behind, it is important that we achieve them all by 2030. 

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/

The UN Sustainable Development Goals are a useful high-level group of global sustainable development goals that can be used as a framework to assess how your business makes a positive social impact.

This series of posts explores each of the goals and proposes some considerations for boards and senior leaders. The rising pressure on business leaders to make genuine changes in their operating model to ensure that their people, processes and systems work together to make a positive social impact means that trade-offs must be made with scarce resources.

Considering how to benefit all stakeholders means that careful consideration of your firm’s purpose business strategy and target operating model to realise that strategy is a crucial part of building a sustainable enterprise.

Traditionally, value creation for shareholders was achieved by delivering value to customers and earning a reasonable profit. Today, value creation for stakeholders is the more popular terminology.

What does this mean? It means keeping customers happy, shareholders happy, regulators happy, politicians happy, industry partners happy, suppliers happy, employees happy, and certification authorities happy.

This mixed group of actors is outside the traditional boundaries of the firm, meaning that when it comes to approaching ESG issues, a press release won’t cut it.

Environmental, social and governance risks have to be identified, triaged, managed, mitigated or eliminated through the risk management process. A board should set clear expectations around how the operating model of the business ensures that the capabilities developed to deliver value to stakeholders actively consider these risks both during project phases and in a business-as-usual environment.

Goal 2: Zero Hunger

Goal 2 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals is Zero Hunger. In 2017, over 821 million people were under-nourished. Over the past few decades, enormous reductions in this number have occurred, but there is still work to do.

Differences in markets and institutions between developed and developing countries can explain much of the problem with hunger. Many states don’t have the infrastructure or even electricity to take advantage of agricultural productivity-enhancing technology at an appropriate scale.

One of the most disturbing statistics concerning hunger is the number of children who die every year from poor nutrition – 3.1 million each year. But merely sending more donations doesn’t solve the societal problems in these developing countries.

Businesses in developed countries can make a positive impact on the goal to reduce hunger in the world. An example of how technology positively impacts developing countries would be the spread of mobile phones, enabling farmers to trade more easily with neighbouring towns and villages to sell their produce or livestock, raising incomes and encouraging more trade inside countries.

One way the private sector can assist developing countries is helping the internal free movement of goods and services. Mobile phone networks, education, infrastructure investment in roads, and assistance with agricultural productivity are crucial.

How might a developed country firm help reduce global hunger? Consider pricing frameworks and intellectual property protections for agricultural productivity-enhancing goods and machinery. Is what makes sense in Canada, a wealthy developed country, necessarily appropriate in sub-Saharan Africa if you’re selling into that market?

How about the issue of subsidies and tariffs? Lobbying for tariffs on some goods predominantly produced in developing countries takes money out of the mouths of the global poor. Even more concerning is marketing cooperatives who play on fair trade to pay a fixed price for goods below the world market price and then capture the price premium for those goods in hipster neighbourhoods in developed countries.

One of the themes in the UN Sustainable Development goals is the removal of unfair subsidies and tariffs that disproportionately privilege farmers in developed countries over farmers in developing countries. If we consider global hunger, losing some farms in the West to keep bringing millions out of poverty in developing countries could be regarded as a reasonable tradeoff as long as the West budgets for appropriate transition payments and arrangements for the impacted farmers.

Banks and insurers don’t need to open a branch in a developing country to make an impact. Letting subject matter experts spend a month upskilling their peers or conducting a training course in a developing country is a modest cost but high impact way of sharing knowledge and capability.

If your global supply chain includes agricultural products exported from developing countries, performing due diligence on the supply chain is essential. Ending unfair labour practices and exploitation of small farmers is something any business trading with these countries should incorporate into their operating model.

One example of how adjusting your operating model to ensure that a positive social impact occurs is by physically tracing the entire value chain for a particular product.

• Who does the work?
• How is it done?
• How are they compensated?
• Is it fair, giving account to local realities and expectations?
• Where is it done?
• Who captures the value?
• Are there any health & safety concerns?
• Are there opportunities to provide upskilling or coaching to suppliers?

Corporate Governance Considerations

If your business trades with developing countries, you need to make investments in technology so that qualitative information associated with your supply chain can be captured and analysed for insights.

Setting up a framework for supply chain risk management with the right supporting policies and processes is a complex project. Many businesses are already doing a great job at ensuring the integrity of their supply chain, but this is a topical issue and emerging issues when it comes to agriculture must be monitored.

Eliminating global hunger is just one of the many UN Sustainable Development goals. As an exercise, working through the plans may convince you that your business can only make an impact on 1 or 2 of them. But the activity itself is valuable because using a high-level framework for considering social impact will enhance your understanding of your operating model and offer up possibilities for small adjustments that could make a positive impact on others.

The drive to have companies consider a more comprehensive set of stakeholders doesn’t mean that no one can make a profit anymore. Many sustainable business practices can lead to lower operating costs and enhanced shareholder value.

There is only one planet Earth, and using the UN Sustainable Development Goals as an initial broad set of considerations can help refine the purpose of a business. Simplifying your operating model and identifying business units that may no longer be suitable to own and need to be divested or shut down will be a natural outcome of more boards and senior business leaders thinking about these issues deeply.

The rise of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues as a priority for business leaders was a theme of the past decade. To ensure that your firm’s social license to operate continues to be renewed by the community, embedding a positive social impact into your operating model is essential.

A firm’s social license to operate has to adapt to changing community expectations of corporate behaviour. In the fallout from the revelations during the Financial Services Royal Commission in Australia, the extent to which community expectations can drastically shift against any industry is evident.

Ever-increasing considerations and requirements of businesses and how they manage ESG risks mean that balancing scarce resources is more complicated than ever before. Firms have to worry about legislation, regulation, environmental concerns, social impact, social risks, governance issues, operational issues, technological disruption, climate change, responsible investment disclosures, and more.

Designing and implementing a target operating model to deliver a firm’s strategy is vital. A firm needs to focus its purpose and concentrate on the core capabilities required to provide value to customers and other stakeholders.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals provide a useful high-level framework for considering a firm’s global social impact. Are you doing anything that could lead to negative headlines? Are there any small changes to your operating model that could support any of these goals and be an example of how your business is delivering above community expectations?

The Sustainable Development Goals are:

• No Poverty
• Zero Hunger
• Good Health and Well-being
• Quality Education
• Gender Equality
• Clean Water and Sanitation
• Affordable and Clean Energy
• Decent Work and Economic Growth
• Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
• Reducing Inequality
• Sustainable Cities and Communities
• Responsible Consumption and Production
• Climate Action
• Life Below Water
• Life On Land
• Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions
• Partnerships for the Goals

The UN Sustainable Development Goals certainly aren’t the only framework for thinking about building a sustainable business or considering how to provide comfort to your stakeholders that your operating model is in line with community expectations. Many companies will be able to make a positive social impact on at least 1-2 of the goals.

How Do Companies Deal With This?

There are ever-increasing pressures from the media, from regulators, from industry bodies, from politicians, and from peers in your industry that mean that a few pages in the annual report no longer cut it – a genuine commitment from the board level down to the operating teams of the business has to be “baked in”.

In this new era, can you ever do enough to satisfy your stakeholders? I’m not sure it’s realistic. The level of constant change in the regulation of financial services, for example, has radically shifted how banks and wealth providers need to spend their investment budgets each year.

If the current level of investment on regulatory and compliance change is half of the spend, and investment in digital transformation or operating model change represents the other half, then which projects need to end to finance spending on sustainability projects?

This reality is where the rubber hits the road – the intersection of idealism around sustainable capitalism with tradeoffs in a commercial context. If a business has to be all things to all stakeholders, then radical simplification of the entire operating model is a high-probability method to ensure that the right trade-offs will happen at executive-level and operational-level.

The fascinating thing about the rise of responsible investment or ESG awareness when making investment decisions is that the light is rarely shone back on the operating models of the asset managers and data providers making these decisions themselves.

Public market investors and everyday people with their retirement savings in their 401(k), superannuation, Kiwisaver or pension increasingly tell market research companies and their providers that they care about not investing in companies that could have a negative social impact.

The plethora of filters available to asset managers means that what one asset manager believes is “responsible investing” is not necessarily what another asset manager defines it as unless they are using the same principles, framework and processes in their investment due diligence process.

When companies make disclosures around ESG issues to their investors, many have done a fantastic job in articulating where they see the risks in their businesses and how they are changing their business to reduce, better manage or eliminate those environmental and social risks.

Key Considerations For Boards And Executives

A key consideration for boards and executives here is that while you can compile an initial list of ESG risks and potential mitigations in a half-day workshop, that is only the beginning of the journey. An ongoing programme of work for some businesses – another substantial investment in people, processes and technology in addition to existing regulatory and compliance programmes of work.

Almost all boards and executive teams are aware of this, but balancing the pressures from shareholders and regulators can be a delicate act. There are earnings pressures, regulatory deadline pressures, and interpretation problems when it comes to how your operating model can deliver compliance with some requirements.

Without deeply examining the purpose of the business itself and going line-by-line through each operating division, hidden risks can remain that emerge at the least convenient time and undermine any previous efforts to promote that the business was trying to make a positive social impact.

The sorts of questions that I would be asking include: what is the purpose of our business? How complicated is our current operating model? How do I have confidence in the data and conclusions in the board reports I receive? How do we know we are ready for the “next” ESG issue that emerges in our industry? Who owns ESG risk in our business? If it is the audit and risk committee, are all members actively engaged in professional development on these issues?

One of the saddening things about reading some of the data attached to each of the UN Sustainable Development Goals is the realisation of how fortunate many of us are to live in highly developed countries. In a sense, many of the issues around managing these risks are “first-world problems”. However, that doesn’t mean that taking such a broad view is unhelpful to a business in an OECD country.

The critical consideration for boards and corporate leaders when it comes to social license to operate is recognising the need to be ahead of the curve on these issues. What is currently acceptable commercial practice today in one of your most profitable service lines or products could be completely unacceptable after a poorly served customer explains their poor customer experience.

A real-time feedback loop now exists between customers and businesses. Regulators, the media and politicians are always watching and listening. Empowering front-line people to do the right thing by customers and removing conflicts and any potential negative perceptions around your value chain are now an essential part of running and optimising your operating model.

The Sustainable Development Goals are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. They address the global challenges we face, including those related to poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice. The 17 Goals are all interconnected, and in order to leave no one behind, it is important that we achieve them all by 2030. 

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/

A decade ago, few business leaders would have accepted that ending global poverty had anything to do with their business. But the recent decade has shown that social license and community expectations are a critical part of the external factors to your operating model.

A decade ago, understanding and taking action as a business on something like the UN Sustainable Development Goals, would be accomplished with a press release. Now, investors and regulators expect full disclosure of environmental, social and governance issues.

Understanding your current operating model – the value proposition, the principles, the people, the processes and the technology – is complicated enough for many firms. If you are embarking on a transformation, defining the new target operating model and building out the supporting processes and frameworks is tricky too.

The growing pressure from more regulation, legislation and industry standards increases the complexity faced by business leaders. There are so many potential frameworks that you could use to assess where your business stands, that going back to basics is a helpful approach.

Because of the rise of globalised firms, it makes sense to take a global approach to assess the social impact of the components of your operating model. Helpfully, the UN Sustainable Development Goals can provide businesses with an extensive set of considerations to incorporate into an operating model review and target operating model development.

If you aren’t a global business, there is still value in considering how your business can make a positive social impact. If there is a lesson from the past decade, it’s that whatever you previously thought was the boundary of social, regulatory or legislative pressure on business, it is now far more demanding on business than it has ever been.

Many businesses may only be able to impact 1 or 2 of the sustainable development goals, but there is still value in considering all 17 to see if there are areas of your operating model that could change to make a difference.

Goal 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere

The structure of the UN Sustainable Development Goals is useful for an assessment exercise. Each goal is high-level, there is a set of accompanying statistics describing the extent of the societal issue, and there are a series of detailed sub-goals.

The goal to end global poverty in all its forms everywhere is aspirational. It would be fantastic if achieved, and an initial impression could be that this is wholly unrealistic.

However, there are small things that businesses can do to help reduce the incidence and severity of global poverty. More than 700 million people worldwide still live on less than US$1.90 per day. Having a job doesn’t guarantee a proper standard of living as 8% of employed workers and their families lived in extreme poverty in 2018.

Poverty has many dimensions, but its causes include unemployment, social exclusion, and high vulnerability of certain populations to disasters, diseases and other phenomena which prevent them from being productive. Growing inequality is detrimental to economic growth and undermines social cohesion, increasing political and social tensions and, in some circumstances, driving instability and conflicts.

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/poverty/

Assessing Your Strategy And Operating Model

Every business has strategic goals it wants to achieve. The operating model is how it structures its capabilities to deliver on the strategy. These capabilities are groupings of people, processes and technology that create value or support value creation.

For example, your operating model is a crucial driver of decisions to insource or outsource capabilities. When you choose to outsource, your supply chain becomes part of your social impact. Enhanced due diligence on your suppliers and their supply chain is required. You need confidence that your business isn’t inadvertently generating a negative social impact through your supply chain.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals provide an additional set of considerations for business leaders when they are reviewing their overall operating model. There are two areas of questioning – business strategy and operating model.

What is your business strategy? What are your strategic goals? When you are thinking about how to create value, are there aspects of this value creation process that do not align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals?

What is your operating model? What are the key capabilities that you have assembled to deliver value? How do these capabilities create a positive social impact? Can they even contribute to making a positive social impact? Are there negative social impacts from some capabilities that your business has?

How is ending global poverty linked to your strategy and operating model? One helpful mental model is to think about the frontpage rule – is your business doing anything inside its operating model globally that could lead to a headline that accuses your company of perpetuating global poverty?

The location of your physical operations is a crucial consideration when it comes to helping end global poverty. Do you have factories, mines or offices in developing countries? If so, do you have a policy framework for ensuring that you are generating a positive social impact in these countries? Have your risk and compliance teams embarked on enhanced due diligence of your supply chain and recruitment processes in these countries to identify any areas of risk or potential exploitation?

The great news is that almost all global businesses already have robust frameworks in place to ensure that these environmental and social risks are identified and well managed. You can read about these efforts in their annual reports. They regularly engage consultants to benchmark their approach against global standards and identify further remediation required.

The change in thinking for businesses wanting to make a positive social impact is that when making a low level operating model choice, there are multiple competing priorities. Having a principles-based target operating model that gives business leaders the ability to choose different components is essential.

I think that businesses who do not currently use a broad framework like the UN Sustainable Development Goals to explore how they could make a positive social impact are missing something. There is an opportunity to use these goals as a differentiator and to identify how each key capability of your business not only creates value for customers and shareholders but aligns to these goals.

The goals and expectations of your employees matter too. Most millennials care more about the purpose of the work they are doing than the commercial drivers. They understand that a business has to make a profit, but if the operating model that delivers that profit helps create a positive social impact and supports the goal of ending global poverty by 2030, then that is another compelling reason for them to come to work.

Next Steps

• Take a look at https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/poverty/
• Think about how your business could help reduce global poverty
• Think about what your employees expect your social impact to be
• Think about how your current operating model helps or hinders these goals