Excellence for sustainability–maintaining the license to operate

Abstract

Companies increasingly work in a global context and need to be relevant in it. In addition to focus on customers, companies need to identify and attend to the needs of various stakeholders. The quality principle of customer focus has been used for identifying stakeholders, their needs and how to manage them. The Planetary Boundaries, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and The Natural Step have been used to identify performance targets for stakeholder needs. Results indicate that People and Planet could be defined as the main stakeholders and that these stakeholders could be further detailed in order to more easily link them with company business. Critical Planet stakeholders could be such as the Atmosphere and Biosphere. Based on the Pareto principle, People needs focus should be on alleviating poverty with a highest priority given to those living in extreme poverty. Absolute and relative indicators for sustainability performance with focus on core stakeholders have been proposed. The indication is that a paradigm shift from Profit to Planet and People focus is needed. The proposed strategy is to combine customer wants focus with a focus on defined critical stakeholder needs.