The Quest for Purpose

Benoit Leleux and Jan van der Kaaij
Additional contact information
Benoit Leleux: International Institute for Management Development
Jan van der Kaaij: Finch & Beak

Chapter 3 in Winning Sustainability Strategies, 2019, pp 37-56 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract In this chapter, we introduce and discuss the first critical success factor for an effective sustainability effort—identifying the proper objectives for it. Through clinical observation, we discovered that many firms failed to successfully implement their sustainability strategies, not because they lacked the desire, the willingness or even the belief in the impact of sustainability on their businesses, but because they failed to identify proper objectives for their efforts. When firms become overly ambitious and select too many targets, their efforts tend to become dispersed and hence of limited impact. This creates demotivation and too often leads to the abandonment of meaningful and inherently valuable efforts. It definitely pays to focus but on the right targets. In the next sections, we review the importance of purpose for an organization, and how it helps to coalesce various efforts and goodwill and gives a shared sense of direction. We then illustrate how sustainability can be a strong contributor to that sense of purpose by providing superior motives for business activities. In later sections, we review how to identify and qualify the possible sustainability efforts and then to single out a small subset that would be most compatible with your business and hence best able to serve as guidance for your organizational efforts.

Keywords: Sustainability; interfaceInterface; Cocoa Supply Chain; Talent Attraction; Recycled Nylon (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-319-97445-3_3

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319974453

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-97445-3_3

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().