How can your company win with sustainability? How can companies turn the challenges of sustainable development into commercial opportunities? This is the focus of our work with companies on their business strategy.

Global issues frame the business context in the 21st century, and any good business strategy must answer some fundamental questions. For example, how will this company be successful in a world dealing with climate change, resource constraints, an increasing population and a growing expectation that business will be part of the solution? Forward-looking business leaders are now considering how to integrate sustainability into their business strategy to find new commercial opportunities and win competitive advantage.

Ways we can help Forum for the Future has created a modular approach to helping companies go through the different stages of planning business strategy. This includes:

Scenario planning
We help companies like PepsiCo and Finlays understand their changing business context using plausible future scenarios which link sustainability issues to business drivers. The scenarios can be company-specific or off-the-shelf.

“In an increasingly competitive business environment our close partnership with Forum for the Future has helped inform new priorities for sustainable business growth, and care for the world and society in which we live and operate.”  - Todd Stitzer, CEO, Cadbury

Benchmarking
We enable companies to understand their strengths and weaknesses by benchmarking their capabilities against their peers using our Leader Business Hallmarks. These are distilled from our experience helping more than a hundred companies operate in a more socially, environmentally and financially sustainable way, combined with sector-specific desk research.

Visioning
We use visioning to assist companies in setting their strategic end-goals. Wessex Water’s sustainability vision is based on our Five Capitals framework for understanding sustainable development and came from engaging with a wide range of stakeholders inside and outside the company. We carried out extensive sector research and held workshops with the executive board at Guardian News & Media to build consensus around a vision for the company.

Creating business strategies
We use innovation techniques to help companies identify the many ways they can use their capabilities to best effect and achieve their vision. We have identified 11 types of business strategy for sustainability which we can use as a starting point for creating the right approach for your company.
 
Determining your business case
We enable companies to choose the best strategy by evaluating the different options. We have experience of applying a range of financial techniques so companies can find their business case.

“Our partnership with Forum for the Future has been a great success. They have continually challenged us to go the extra mile and helped us to think in new ways. This has resulted in a vision and strategy that will ensure we are at the forefront of change within the media sector.” - Tim Brooks Managing Director, GuardianNews & Media

Implementation
Our partnership approach makes us uniquely suited to support the implementation of strategy. Our Individual Leadership programmes develop the knowledge and skills people need to put it into action. Our innovation team can adapt the strategy for research and product development.

Balfour Beatty sustainability vision and strategy
Balfour Beatty, a leading global engineering, construction, services and investment business, invited us to help them create a sustainability vision and strategy. We started by creating a working group from across the organisation as a ‘transition team’ and interviewing the top executives. Then we used horizon-scanning to identify and prioritise the key trends and global issues facing the business.

The working group shaped a vision statement that articulated how Balfour Beatty can win with sustainability – looking for profitable markets in the needs of communities and the necessity of living within environmental limits. The working group tested this vision across the group, creating understanding and buy-in. Crucially, we turned the vision into a 2012 roadmap that combines central direction and local autonomy on key issues. It sets a minimum standard for all subsidiaries and defines excellence for those markets where a commercial case exists. After only six months, Balfour Beatty has won significant contracts on the basis of its sustainability approach, and potential customers are approaching them for advice.  

Find out more about our work on business strategy 

For more details of Forum’s business strategy work and how it can benefit you contact:

David Bent
+44 (0)20 7324 3662