At the Corporate Sustainability Mastermind Group, my job is to guide the conversation, ask provocative questions and record the ‘take home points’ that arise. Of these, asking provocative questions is my favourite, and at last week’s meeting, my best was:

“When will your business and sustainability strategies converge into one?”

At that point the conversation was about the need to take a product-oriented approach to sustainability so responsibility went from cradle to grave (or indeed cradle to cradle as the circular economy was a key theme) of the product life cycle. It struck me that if you are restructuring your supply chain, your operations and your offering to the market in terms of sustainability, what is the point of having separate sustainability and business strategies? Only the metrics (£, t CO2e etc) would differ.

The ultimate act of embedding sustainability into the organisation would be for the two strategies to be combined into one. The direction and speed that many leading companies are heading towards sustainability, there would be little point in not doing it.