Forty years ago British businesses were embracing the practices of total quality management (TQM). This improved the quality of the products and services we now consume. So much so that anecdotes about cars being built and then delivered with parts missing seem bizarre and untrue to today's generation. But to those of us who can remember the 1970's, we know that brand new Allegros and Escorts were delivered to customers with things like window winders, and worse, missing.
Jump forward to the mid 1990's and the start of the World Wide Web. If you said to a business person then that within fifteen years a website would be their key business platform, that they'd be concerned about their position on Google, that a primary means of communication would be by e-mail, and they'd be using Facebook and Twitter to engage with customers, they'd have looked at their fax machine, telephone and Yellow Pages advert and thought you were crazy.
Sustainability is the next in this line of drivers of change.
Over the next fifteen to twenty five years we will move to a circular economy. The children of that time will think us crazy for burning fossil fuels, not recycling and will struggle to understand our concept of waste.
Note that two common themes run through all these changes; cost reduction and market attraction.
Total quality management reduced corrective action costs and through the production of better products, won market share for its practitioners. The Web reduced transaction and marketing costs. Plus with ease of use has attracted the market.
Sustainability is doing the same.
Businesses are realising cost savings by better managing their energy use and waste streams, and by using sustainability as a criteria in their procurement. This makes them leaner, more resilient and by result, more competitive and able to win business.
Public sector organizations, corporations and leading brands are asking their suppliers to work in a sustainable way. Meaning that smaller businesses in their supply chain have to be able to prove their environmental management credentials if they want to win, or keep, their business.
Sustainability as a business model, then, is the latest example of Darwin's maxim;
"It is not the strongest of the species, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change"
If you'd like to know more about how your business can become more sustainable in the way it operates, BSI, the business standards company, can support you with training and certification to ISO 14001, the World's leading management system, and ISO 50001, the latest in best practice energy management systems.
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