Responsible Business and Sustainability

We recently spoke to three prominent business leaders to get their insights and perspectives on the meaning of sustainability leadership. We discussed how sustainability impacts their role and organisation today, shifting and driving change towards creating “good business” and about their future outlook.

Full interview (in Swedish)

The panel

Evelina Lindgren, is today Managing Director of aPak – the packaging company. Nominated for Future Female Leadership awards and winner of Leader of The Year award in Sweden, Evelina is often mentioned in conversations about business transformation, relating in big part to her work in helping aPak go green.

Henrik Henriksson is a well-known business leader and CEO at H2 Green Steel, a startup and green impact company working to manufacture fossil free steel. Former group CEO of Scania, a major Swedish manufacturer of commercial vehicles; he also serves as non-executive director on the board of Hexagon, Electrolux and Creades. Well-known for his work with sustainability in the manufacturing industry he has also co-authored a book on the topic.

Mia Brunell Livfors is President and CEO of Axel Johnson, one of the largest Nordic trade and service companies. She is a non-executive board professional and has had a long career at management level at investment management company Kinnevik and MTG (a strategic operational and investment holding company in esports and gaming entertainment). Having won numerous awards in the past and last year winning Leader of The Year she is one of Sweden’s most powerful and celebrated business personalities.

Looking to the past to build for the future

Founded in 1917 aPak is a company steeped in tradition. Evelina Lindgren’s considers that in order to ensure that the company lives on for another hundred years requires a transition into a more “green company” as a business imperative. aPak has a long heritage and has always taken a long-term and holistic approach to its future, so positioning around sustainability and the business opportunities it presents has in Evelina’s experience been a quite natural and welcome development.

“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”

— Evelina Lindgren

Evelina explains that many customers have expressed interest in aPak’s work and have reached out for help to connect them with other companies within their industry to exchange best practice and knowledge. “Simply raising the topic with customers has resulted in some going on to recruit sustainability expertise or creating new roles within their organisation to get focus and momentum.” She states, “There is a lot of goodwill to be found.”

Inventing the new and running with a technological shift to accelerate change

Henrik Henriksson at H2 Green Steel recognises that there is an established understanding of the long-term implications of the threat to our planet if we don’t put sustainability efforts at the forefront. “There is a collective consciousness around the need to make a shift to survive in a future economy. However, in the short-term many companies worry that customers will leave when faced with a higher price for their product or service.” According to Henrik more companies need to be brave enough to change their entire value proposition. “Reconsider everything - what you offer, who your customers are, right through to how you charge for your product or service.” he states.

“Many of the more complex decision that will enable our sustainability agenda ahead are made in Brussels today. I think we have much to gain from politicians and business representatives taking a stronger stance together there, working side by side to solve the problems.”

— Henrik Henriksson

Clean up your own mess to make a wider impact

“Creating a company culture where your people feel safe will allow you to make the changes needed, and successfully integrate sustainability into your core business identity.”

— Mia Brunell Livfors

Mia Brunell Livfors describes how Axel Johnson have been working with sustainability for a very long time and uniquely established ways to measure progress very early on. She explains “One of the most difficult things has been establishing and deciding what to measure and how. Many get stuck on measuring what they can, but this serves little purpose if this measurement is not linked in a good way to your business’ impact. Easy to measure is not always best to measure, if it does not effect change.”

Full-length interview available in Swedish

The Panel’s Top Tips for Embedding Sustainability

Establish baseline & focus

Businesses will be at different stages of maturity regarding their position around sustainability. Some will be just starting out with little idea of how to contribute, and some will have an entirely sustainable business strategy for their overall service or products. Identify where you as a business have the biggest negative effect on the environment or your society and where you can have the most positive impact. Focus on those areas to get started.

Work should start with the basics: raising awareness within your organisation and ultimately progress all the way down through your value-chain. By providing the right tools and processes and implementing changes, progress towards sustainability will become measurable. People want to make a difference but are often uncertain about how and where to best contribute. Setting a clear direction and goals for improving sustainability will be welcomed as something to build upon, something that brings a sense of security and something to take pride in.

Widen your perspective

You can do better than simply setting a strategy then isolating its deployment to one department in a corner of your organisation. Sustainability must permeate your entire organisation. Similarly, don’t limit your sustainability work to just financial or environmental aspects. Considering the social implications of your business and make efforts beyond your organisation to involve a bigger part of your society to create a ripple effect. Sustainability is tightly linked to our societies, as a those that are healthy, and thriving will help businesses prosper.

Consider the stakeholders of your company to be that of five and not the usual three; your employees, your customers, your investors, society around you and the planet. If you manage to include all these in your decision-making, then you are more likely to be successful in building a company that embraces sustainability in a way that really contributes to an upward spiral of value.

Raise the bar and make a commitment to help drive change not just for your own company but for your entire industry. Lasting change often comes from collaborations and alliances between the likeminded and those who share a similar vision. As a startup H2 Green Steel is taking a different approach compared to many more traditional companies, and instead contributing to an open-source knowledge base to help push for a change within the manufacturing industry. Dare to engage across industries and across geographies.

Build Velocity

The time for talk is over and now there really only is the option to act. So called “green washing” will soon be a thing of the past as stakeholders rapidly become more informed and scrutinise all that we do. Without connecting sustainability to the values of your company, it can easily end up as just another project or initiative that fades away with time. Driving sustainability must be a long-term commitment and should be part of your organisational DNA to provide real value and make impact.

Times are changing and today no one will question your ambition to achieve financial and sustainability goals simultaneously. Investors and banks setting demands has accelerated the shift toward more responsible business. Money talks.

One of the biggest challenges to overcome is getting everybody onboard and all working together to help move the sustainability agenda forward. We need to change behaviours and that is one of the most difficult things to do. It takes perseverance and a long-term vision, but these efforts will snowball and create more success. Genuine intentions, clear purpose and commitment to sustainability are all important keys to successfully attracting future leadership and talent.

Governance vs government

There is a need for speed and the pace of change in sustainability is often dictated by governmental policy makers. Listing the world’s richest 100 economies, 25 are countries the rest are individual businesses. That says a lot about the impact business can have on the transformation of society. Businesses with ambitious plans and new ideas, have many considerations from creating new offerings to securing investments, but when it comes to specific permissions needing to be granted by authorities, they need to challenge the status quo. Not the principles behind the decision-making, but rather the speed of processes and creating more urgency to gain momentum.

In order to secure commercial investments, we need a long-term commitment from our governments. Ones that stretch over a longer horizon than their next election. Ideally, sustainability initiatives should be taken across the broad front of our parliamentary systems, in an approach similar to that of defense or pensions. Our governments need to take on the task of securing investments that cut across industries in order to secure infrastructure and solve energy supply systems. If that is in place, businesses will be able to commit to a powerful drive towards a more sustainable future.