Business at its Best: Driving Sustainable Value Creation

Accenture has long believed that the interests of business—growth, increased profits and achieving high performance—and addressing fundamental societal needs are converging.

This report shows how leading CEOs are increasingly taking the same view. Accenture and the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy outline the issues and propose five key imperatives for implementing a sustainable value creation strategy.

Download the Executive Summary

“What does a business look like at its best?” That’s the question this report by Accenture and the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP) sets out to examine.

Five imperatives are presented, along with company case studies, and practical insights that businesses can use to implement the concept of Sustainable Value Creation. Insights were gathered based on CEO interviews and polling—as well as analysis and experience from Accenture and CECP.

The report makes the case that a business at its best has overcome traditional strategic and operational divisions between advancing the performance of the enterprise and promoting the well-being of citizens and communities. Such a company sees fundamental societal issues not merely as something to be addressed through charity alone but, instead, as seeds of innovation and growth. Sustainable Value Creation strategies address fundamental societal issues by identifying new, scalable sources of competitive advantage that generate measurable profit and community benefit.

This view goes beyond theory. Leading companies are already pursuing groundbreaking initiatives at the convergence of core strategy and societal needs—designing products, services, and practices that deliver both commercial and community benefits.

Business at its Best is organized around five key imperatives for planning, managing and scaling a strategy for sustainable value creation. These imperatives are:

• Recognize the opportunity. By rigorously analyzing the root causes of existing core business challenges, companies often uncover underlying societal problems that, if addressed, may lead to new sources of competitive advantage.
  
  
• Recalibrate your radar. Once the relevant societal issues have been broadly identified, leading companies often pinpoint the optimal role that the company can play in helping to address those issues. Organizations must invest in a deeper level of understanding of their future growth path as it relates to community needs.
  
  
• Research, develop, repeat. A sustainable value creation strategy requires executives to adopt a management philosophy that is akin to how an R&D department runs: a hands-on approach to conducting the local market research needed to understand societal needs and to accommodating a more iterative learning and development cycle.
  
  
• Rewire the organization. As companies realize initial successes with sustainable value creation, they should then look to scale programs across the business. Doing so requires important organizational changes: embedding incentive programs, gov¬ernance structures, and measurement practices across the company in sup¬port of the strategy. 
  
  
• Reinforce the value. This final imperative focuses on the distinctive executive leadership capabilities required to drive success with sustainable value creation.

Accenture has pioneered the concept of the convergence between business interests and development in the 21st century.

Contact us to explore further how your organization can align its drive to achieve high performance with its desire to be a good corporate citizen.