Date: 2024-05-15 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00005959
PROMOTING TBL
REACHING OUT TO DUPONT
Follow up with James Weigand on 'The triple bottom line approach to measuring business success' after meeting Chad Halliday
REACHING OUT TO DUPONT
Follow up with James Weigand on 'The triple bottom line approach to measuring business success' after meeting Chad Halliday
Original article:
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
Peter Burgess
James Weigand ... President-Dupont Sustainable Solutions at DuPont
At DuPont, we believe sustainability and business objectives must be interconnected and sustainability strategy must be translated into business value.
That is just one of the many topics we discussed a couple of weeks ago at the DuPont Sustainable Solutions Safety and Sustainability Forum in Dubai. The annual forum was a chance for business leaders to emphasize a renewed commitment to promoting safety and sustainability, because both of these efforts have great potential to increase our competitive advantage and positively impact the bottom line.
As business leaders, we are struggling against the current unpredictability in the global market, caught between the need to reduce costs while also ensuring safety and sustainability in the workplace. It is during times like these that we can be tempted to underestimate the value of safety and sustainability. But, right now is the most important time to focus on safety and sustainability, as it should be part of everything we do if we want to ensure our business success.
Meantime, the pursuit of sustainable growth has become more complex, with increasing pressure to measure environmental and social performance along with traditional financial results. This is the more comprehensive triple bottom line approach to measuring business success. That means protecting and developing people, protecting the environment and maximizing profitability. As you may know, DuPont is more than 200 years old. We have a very long and rich history of discoveries and innovation that have helped our company grow and improve the lives around the world. It has also led to and shaped our purpose. We are a science company, and our purpose is to work collaboratively to find sustainable, innovative, market-driven solutions to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges, making lives better, safer, and healthier for people everywhere.
By market-driven, we mean that we are committed to addressing real needs with our science and other resources. Our early offerings were not always a response to market needs; rather, we developed a product and looked for an application. That is not the case today. Our purpose commits us to sustainable growth, which means creating value for our shareholders, as well as for society at large while we reduce our environmental footprint. It’s a dual commitment—to our stakeholders and to the environment we live in.
At DuPont, we know sustainable growth can best be achieved through an integrated approach that aligns operations performance and culture with management systems that link collaboration, innovation and technology.
There are four key requirements to achieving sustainable growth. They are: leadership, people, innovation and collaboration
In the coming days I will share more with the LinkedIn DSS group on those four requirements. I encourage all of you to participate.
Share your ideas, your experiences and even any disagreements you may have. The more we talk about sustainability as leaders, the faster we will reach our destination of sustainable business.
Comments Burcu Türkeş, Johan Potgieter and 2 others like this 2 comments
Sidney Clouston
CEO at Clouston Energy Research, LLC and Owner, Clouston Energy Research, LLC
If DuPont has sustainable solutions interest in Biochemical products then we ought to talk. I have a group here in Linked In also called Biomass, Bioenergy and Biofuels. A collaboration is possible and it would make our funding process flow better in the pipeline that exists now.
One possible result would be products made in the Middle East from resource chemicals grown in Nigeria and in the region. We are able to facilitate that and improve the economy with global trade. Perhaps we should discuss Pirate issue and criminal behavior as risk, but it would help to have a stable and good economic situation.
Monica Morrow ... Global eMarketing Leader at DuPont Sustainable Solutions
Sidney, thank you so much for reaching out, and for your continued participation in the DSS group! The best way for you to get in touch about working with the DuPont team is to submit your information to the DSS Knowledge Hub: http://bit.ly/YaAuVn. Notice the 'Connect With DSS' form on the right side. Be sure to add your specific request details to the 'other relevant information' section. Thanks again!
Peter Burgess commented on The triple bottom line approach to measuring business success
The idea of the Triplel Bottom Line is not new, but only a few companies are making it a meaningful part of their decision making process.
I met Chad Holliday some years ago when he was CEO of DuPont and was promoting his 2002 book Walking the Talk, The Business Case for Sustainable Development. He was kind enough to introduce me to a department head in DuPont to facilitate an initiative that I was working on. We could not make it fly, because, while the CEO was committed to the sustainability agenda, the internal performance metrics were still focused on money profit performance. My product was ethical and sustainable, but not the cheapest. I had been an corporate CFO myself, and very well understood the decision process. Now, about a decade later I still see the disconnect in most corporate organizations between what the top leadership talks about and what everyone else in the organization is incentivized to do. At some point this has to change.
I am working on something I call Multi Dimension Impact Accounting (MDIA) that has an architecture to make the accounting for impact on people and planet as rigorous as the accounting for money profit, not only inside the business organization but more broadly in society. Among other things this architecture ends the convenient ability of regular money profit accounting and economic analysis to ignore externalities, and brings everything about the product life cycle into account at every step of the product life. While this is more complicated than existing money profit accounting, the tools to handle this are available. We did pretty sophisticated cost accounting 50 years ago before accounting was computerized. We should be able to do this level of analysis on top of modern computer technology without batting an eyelid!
What is possible is very exciting ... and in my view (an accounting perspective) the right metrics will change everything.
Peter Burgess - TrueValueMetrics
Multi Dimension Impact Accounting less…