Sustainability Programs
A Design Guide to Achieving Financial, Social, and Environmental Performance
1. Edition March 2025
288 Pages, Hardcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
Go-to guidance for designing, implementing, and managing effective sustainability programs and their management systems
Moving past vague concepts, buzzword overloads, superficial efforts, and flavor-of-the-month misdirections, Sustainability Programs presents a pragmatic, step-by-step approach to creating and managing adaptable, organization-wide sustainability programs to achieve People, Planet, and Profit (3P) objectives with least cost, effort, and risk. Key steps covered in this book include reaching a programmatic "Go" decision, developing sustainability policies, designing an organizational framework, defining the most pressing sustainability needs, and cascading 3P goals, tactics, targets, and initiatives into business units, functions, and departments to create new capabilities and improve performance.
By following the principles and practices in this book, any organization can better achieve sustainability's full promise of social responsibility, environmental stewardship, and financial performance. Written by authors with a wealth of practitioner experience in the field, Sustainability Programs explores topics including:
* Creating social, environmental, and financial strategies, tactics, targets, and initiatives that create new capabilities and resolve 3P performance issues
* Avoiding ad hoc projects that fail to address critical sustainability issues, wasting valuable resources and squandering competitive advantages
* Overcoming technical professionals' lack of business management experience and helping management professionals understand sustainability's benefits and intricacies
* Understanding sustainability through the management lenses of risk reduction, improved efficiencies through eradication of wastes, increased revenues via innovation, and enhanced competitive advantages fueled by greenwash-free transparency.
* Responding to the demanding data capture, analysis, and reporting challenges of environmental, social, and governance (ESG).
Acknowledging that one size does not fit all, this book delivers individual concepts and methods adaptable across any organization's value chains. It is an essential read for leaders and practitioners working within private and public enterprises of all types and sizes, especially those with 2,000 to 5,000 employees.
--Salem Afeworki, MSc, Municipal Energy and Sustainability Services Division Manager, Global 40 Under 40 and Top 100 Environment + Energy Leader
"This book delivers what many others in this topic area do not - practical, specific, and actionable information on how to effectively implement sustainability management programs for both positive environmental and economic impacts.... Most importantly and impressively, the book provides detailed steps and practical insights for effective program implementation, key operational tools, and organizational examples that can benefit those with extensive sustainability experience in organizations in either the private or public sector."
--John Milliman, PhD, Professor Emeritus, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs College of Business
"As a retired senior executive and corporate officer with responsibility for all aspects of EHS performance and EHS risk management in Fortune 500, multi-national corporations, I found Sustainability Programs: A Design Guide for Achieving Financial, Social, and Environmental Performance to be strategically rigorous and operationally practical. I would recommend Sustainability Programs as a reference and guideline to executives and managers responsible for EHS and Sustainability programs and performance, enhancing operational resilience, and contributing to business growth, as well as students interested in careers in EHS and Sustainability. The book offers a clear blueprint for embedding sustainability into enterprise strategy, goal setting, planning and execution, and performance metrics. The authors present a disciplined, step-by-step approach that directly links sustainability initiatives to risk mitigation, cost efficiency, revenue growth, and competitive advantage. The framework is grounded in core business processes and speaks the language of leaders who must translate intentions into measurable results."
--Stephen Evanoff, PE, BCEE, CSP, Vice President, EHS, Danaher Corporation (Retired)
John Grosskopf has helped hundreds of public and private organizations worldwide dramatically improve their environmental, health, and safety (EHS), security, and sustainability performance while simultaneously reducing their costs, risks, and impacts. He was a principal architect of General Dynamics' pioneering EMS and its Zero-Discharge program. He is a management systems innovator that has advanced systematic and systemic EHS and sustainability management practices to help organizations better address climate change threats, ESG practices, and marketplace competitiveness.