The Future of Value: How Sustainability Creates Value Through Competitive Differentiation - Hardcover

Lowitt, Eric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1118074521 ISBN 13: 9781118074527

Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 2011

Synopsis

What if you were able to help your company grow faster and become more profitable than its rivals? Would you benefit as a result? Of course you would. What if your approach required little cash, caused nominal disruption, and was easily understandable by all your colleagues? What reason would you have for not helping your company outperform the competition?

Enhance business performance by using sustainability for competitive advantage
The Future of Value reveals what it takes for companies to grow and outperform the competition in today′s growth–constrained, sustainability conscious world.
The author, Eric Lowitt, shows leaders and students alike how to use sustainability as a powerful, pragmatic lens to enhance business performance. The Future of Value explores how to craft and oversee a portfolio of effective tools, develop competitive strategies, and adjust value chain activities, talent management practices, and corporate policies to help organizations execute powerful sustainability strategies.

Lowitt provides a systematic, yet instantly familiar, model all companies can use to connect sustainability with their growth and competitive strategies. In this way, the author shows leaders how to shape, color, and own The Future of Value.

The Future of Value draws useful and accessible conclusions from a rich, diverse set of corporate interviewees. A core part of his research was the selection and interrogation of more than 25 Global Fortune 500 companies' sustainability, strategy, and finance leads. In total, Eric interviewed over 100 senior executives, worldwide, to create The Future of Value.

Eric Lowitt, is a 15-year veteran of sustainability and strategy management consulting, having worked with clients in the US, Japan, Australia, and Europe. He has an MBA in Strategic Management from The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and writes a regular column for the Harvard Business Review, the Guardian, and the Christian Science Monitor.

About this title

About the Author

Eric Lowitt is a strategy and sustainability consultant and speaker with fifteen years of management consulting and strategy experience in companies such as Accenture, Deloitte Consulting, and Fidelity Investments. He is author of numerous articles about sustainability, strategy, and value creation and has been published in mainstream and practition–er journals, including Forbes, Reuters, and Business Strategy Review. He writes a regular column for both GreenBiz and Sustainable Life Media and blogs at his website.

From the Back Cover

If organizations are to stay two steps ahead of their competition, they must embrace sustainability as a new and dynamic means of creating value today and becoming more agile than their competitors tomorrow.

The Future of Value reveals what it takes for companies to thrive and outperform the competition in today's growth-constrained, sustainability-conscious world. Written by Eric Lowitt (a renowned business strategy and sustainability expert) this groundbreaking book shows how sustainability can be used as a powerful, pragmatic lens to enhance business performance. Lowitt also explains what it means for a company to be a Sustainable Market Leader and explores best practices for crafting and overseeing a portfolio of effective tools, developing competitive strategies, and adjusting value chain activities, talent management practices, and corporate policies to help organizations execute powerful sustainability strategies.

Based on solid research, the book is designed to be practical and is filled with proven ideas that can be used to strengthen a company's strategy and performance through the integration of sustainability-oriented tasks and actions. The author also includes much-needed information for engaging stakeholders in day-to-day sustainability management as a means to shape and fuel efforts to continuously renew their sustainability strategies

Lowitt outlines a systematic, yet instantly familiar, model any company can adopt to connect sustainability with their growth and competitive strategies. In this way, the author shows leaders how to shape, color, and own The Future of Value.

From the Inside Flap

Praise for the future of value

"Creating value in a crowded marketplace is always difficult; doing it in a sustainable fashion is downright painful.?The Future of Value?provides insightful analysis of how successful businesses have been able to make sustainability part of their corporate ethos and more importantly how they have translated this ethos into profits and value for all stakeholders. A worthwhile read." —Anup Jacob, founding partner, Virgin Green Fund

"The Future of Value is an invaluable resource to help companies pivot forward by embracing sustainable practices that will create distinct competitive advantage and long-term stakeholder value." —John Replogle, CEO, Seventh Generation

"Think sustainability is about altruism and good citizenship? Think again. Eric Lowitt demonstrates that it's about business value and long-term corporate survival. Helping people and the planet is a great fringe benefit." —Thomas H. Davenport, President's Distinguished Professor of IT and Management, Babson College

"I have always been a believer in 'whatever it takes' to get the business sector and consumers on the road to sustainability. The Future of Value provides strategic frameworks and concrete actions that tie sustainability to competitive differentiation and value creation. And if there is anything that corporate executives listen to, it's how to win in the marketplace! Kudos Eric!"—Bonnie Nixon, executive director, Sustainability Consortium

"An excellent look at the role sustainability can and does play in creating successful business strategy today. Filled with compelling examples and rich insights from real strategists, this book is sure to inform even the most active reader of sustainability best practices. It provides a clear how-to guide that can enable any company to make sustainability a key part of a winning strategy. This book is sure to prove valuable." — Paul Nunes, executive director of research, Accenture Institute for High Performance, and coauthor, Jumping the S-Curve

Edition details

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1118074521
• ISBN 13: 9781118074527
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272