Vice president and co-lead of Capgemini Invent’s Management Lab, Elisa Farri and Paolo Cervini, and content director Gabriele Rosani , in their work as consultants have witnessed the development and implementation of dozens of companies’ sustainability programs across different sectors. They have observed that after positive beginnings, most sustainability programs get stuck and are unable to scale.
Without scale, long-term goals are simply not attainable — or are delayed for years, which reduces credibility and increases external pressure from customers and other stakeholders.
The real blockers to sustainability are hidden inside companies and are often the result of what was considered sound management practice in the 20th century. These are the “hidden enemies” of sustainability: the prevailing organizational winds that tend to blow in the direction of routine and an incremental approach rather than sustaining a more radical and transformative journey.
In their Harvard Business Review article titled How Sustainability Efforts Fall Apart, the authors present the four main categories of hidden enemies — and how to fight them to achieve sustainability at scale.
To complement this article and to hear more about how sustainability in IT can help businesses reduce their carbon footprint, hear the episode of Future Sight where host Liz Lugnier talks to Capgemini colleagues Maxime Wyka, Management Consultant and part of the Sustainable IT Team; Laurence Jumeaux, Vice-President at Future of Technology, and Caroline Vateau, Sustainable IT Director, discuss the topic of sustainable information technology and what businesses can do to tackle this power-hungry issue!
