Sustainable Management implies a New way of Doing Business

Ricardo Young , president of Brazil’s Ethos Institute that focuses on initiating companies into a culture of corporate social responsibility (CSR), tells Nandita Sengupta that new ways of doing business must be explored to meet the challenge of climate change:

Your take is CSR is not a part of business, but its core. How?

The issue is what climate change means in terms of sustainable management, which can’t be developed without CSR. Sustainable management implies a systemic understanding of your business, from your suppliers to how you tackle the waste. It’s neither charity nor philanthropy. It’s a new way of doing business.

Brazil seems to have no problems when compared to the challenges India faces. India has to balance development with social inclusion. To do this in a sustainable way will require the most advanced technology and innovation ever. It requires a completely new understanding of what development means. India should fork out much more in infrastructure so that you can retain people in their villages and minimise migration to cities. In a sustainable world, there is no solution to big cities.

We redefine development?

Sure. Cities are old-fashioned. New Delhi, Mumbai, Sao Paulo… they are already impossible. Quality of life is more important than the traditional concept of being rich or having lot of things to consume. India knows, and Gandhi’s words are now more contemporary than ever before, quality of life is not equal to number of things you can consume. You must invest in things that provide at least potential quality of life: infrastructure for sanitation, health and education.

This is at least what we’re doing in Brazil, where 98 per cent population lives in 2.5 per cent of territory. What happens to the rest of the land? Take out the Amazon and we still have 60 per cent land on machine-intensive agribusiness. Vast parts of land, farms the size of Belgium have one or two owners. That’s ridiculous. We are discussing how we can rethink agribusiness to promote inclusion and retain people in their villages providing them with education, internet, healthcare, sanitation. There’s no point providing goods without infrastructure.

How does business values alter in a sustainable world?

The major challenge business faces is to develop the technology needed to compete in a sustainable market. Building trust in the whole value chain and with customers is the second big challenge. Transparency and accountability is essential. The consumer will be increasingly aware of what companies are doing. We live in a transparent world where everything is online. Any poor experience will be on Twitter within minutes. And third, businesses have to understand the meaning of collaboration. Business, government and civil society need to collaborate. These new values are not easy to understand because now we work in vertical value chains but we’ll have to move towards more networked systems, an ecosystem of business.

Source: The Times of India