WHAT COULD GO RIGHT?

WE CAN DESIGN A BETTER FUTURE FOR EARTH AND HUMANITY IF WE PUT IN THE WORK, SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGIST JUSTIN BEAN SAYS

- DAMIEN MARTIN 

You can't rightly call Justin Bean a pessimist about the way businesses are addressing sustainability and their role in the climate future. But he's no Pollyanna, either. He knows there are bad actors and greenwashers out there, but he also believes their strategies won't bring them success. Rather, they'll be the new Kodaks and Blockbusters, as he puts it, cast aside in the business landscape because they failed to adapt to changing times. In his book "What Could Go Right: Designing Our Ideal Future to Emerge from Continual Crises to a Thriving World," Bean tries to provide a vision of success that we might use to reverse-engineer the steps required to create a brighter tomorrow.

"That gives us something to build a roadmap toward and gives us work to do to build it," he told BOSS. "That's just a much more effective path to build the future that we want. That's what we need to do in this decade and this century."

SUSTAINABILITY = SUCCESS

A major harbinger of this ideal future that Bean sees is that even in the short and medium terms, sustainable products and services are growing faster than traditional markets and that companies that incorporate social and environmental impact into their core business outperform their competitors. They have higher revenues, higher margins, lower cost of capital and they attract and retain talent more easily.

"Even if you're thinking about it strictly from a growth and performance standpoint, there are plenty of reasons to go into sustainable products, services, and solution offerings."

Venture capital investments in sustainable technology were down 3% last year, which might seem like a bad thing until you consider that overall VC investing was down 35%. Because of the growth potential, sustainable investing serves as a great hedge in times of recession or fears of one. Even as overall car sales were down 8% last year, EV sales went up 68%.