On Corporate Sustainability How does a corporate culture of sustainability come to exist? What are the ways to build one and what can we learn from industry leaders? Writers: Julian Walker-Palin
In the mid-1990s, when sustainability was just emerging into corporate parlance, apart from a few ‘hero’ companies such as Patagonia, there was no corporate culture of sustainability. Instead, there was a small but passionate band of mostly senior managers or directors often supported by a future thinking CEO. As one of this band myself within Walmart, I know from experience that it’s a tough call being tasked to go around the business and say to people who have been doing their jobs a certain way for years that they are doing it all wrong! Fast forward to 2015 and every University in the UK runs multiple sustain-
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ability courses, especially at MSc level, corporations love to include pages and pages in their Corporate Sustainability Responsibility (CSR) reports or websites espousing their activities and progress, and how every worker is now challenged to be sustainable in their day to day jobs. Such an amazing amount of progress in 10 years! Having left Walmart in 2014 to set up my own consultancy, ETANTE, and now working across retail and also major FastMoving Consumer Goods (FMCG) companies and government, this picture is true across all these sectors.