Your Course of Study
You will draw on recent faculty research, new cases, and dynamic exchange with HBS faculty, peers, and guest speakers in exploring the relationship between financial and ESG performance.
The program's curriculum has been crafted to help you place sustainability efforts in the context of your business objectives, formulate and execute sustainable strategies, and carry out successful integrated reporting efforts. Topics include:
Why a Strategy That Incorporates Sustainability Is Necessary
- Assessing the increasing pressure from governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)
- Determining why employees are engaged in sustainability efforts and how engagement can drive the performance of the business
- Understanding why customers, both individual and corporate, are paying more attention to sustainability
- Exploring how analysts and investors are integrating sustainability into their recommendations and investment decisions
- Examining how the failure to address ESG issues creates reputational risk and jeopardizes the company's license to operate
The Sustainability Landscape: Challenges and Opportunities
- Creating shareholder value by addressing social and environmental problems
- Focusing on the sustainability issues most material to your business
- Uncovering revenue-producing and cost-saving opportunities
- Maintaining and building the company's brand and reputation
- Managing human capital—attracting, retaining, and motivating employees through integration of social and environmental goals
- Coping with the complexities of global markets and a global supply chain
Innovating to Build a More Sustainable Company
- Exploring diverse motivations for change—the dynamics of customer-driven, partner-driven, and investor-driven sustainability efforts
- Linking incentives to sustainability factors
- Developing a culture focused on long-term performance
- Creating a sustainable supply chain
- Improving the company's ability to compete in capital, talent, and product markets
Creating and Using Integrated Company Reporting
- Viewing reporting as a driver of institutional change
- Identifying material ESG issues for the integrated report
- Leveraging best practices in integrated reporting
The Role of Capital Markets
- Shifting the basis of investment analysis—evaluating company performance and valuing firms using comprehensive metrics that include sustainability
- Improving the communication between companies and their analysts and investors—exploring the engagement process