What You Can Expect
Enhancing Your Company's Performance
Today, most companies treat financial and ESG performance as separate domains. However, facing increasing pressure—and in some countries, government mandates—to improve both performance and transparency on ESG issues, executives must develop a strategy that creates value for both shareholders and society, while finding ways to align financial reporting and ESG reporting.
Offering insights from groundbreaking research, HBS faculty will lead you in an exploration of companies on the leading edge of ESG practices. In this HBS Executive Education program, you will examine the approaches used by companies in diverse industries to:
- Design sustainable strategies tailored to the business
- Identify the key trade-offs that currently exist between financial and nonfinancial performance
- Innovate in ways that generate both financial and ESG benefits
- Measure and report on these efforts to investors and other stakeholders
Taking Your Skills to the Next Level
By developing a more analytical approach to the relationships among the various dimensions of company performance, you will improve your ability to design ESG strategies and communicate the concrete value of ESG initiatives. Specifically, you will be better able to:
- Assess the profile of your business and build sustainability into your strategies
- Identify the ESG factors most essential to your company's success
- Demonstrate in concrete terms how ESG efforts create value for shareholders
- Establish an integrated reporting approach and maximize the value of those reporting efforts
- Help your company gain competitive advantage in capital markets, talent markets, and product and service markets by integrating ESG issues into business strategy
At the same time, the program will help you build a network of relationships with executives who have similar interests—a valuable resource in a domain where best practices are still emerging.
"Innovating for Sustainability brought together executives from multinational corporations and the financial and analyst communities, providing a unique opportunity to learn how others view the role of corporations in society. For me, it clarified how innovative and responsible ways of doing business can actually enhance business sustainability while serving the public good. This has helped to make me more thoughtful in day-to-day decision making. I was also pleased to learn that financial analysts are thinking along those same lines—not just about quarterly financial numbers—as they recommend investments."
Dr. Sujit Ghosh [Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer], Holcim Pte. Ltd., Singapore