Sustainability, or the Pig Lipstick

I had the pleasure to assist last week to the Doing Good, Doing Well conference in Barcelona, hosted by the IESE Business School. It is an admirable well executed conference which had several very high ranking speakers. The conference managed to fulfill the objective of devoting the collective efforts of hundreds of (potential) business professionals towards the topic of sustainability.

Wait, if it's not "biological", then what is it!?

Listening to that word so many times created a rift in my mind between the concept - abstract and defined in several ways as it might be- with the actual practice of business sustainability. While some companies have embraced the idea throughout the supply chain, other firms have just decided to pay lip service to it.

This begs the question, how does sustainability even WORK in companies, and if it doesn't, can businesses still benefit from the word?
By no means am I assuming that I'm a sustainability specialist. If I was, I would have been on the opposite side of the conference floor, so bear with me if some things written here stop making sense.
Making a business sustainable entails WAY much more than "green" issues. It is not about mitigation of impacts, consuming less resources, or community engagement. Those aspects are relevant, but there is a meta-element in all this: making business adaptable and able to survive under political, economic, social, and environmental duress. For every firm, it will involve changing the assumptions under which its entire supply chain, both production related and functions, integrate to survive under an environment that not only is competing for market, but also for scarce and limited resources.
This requires dispelling some assumptions that plague the discourse on sustainability. First, is that such an objective is a marketing ploy; second, is the idea that it necessarily brings lower profits.
It is possible to achieve very creative marketing spins throughout sustainability, but that shouldn’t be the primary reason to engage (or to pretend to do so) in sustainability practices. As the ideas of ethical businesses and green activities become more widespread, not openly burning away resources and behaving like proper human beings has lowered the impact on consumers; soon it will be a threshold competency, rather than an element that brings differentiation. If a firm depends on its green marketing to charge a premium, it will soon see its profits dropping fast.
The second idea of sustainability being an enemy with profit maximization is linked to the last concept of the marketing strategy; it will be necessary to have profits AT ALL to be able to convey a message on doing good with business, or perhaps just not being evil, paraphrasing Google’s informal motto. Most important, though, it should be kept in mind that sustainability might indeed mean forfeiting profit maximization in the short run, limiting the firm towards “simple” profit seeking, but a correct process of adaptation of the entire supply chain could actually maximize profits in the long run.

"Oink" -Random Business

The real risk for the business community as a whole is that sustainability, ethics and CSR in general become a “pig lipstick”, as The Guardian’s Jo Confino brilliantly called it. We run into the danger of not only turning those ideas into buzzwords –and certainly there are grounds to claim they are already just that- but actively creating revulsion in the public. If a critical mass of firms claim to be green, ethical and sustainable, and the private sector as a whole fails to deliver on those assertions, societal pressures will increase and render the already complex business environment even more difficult
Sustainability is then a matter of survival: in the short term, surviving to the green marketing wave; in the long run, getting more of what we have, without running out of resources, and furthermore, it has a role on the survival of the business environment.
Sustainability is, therefore in a very important moment of development. Let’s not use our pearly makeup upon swine.