From my associate Janice Giannini.
Leadership teams often approach sustainability backwards. Too many organizations begin with KPIs, dashboards, reporting frameworks, and audit checklists. But numbers don’t build sustainable enterprises — people do. Sustainability is, at its core, the ability to continue: to keep strategy, operations, customer relationships, and performance moving in the right direction over time. This continuity only occurs when people operate in an environment grounded in continuous learning, truth-telling, open-mindedness, intense curiosity, respect, and thoughtful decision-making. Without these attributes, no organization can fully develop a sustainable business.
Sustainability is culture first — everything else is instrumentation.
This cultural foundation matters even more whenever there is a volatile business environment: regulatory shifts, geopolitical disruptions, cost instability, public scrutiny, rapid technological change, and unrelenting pressure for near-term results. Sustainability is not merely compliance with evolving standards. It is the organizational capacity to navigate constant change without losing direction or credibility. Employees don’t need perfect leaders; they need leaders who ground the culture in values and purpose, acknowledge the waves, and create a cohesive environment where people know, support, and depend on one another.
In this sense, sustainability is not a “program”; it is a cultural human discipline: the ability of an enterprise to adapt, learn, and effectively collaborate over time.
If you want a sustainable enterprise, fix the cultural foundations first. Everything else follows.
Targets, disclosure frameworks, materiality assessments, and circular models matter. They only work when the culture allows for open information flow, productive dissent, and the courage to challenge assumptions. Sustainable organizations make candor ordinary, continuous learning the norm, and long-term stewardship nonnegotiable. They treat failure as information rather than shame. Consider two well-known moments of “accidental” innovation at Eli Lilly: a discontinued heart-disease trial that uncovered an unexpected benefit for millions of men, and a diabetes drug halted because patients lost “too much” weight; later becoming a breakthrough in metabolic health. These successes were possible because the culture allowed scientists to remain curious, question assumptions, and reexamine the data.
When organizations neglect to ground their culture in purpose, values, learning-oriented listening, respect, understanding diverse viewpoints, and speaking up, they build sustainability on sand.
The real test of culture is not in calm periods but in moments of pressure.
A culture is only a culture if you can feel it walking the halls during the most stressful times. When fear shows up, be it fear of missing numbers, fear of job loss, or fear of disappointing leadership, that is when the organization reveals its enduring operating system.
Action under fire is the genuine culture of the business.
Leadership’s job is to model the mindset the enterprise needs: integrity, openness, courage, and stewardship rather than short-term opportunism. Leaders who demonstrate these traits — consistently and visibly — create the conditions where sustainability becomes a shared pursuit rather than a compliance exercise.
The gold standard is when this shared pursuit is visible everywhere: in decisions, behaviors, conversations, trade-off debates, and the way people treat one another. Sustainability becomes not something the company does, but something the company is.
Of course, some realities can derail even well-intended sustainability efforts. Three gaps, in particular, signal when the foundation is at risk:
The execution gap occurs when the organization knows what to do but lacks alignment across talent, incentives, decision rights, and timelines. That gap exposes process weaknesses and raises legitimate questions about whether the business can actually deliver on its commitments.
The cultural risk gap occurs when fear of conflict, over-confidence, silence, outdated assumptions, or loss-avoidance dominate behavior. This gap undermines values, erodes integrity, and heightens both reputational and operational risk.
The trade-off navigation gap occurs when leaders fail to make and defend difficult decisions: short-term margin vs. long-term resilience, supplier cost vs. supplier capability, speed vs. quality, price vs. circularity. Sustainable organizations name the trade-offs, own the consequences, and avoid sugarcoating the cost.
Evaluating sustainability through the lenses of clarity of purpose, disciplined execution, and cultural/behavioral alignment shifts sustainability from a reporting requirement to a strategic and cultural capability built on a solid foundation. Sustainability is not an initiative. It is the enterprise’s way of existing.
In volatile times, before launching new goals or frameworks, it is worth asking a few foundational questions:
1. Do we have a culture rooted in purpose and values — especially under duress?
2. Are our leaders capable of balancing near-term pressure with long-term responsibility?
3. What are the two or three sustainability priorities most critical to our long-term viability?
4. What capabilities, skills, and partnerships do we need to make meaningful progress?
Organizations that can answer these questions honestly – and build the cultural foundations required – will be the ones whose sustainability efforts survive contact with reality.