The Sustainability Edge
FOREWORD BY PHILIP KOTLER How to Drive Top-Line Growth with Triple-Bottom-Line Thinking Business leaders need to embrace sustainability to ensure the lasting success of their organizations. Suhas Apte and Jagdish Sheth bring their expertise from both practice and academia to illustrate how business leaders can embed sustainability in a truly holistic and transformative way. Through an examination of companies such as Walmart, AT&T, IKEA and the Tata Group, Apte and Sheth have developed a proven and actionable framework rooted in the real world success of these companies. The case studies reveal how business leaders proactively engage, energize and promote market sustainability to all of their stakeholders including customers, employees, suppliers, investors and the government. The Sustainability Edge enables companies to critically engage their stakeholders and influence them to accept sustainability as part of their core mission. SUHAS APTE is a former Sustainability Officer and senior executive for the Kimberly-Clark Corporation. He is President of Apte Consultants, LLC and a partner in the Blue Earth Network. JAGDISH N. SHETH is Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing at the Gozuieta School of Business at Emory University. He is the Founder and Chairman of Sheth Leadership Academy. “Apte and Sheth have documented how embracing and advocating sustainability is emerging as the next competitive advantage.” RATAN TATA, Former Chairman, Tata Sons “The Sustainability Edge documents how a company that embraces sustainability initiatives and advocates them to its customers, suppliers, employees, and investors generates both top-line growth and bottom-line results.” RAM CHARAN, bestselling author and advisor to CEOs and boards “Suhas Apte and Jag Sheth detail the powerful opportunities to grow your business by putting purpose at the core of your strategy and activating it through deep collaboration across your value chain. A must-read for today’s business leaders.” PAUL POLMAN, CEO, Unilever “This is a book that CEOs all over the world will find very useful as they reorient their businesses to be anchored in ecological sustainability.” JAIRAM RAMESH, Member of Parliament and former Cabinet Minister, India