Start by helping your CEO to be able to articulate the business case. Help them understand (and when possible quantify) the risks of inaction and the potential return on investments in sustainability. Provide them with compelling stories that signal the potential to win new business, reduce risks, or develop innovative new products or services. Consider the following:
"Every project we do it's like 'guys you need to track the economic benefit on it.' I did that because previous iterations never got off the ground because no one could ever prove it. I was very adamant at the beginning, saying 'I can't guarantee you we're going to save money, but I know that other companies have saved money, so it's a little bit of a leap of faith here. Let's just see what happens.' Logic would dictate that if you're doing things more efficiently or innovatively, there should be some economic benefit. I've always been very conscious of it because I've always wanted to be able to show the successes. Maybe for some projects we might lose a little bit of money, or it might be a little bit more expensive, but if you look at the thing overall, these are the amounts of savings that we generated.
I remember the first year of the program I said, 'Give me a target of $1 million,' which was my operating budget, 'I just want to be able to show that if I'm not costing you any money, and I'm at least covering my own costs, then let me live because employees love this, and customers like it, and we're getting lots of press. As long as we're not costing you money, at least give it some runway.' So my target was a million, and we saved $23 million alone on one project.
Every time you implement a project you track the economic benefit of it right from the get-go. So you take the baseline assumption, and then you say this is the embedded value had you continued in the go forward mode, and we've implemented this change and as a result here's the difference.
I know the supply chain group, for example, you have a couple of individuals who are the sustainability reps and I know one in particular, every time we talk about money she bristles and says 'This is not about saving money.' Okay, maybe we're not doing this purposefully to save money, but there is an economic benefit, and we can't ignore that. Just because we're tracking it and celebrating the fact that there's also an economic benefit to it, there's nothing to bristle at. It doesn't diminish what we're trying to do here... we're a very low margin business, so we don't have a big margin for errors here."
(VP Sustainability)