Financial acumen focuses on a broad, enterprise-wide thoughtful understanding of cost drivers, market needs and global competitiveness. Firms must have clear visibility on cash, working capital, inventory, and debt. Firms must have the intellect to analyze and understand how their costs influence pricing and ultimately, competitive sustainability.
CSR is an integral of sustainability in today’s marketplace. Being to balance the needs of the business, in a capitalistic vein and the relationship with stakeholders in an altruistic manner. Consumers are keenly becoming increasingly interested in aligning their loyalty and spend with goods providers – whether products or services. There is much research that shows that corporate philanthropy, as a subset of CSR, can have a positive influence on a company’s performance. Firms must develop strategies and tactics that align their operational objectives, human resources initiatives and marketplace presence with CSR.
Critical thinking, simply put, is an approach that is well-suited for contemporary businesses who are considering and moving to assimilation of sustainability into their model. Effectively using this psychological mindset has been shown to enable greater application of clear thoughts and an objective-lead thinking approach to further assess and adopt methods to improve an organizations performance in a way that balances the benefits to all of its stakeholders.
A key element within sustainability model centers on logic. In this sense, “how will it work”, in terms of differentiation and value creation. The innovation materializes to gain competitive advantage and ultimately leads to sustainability in terms of marketplace presence, brand loyalty and sales growth to name a few. The end game is adopting or adapting for sustainability change – paying attention to information flow and application of the innovation, companies can formulate winning strategies. Albert Einstein purported, “make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”
