How to Tell If Your Business Model Is Truly Sustainable
Use a nine-point robustness and resilience framework to determine if your business model can provide ongoing competitive advantage.
The pandemic will one day be behind us, but that doesn’t mean that businesses will be able to return to business as usual. They’ll have to pivot quickly and refocus their attention to solve critical challenges in the years ahead.
The rapid acceleration of new ways of working and technology—combined with widespread social anxiety and geopolitical uncertainty—signifies that the world has changed forever. The task for leaders is to navigate the complexities of this current environment while preparing for whatever lies ahead. By focusing on three critical areas—climate and sustainability, digital transformation, and resilience—companies can develop competitive advantage that will allow them to thrive now and in the future. The speed of change taking place today means that they must act quickly—and boldly—to keep up. BCG has the experience and insights to help.
Businesses are at a defining moment to act on sustainability. Those that act decisively have the opportunity to create sustainable competitive advantage for the long term. Thanks to the scale and speed at which they operate, businesses are also uniquely positioned to address climate change and many of the other serious challenges facing our world. We have the expertise to help companies step up their commitments, reduce their emissions, and partner across the public, private, and social sectors to generate sustainable impact.
Use a nine-point robustness and resilience framework to determine if your business model can provide ongoing competitive advantage.
Sustainable companies need sustainability strategies. The front-runners are fundamentally reimagining their businesses to turn sustainability into a core business advantage.
Even companies with modest direct-emissions footprints can make a global impact on decarbonization by implementing nine initiatives in their supply chains.
Environmental degradation is everyone’s problem. Businesses have a responsibility to take action—and will benefit from doing so.
The pandemic has put the power of digital on full display, catapulting the world of work five to ten years into the future. Even as employees start to return to their offices, it’s clear that workplaces won’t ever return to normal. Leading in the new reality requires robust digital capabilities and—in many cases—a comprehensive transformation that can support these new ways of working.
In this series—which began with the original 2014 Decoding report—BCG and The Network document the ongoing evolution of work and highlight how workplaces will have to change in the future.
We explore why some sectors and segments have higher success rates than others.
To achieve significant financial benefits from their machines, companies will have to look beyond automation—and focus instead on learning and organizational transformation.
Why do digital natives grow into the world’s most valuable companies seemingly overnight while the world’s largest legacy companies achieve only incremental digital progress?
BCG research suggests that the gap between winners and losers increases during a crisis—and that performance in times of turmoil has far-reaching consequences. But resilience isn’t just about weathering the storm. It’s about being ready for whatever comes next, finding ways to minimize disruption and adapt quickly to change. To win in the new reality, businesses will have to reflect on what they learned during the pandemic and integrate those lessons into their operating models and ways of working.
To take DEI to the next level, look beyond broad categories of race, gender, and sexual orientation to discover what truly shapes employees’ experiences at work.
Competing home responsibilities, barriers to inclusion, and social isolation are everyone’s problem. It’s time for businesses to fight back.
Leaders now need to refocus on the long term and attend to five key imperatives.
The coronavirus crisis brought renewed attention to the value of resilience. Our research shows that resilience has an outsized impact on performance, and companies can take certain steps to put it into practice.
