Sustainability and Core Values in Business

Business sustainability is about realizing the pathway to preserving and protecting profits, people, and the planet. It is expressed through a company’s focus on the triple bottom line, also defined as the management of financial, social and environmental risks, duties and opportunities.

Firms that engage in sustainable practices typically have some form of corporate social responsibility (CSR) program or policy in place that allows them to support and promote initiatives that are considered to be important either to the communities in which the firm operates or else good for the overall environment as a whole. Sustainable practices that businesses focus on can include anything from “going green,” reducing one’s environmental footprint, protecting water supplies, promoting scholarships in communities where economic disadvantages are high, and so on.

Engaging in sustainable practice is the essence of maintaining a commitment to culture and to one’s core values. This paper will define the term core values and show how Tesla is one company engaged in using its core values to guide its sustainability policy. Core values can be defined as the ideals and principles that are most important and meaningful to a company: they represent and/or serve as the foundation upon which the company’s mission is erected.

These principles serve to guide the firm’s conduct, vision, outlook and strategy. They are like the ladder leading upwards to good things, positive returns for the firm and for all stakeholders, whom RILA (2017) notes are everyone “from customers to investors to nonprofits and government [and] can be sustainability program’s greatest ally” (p. 23).

Stakeholders help in their own way to shape the principles of the firm by giving important feedback, expressing their opinions, and letting the company know what it feels is most important to them—just as conservative groups did when they “boycotted Patagonia due to its support for Planned Parenthood” (Reinhardt, Casadesus-Masanell & Kim, 2010, p. 6).

In turn, the firm uses this feedback to identify the most important principles—and these are the core values: they act as the north star, pointing the right way ahead so that leaders of the organization know how to act, how to steer, how to guide the organization at all times.

If a policy or practice violates one of these principles, it goes against the ethos and culture of the firm and should be abandoned immediately—because to engage in it is like to invite a deadly disease into one’s body: it might seem like a good idea at the time for whatever reason, but sooner or later it will kill off the body.

One’s core values are there to help and protect the company just as the company’s commitment to sustainability is there to protect the firm’s profits, people, and planet. Values reinforce sustainable policies and vice versa. The core values that drive sustainability serve as the framework for organizations needed to positively impact the “social, environmental and economic environment in which” the firm operates (Castka, Bamber, Sharp, 2005, p. vii). For many companies, core values are what bring the vision into focus.

One company especially that is led by its core values is Tesla, which is focused on bringing green energy to the automotive industry with its electric cars. Tesla’s focus on moving the nation off of its gas and oil energy and into the battery-powered age is based on its core value of protecting the environment from fossil fuel burning, which can lead to climate change. Tesla does this in a number of ways: 1) it.