McKinsey’s Head on Why Corporate Sustainability Efforts Are Falling Short

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

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4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2018

⏱️ 18 minutes

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Summary

Dominic Barton, the global managing partner of McKinsey&Company, discusses the firm’s sustainability efforts. He talks about the wake-up call he got about sustainability and how he tries to convince CEOs hesitant to make it part of their business model that doing so will improve company performance. He says he sees companies thinking about the environment. “But the speed and scale of what we need to do — I don’t think it’s sufficient.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Closer Podcast brings you the inside story of deals changing the world, told by the people who know how it all went down.
0:09.0	Understand the human motivations behind groundbreaking business decisions with host Amy Keene.
0:14.6	Listen to The Closer, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish in for Sarah Green
0:38.9	Carmichael. In 2012, the number one reason that companies around the world said they were working on
0:50.8	sustainability, if they were working on it at all was to improve operational
0:56.0	efficiency, not to protect the planet, not to be in business long term, not to meet the
1:02.1	expectations of consumers or investors.
1:05.0	Basically, companies saw sustainability as chiefly one thing, a way to save money now. In just five years that's changed. The latest McKinsey
1:17.2	Global Survey on the topic finds that the top reason firms pursue a
1:21.9	sustainability agenda is because it's part of their values.
1:26.0	A sustainability agenda just goes hand in glove with performance of a company or an organization.
1:33.0	That's Dominic Barton.
1:35.0	He's the global managing partner of McKinsey,
1:38.0	and he says his consulting firm is increasingly focusing on helping clients address sustainability.
1:43.0	All right, so we are now rolling.
1:45.0	So we might as well plunge right in.
1:47.0	So, Dom, let me ask, why, why did you decide?
1:50.0	HBR editor-in-chief Audie Ignatius recently spoke with Barton and asked him where the new focus came from. What kind of shifted it for me was really actually working in Korea that was a
2:11.6	mayor, a business guy, he was known as the
2:13.7	bulldozer construction guy and he went right clear on this kind of we got to be thinking
2:19.2	about the environment we don't think about this enough we got to get business to think this way and he kind of was pushed me in a way to say are you guys doing enough to what did you think about this and I found it
2:32.2	honestly a bit of a wake-up call because it was coming from kind of a
	...

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