executive summary

Many of today's business leaders are aware of the sustainability debate and believe there's "something in it". Thus the challenges of "operationalizing" sustainability in a way that builds business value and benefits society are already a major preoccupation for executives in today's more progressive corporations, and will have to be confronted by many others.

The rise of global warming/climate change as a key issue for international diplomacy and business and the controversy surrounding whole new industry sectors like biotechnology/genetic engineering mean that the level of business awareness about sustainability will continue to grow. The safety fears of billions of people - including consumers and investors - will ensure that business takes notice.

So what is holding back corporate action on sustainability? Our experience shows that the key blockages are not so much lack of motivation, but rather confusion over "what to do", "how to do it" and "where the value is". Sustainability as it has been served up to the corporate world by many of its most vocal advocates can be highly confusing for those who run companies. It also can be too narrowly focused on environmental issues, critical as they are, losing track of both the people agenda (social) and business reality (financial and economic).

These failings are restricting the uptake of sustainability as an organizing framework for business in the 21st Century. This discussion paper presents Ecos Corporation's Safe Companies, a strategic framework for integrating sustainability principles and issues into business. To act decisively, and to shift sustainability from passion to practice, business leaders need a path to take them past the blockages.

To be practical such a path must:

• Demonstrably create value for shareholders
• Be accessible and manageable, and
• Have outcomes that are measurable (and therefore reportable)

We have identified a path that is shaped by the deeply ingrained human craving for safety and security, by modern consumer expectations around product safety and corporate responsibility, by investors' demand for reduced risk and by the market's need for stability. In preview, the Ecos Safe Companies framework involves:

• Recognizing that corporate uncertainty - about what to do, how to do it and how value will be created - is now a major blockage to business "buy-in" to sustainability
• Overcoming the confusion that unfamiliar sustainability issues cause by getting companies started via a more familiar route based on a company's "core value/s"
• Advocating workplace safety and health as the most logical and effective core value on which to build a sustainability-based business model
• Empowering Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) and Safety Health and Environment (SHE) professionals to increase their effectiveness within corporations
• Following a Safety-Sustainability Continuum Footnote 1 beginning with workplace safety as the readily accessible first stepping stone on the long and poorly signposted path towards sustainability, and
• Focusing (always) on the identification and measurement of the shareholder value that is created for a business through safety sustainability strategies

Our methodology for this paper was:

• The major conclusions are based on our working experience with a number of major corporate clients over several years, in particular DuPont and its safety consulting arm, DuPont Safety Resources, and extensive consultation with a wide range of other stakeholders
• An initial draft of this discussion paper was circulated to more than 20 guest reviewers around the world - from industry, academia, NGOs, the financial sector and the safety and sustainability advisory fields - for their comments and criticisms
• Feedback provided by our reviewers has been assessed and where appropriate has been incorporated into this latest and substantially revised version of the discussion paper
• We regard the safety-sustainability theme as a dynamic and developing concept and invite further dialogue on the conclusions we have reached in this paper from business inertia to safe companies

The main reason for big business inertia on the need for greater corporate responsibility and the pursuit of sustainability is no longer active resistance to the idea. Many companies and business leaders now accept that individual corporate well being and the stability of the market-based democratic system are influenced by environmental and social factors as well as financial ones. In essence, they see that there are good business reasons for being a good company. The real impediments for these business leaders who have accepted that "we have to do something" are simple but potent. They are straightforward business questions:

• What do we do?
• How do we do it?
• How do we ensure value is created?Footnote 2

The unfamiliarity, controversy and sheer "fuzziness" that surround sustainability as a concept often repel or baffle business leaders when they attempt to integrate its key principles and issues into their companies. The long-term nature of the climate change issue, for example, is understandably an immense challenge to executives who are focused on the market's demands for 90-day reports on shareholder value added. The result is often ongoing inaction and considerable frustration within companies as managers either ignore sustainability or at best institute isolated ad hoc programs.

It is no longer enough for sustainability advocates to be preaching to business on sustainability's virtues without accepting some responsibility for the "what", the "how" and the "value". They must help business with practical, affordable and effective approaches to the core challenge of operationalizing sustainability. The general proposition of this paper, therefore, is that companies should identify a familiar core value/s for their business that fits with their corporate culture, and that matches existing management skills and processes, and then work towards sustainability from that entry point. If such a core value/s does not exist then it will have to be created before a company tackles the vast, unfamiliar territory of sustainability.

Our more specific proposition is that a core value around workplace safety and health is the most logical and effective entry point for most companies. There is a Safety-Sustainability Continuum that runs from accepting responsibility for providing a safe workplace all the way to fulfilling responsibility for protecting the planet and its people. Companies with a strong existing safety culture, or at the very least with effective skills and processes to safeguard their workers, have a head start on the long road towards sustainability. Those which don't will have to develop the skills and processes - and ideally the culture as well - because no corporate regime that presides over avoidable deaths, injuries and illnesses in the workplace can ever claim to be sustainable, or even to understand what the concept requires of their business.

In the future the corporations that will be closest to being sustainable will be Safe Companies. In this sense, pursuing safety is an ever-expanding mission - a common dictionary definition of safety is the utopian "absence of risk" - just as pursuing sustainability is likely to be a never-ending quest. From the first stepping-stone of workplace safety tomorrow's Safe Companies will move on up the Safety-Sustainability Continuum to being safe for their neighbors, safe for their customers, safe for the environment and safe for their shareholders. This trajectory will take them from being companies that are making themselves safer by minimizing their negative impacts on society and the environment to becoming safety-enhancing companies that seek to maximize their positive impacts.

why workplace safety and why not some other core value or issue?

A number of our guest reviewers for the first draft of this paper suggested that we should emphasise the general proposition of using a familiar core value/s as the entry point for operationalizing sustainability rather than our specific proposition of workplace safety as the ideal core value. Other core values that were suggested include shareholder value, customer service, environmental care and quality. While agreeing that each of these other foci has potential if it represents a strong core value for a particular corporation - for example customer service in a retail sector company - our analysis nevertheless is that workplace safety has a number of clear advantages. These include:

• As an entry point for sustainability, workplace safety in the first instance is people focused rather than environment or dollar focused increasing the likelihood of "buy-in" from a wider range of important internal and external stakeholders
• Workplace safety does, however, have clear environmental and financial characteristics as well as social ones with, for example, a chemical explosion and spill posing a threat to workers, neighboring communities, the environment and shareholder value
• The business culture, policies, management skills, processes and systems that deliver superior performance on workplace safety can be harnessed to address other key business challenges in areas like risk management, eco-efficiency, research and development, quality control, customer service and even shareholder value creation. We don't see this as strongly with any other core value
• Targeting safety (and security) in the broader sense, including the initial specific area of workplace safety, is directly linked to the established business priority (and therefore cultural fit) of reducing risk in all areas of a company's operations
• Making workplace safety the first of many stepping stones towards sustainability energizes OHS and SHE professionals, helps to integrate their role into the wider business and avoids a classic loss-of-interest situation once early goals are achieved
• There are strong process similarities between OHS management systems and other management systems such as quality (e.g. ISO 9000) and environment (e.g. ISO 14000), making workplace safety a valuable systems learning opportunity
• There are strong case history examples of corporations that have safety as a core value using it to strengthen other parts of their businesses or their business as a whole (e.g. Alcoa on leadership) Footnote 3 and using it to guide their handling of other key challenges (e.g. DuPont on environmental stewardship and security) Footnote 4
• There are many common points between the narrow challenge of managing for good workplace safety outcomes and the broader challenge of pursuing good sustainability outcomes (see Workplace Safety v Sustainability - A Checklist! in this paper)
• Workplace safety is relevant to most industries and most companies in most parts of the world, although we recognize that the specific issues vary greatly from sector to sector

The pivotal issue is that workplace safety is first and foremost a human values issue. Using shareholder value, for example, is overwhelmingly a business value approach. Focusing on value creation in planning and implementing any sustainability-based business initiative is very important, and we argue this very strongly. But it is not enough by itself and there needs also to be a human values filter. The best equation is value plus values, not one or the other. Merely focusing on profitability clearly lacks the human values dimension and cannot drive safety or sustainability on its own. The case for using workplace safety is bolstered by a view among enlightened managers that it represents "a microcosm of management more generally, incorporating issues as diverse as engineering design, maintenance, human psychology and industrial relations". Footnote 5 There also is growing evidence of a strong "business case" for workplace safety, with the work being done in this area being an important precursor to demonstrating a positive business case for sustainability. This is critical to breaking through common business perceptions that acting on challenges like safety and sustainability is a cost, not a benefit. Footnote 6

Sustainability-seeking companies need to crawl before they walk, and walk before they run, meaning that getting workplace safety right can be a constructive jumping off point for the sustainability journey. Protecting workers everywhere isn't easy. But companies that can't do it well will fail or at least struggle to operationalize sustainability with its diverse and often even greater challenges.

In the narrow sense of workplace safety, accidents avoided can mean dollars saved. For example, a large chain store company that has direct and indirect accident costs totaling $10 million a year and has a profit margin of 5 percent of turnover would need to make $200 million in sales just to cover its safety failings. Any business opting to sell more of its product rather than pursing best practice on safety to save lives and avert human misery would clearly fail the sustainability test and, arguably, the shareholder value one as well.

For the broader safety (or risk minimization) arena there are many examples where safety enhancement/risk reduction has a strong connection to sustainability principles and/or issues. For example:

• The consumer risk that Monsanto was hit by when it pushed genetically-modified crops into a European marketplace gripped by food safety fears
• The sovereign risk that ExxonMobil suffered with its Indonesian oil/gas assets in 2001 due to political instability, in turn related to socio-economic and cultural issues, making it impossible to guarantee operational safety for several months
• The damage to brand and the bottom line for the Firestone tire company and the
• Ford Motor Company inflicted by the tire blowout and vehicle roll-over debacle that hit in 2000

but isn't workplace safety struggling to gain business priority status too?

One of the attractions of workplace safety as an entry point for sustainability is that both share many similar characteristics, including blockages for business action, although generally speaking these are less likely to obstruct action on safety by comparison with sustainability. The business case for protecting workers is still debated. There is philosophical, bordering on ideological, debate around workplace safety, with some arguing that zero accidents is the only moral target and others proclaiming this a nonsense and making a case for a pragmatic degree of "acceptable or affordable" risk. Industry and organized labor often differ about safety issues, especially about whether it is unsafe workplaces or unsafe behavior that is to blame for killing and maiming workers.

A number of our reviewers warned against assuming that the need to act on workplace safety is widely accepted as a core issue within the corporate world, especially in small and medium sized businesses, and also against assuming that just because companies have an OHS or SHE capacity that they are committed to anything more than bare regulatory compliance. One said: "There are many companies with OHS systems (and even environmental management plans) in place today which do little more than meet base regulatory requirements."

Another questioned if making workplace safety the entry point was a "one-size fits all" model, observing that some firms might see safety as a forbidding and difficult challenge in its own right. "It is not a universally held value," this reviewer said. These question marks are appropriate but do not dissuade us from recommending workplace safety as an ideal entry point for sustainability for most companies, especially if it is used in tandem with a focus on value creation. That said, there will be cases where individual companies have a strong alternative core value (customer service is one that also has a number of common points with sustainability) that could be used as the main entry point or in combination with safety and/or value. As another reviewer noted, there are "Darwinian forces in play" and in a predatory world "some companies of today are simply not fit to survive". Those that cannot safeguard their own employees may well fall into this category, and increasingly those that fail to be Safe Companies in the broader sense also will face survival challenges.

Undoubtedly there is a self-selecting element to the Safety-Sustainability Continuum. Companies choose to make safety a priority or they don't. They choose whether they will rely on their own resources to achieve best practice or perhaps bring in outside experts to help them excel. They also will choose whether they want to pursue sustainability, and they can choose their own entry point. Our conclusion, however, is that a company that lacks the business equivalent of a university degree in managing safety (and ideally a genuine safety culture) will struggle to do the combined MBA and PhD in sustainability.

There may be exceptions as more companies sit for the sustainability tests. But we are unaware of any of today's leading sustainability-seeking companies that don't have a strong focus on workplace safety, and OHS and SHE are laboratories - though not always powerful ones - for sustainability thinking in corporations. A reviewer said: "I would stress that true 'forward-thinking' companies will have a vision of where they are going organizationally and operationally and will see a journey to becoming a sustainable enterprise as a series of steps with robust OHS systems likely to be both an early and necessary target."

should sustainability principles and issues be the drivers for sustainability?

In working with corporations over seven years Ecos has tried using a number of sustainability principles and issues as the entry points and drivers for operationalizing sustainability. These have not been as effective as they need to be to promote increased business take-up, mainly because of their complexity and unfamiliarity. This experience has prompted us to use more familiar business issues as the starting point and then transplant sustainability on to them, rather than trying to graft the business on to the sustainability rootstock. Sustainability-based options we have tried previously include:

• Major issues like climate change and biotechnology - While they can be crucial drivers for change, they are not universal across industries and they are ideologically divided, presenting many impediments to their effective use
• Reporting - Useful as a guide and focus, but doesn't create new opportunities for business value and is compliance driven (community compliance rather than regulatory)
• Stakeholder engagement - A crucial tool and a source of new ideas and perspectives rather than being a driver for sustainability in its own right. Engaging with stakeholders including sometimes hostile NGOs also can be intimidating territory for companies to venture into

starting the climb on the safety-sustainability continuum

Our model for the Safety-Sustainability Continuum (see Figure 1 next page) places workplace health and safety at the base, the ambitious goal of being a safe or sustainable growth company is a midfield checkpoint and the ultimate goal of sustainability is the elusive aspirational point at the top. Companies that are ascending the Continuum, while also creating value for shareholders, will be on a safe or at least safer growth trajectory. The reverse will be true for any companies that are dropping down, with a falling trajectory meaning growing risk, especially in regard to the social license to operate.

An expanding, financially successful company that eliminates its negative social and environmental footprint could be said to be a true sustainable growth business. If that hypothetical company progresses further up the Continuum by developing a positive footprint it could create value for shareholders through making the world a better place, rather than merely delivering profitability along with some societal benefits. Those in the current crop of sustainability-seeking companies - even leaders like Shell, DuPont, BP, Baxter International and others - are yet to reach the checkpoint, much less go higher.

understanding the purpose of the continuum

The reviewer response to the Safety-Sustainability Continuum was generally very positive, but again we received cautions. One asked: "Is the Safety-Sustainability Continuum linear and path-dependent? yes">  While I like Figure 1 very much, I still find myself asking whether the entry point of safe processes necessarily leads to a 'positive footprint' company. There are some significant leaps that have to be taken to get from the continuous improvement of existing internal processes (safe processes) to discontinuous innovation of core technologies, products and services (restorative products, positive footprint)."

The Continuum is meant to be indicative rather than trying to dictate one true path towards sustainability. Different companies and sectors will have different priorities and not all of the steps that we have portrayed will be relevant to all companies or sectors. The order in which various steps become relevant to companies also will differ, and doubtless there are opportunities and challenges that we have not identified. Companies also will not move up the Continuum in an orderly and ever-ascending manner. There will be diversions, missteps, slips and surprises. Different business units within single companies will move at different paces and on different paths.

    

We present the Continuum as a useful tool for companies to grasp the concept that what they do at the bottom in taking on workplace safety challenges can be much more than the pursuit of a "zero endgame", being the effort to drive accidents and incidents towards zero. This is no longer uncharted territory because companies like DuPont and Alcoa have come amazingly close to zero across their whole global operations, and have individual plants with extraordinary safety records. Increasingly the same goes for eco-efficiency targets like zero waste and zero emissions. The corporate discipline to pursue targets like these needs to be applauded, and is highly relevant to addressing the big sustainability challenges like climate change and poverty, but it remains that the primary focus is on minimizing or eliminating a negative impact. There are two logical paths for companies that are excelling in the "goal is zero" game:

• Stagnate - Face an increasing challenge to stay focused as other business challenges arise and command the attention of the company hierarchy, along with the danger that the law of diminishing returns begins to evaporate interest in the target. Only the strongest of cultures and core values can resist these pressures and even then the best that can be hoped for is to edge closer to zero
• Grow - Find a path to apply the skills and processes learned in minimizing harm to new challenges, thereby maintaining the original focus while also re-energizing the company around its cultural strengths and core values. This means shifting on to a positive footing aimed at maximizing the good that a company can deliver for society and the environment - a "beyond zero" strategy

For practical reasons this paper has focused on the lower part of the Continuum. Firstly, the greatest blockage to business take-up of sustainability is getting started in the first place. Secondly, players in the current crop of significant sustainability-seeking companies are yet to make it to the checkpoint, at which point they'll be switching to "beyond zero" mode. There is already a growing body of data about what happens in the lower third of the Continuum. What happens above that, especially in the top section, still has to be explored. Nor is the diagram meant to be linear. The journey from the entry point to the checkpoint may be much shorter than the next section. Arguably the aspirational goal of sustainability will always remain elusive.

What seems certain based on existing case histories is that companies can move through a series of transitions building on their core value/s as they go. In the case of DuPont, with which we are most familiar, workplace safety is the foundation core value. Environmental care was built on to the safety base in the 1980s and '90s. By the late '90s the focus shifted to "sustainable growth", which incorporates safety and environmental care with the very major addition of shareholder value into the equation. The DuPont progression shows how workplace safety can be used as a managing process for different challenges.

the importance of a dual focus on safety and value

The weight of this discussion paper is devoted to highlighting our arguments in regard to focusing on workplace safety as an entry point, and safety more widely as a driver for operationalizing sustainability. A subsequent paper will explore further the use of a focus on value creation - in traditional areas like margin improvement, risk management, growth enhancement and capital efficiency - to initiate and to drive sustainability for corporations.

It is important, however, to understand that in isolation neither a safety nor a value creation focus is likely to be comprehensively effective as an entry point and/or driver for sustainability. A failure to use both to enter and to drive sustainability-based business strategies is likely to threaten the sustainability of any such initiatives and, alternatively, also could threaten the sustainability of the business itself. Any business strategy that is significantly unsafe for workers or others, or that fails to enhance safety for society, sooner or later is likely to be rejected by the community. Similarly, the pursuit of a strategy that fails to reward shareholders is likely to be rejected by investors.

The strong appeal of workplace safety, safety more generally and value is that each is familiar for a business audience. Not all companies make workplace safety a priority, but there is broad acceptance that they should. Promoting safety more generally equates to risk reduction. Creating value is what business is all about.

    

The Big Picture - The Market Needs Safety and Security to Provide Stability

The stability of the market-based democratic system relies on consumers (people) and investors feeling safe and secure. If the safety and security of people in a market economy is compromised, as happened with the US terror attacks, consumer and investor confidence plummets and the resulting instability can quickly harm many corporate players. Just look at many of the major airlines' post-September 11 woes. Other sustainability-related examples include:

• Product recalls - Companies and whole sectors can suffer if their products are seen to be unsafe and consumers lose confidence in them e.g. Firestone tires
• Consumer scares - For example the progressive collapse of the beef industry in Britain due to "mad cow disease" and the recent problems in Japan after discovery of the disease there
• New crises or issues - The impact of the growing cost of weather-related diasters on the re-insurance industry and on public sentiment regarding climate change

We do urge a strong caution. Focusing on safety in the pursuit of sustainability can't remove all risk nor anticipate all threats. But it can provide corporations with better over-the-horizon radar, the management capacity to deal with a wider variety of risks if or when they emerge and a "trust bank" with a company's own stakeholders and the community more generally in the event of some disaster occurring. The more Safe Companies there are, the more stable the overall system is likely to be.

'people-focused' sustainability and the SHE model

Many non-business advocates for sustainability come from the environmental stream, leaving the social and often the financial and economic parts of the equation under-represented. The landmark Rio Earth Summit in 1992 - essentially a mega-green forum - used the term ecologically sustainable development (ESD). Since then, however, there has been increasing recognition that sustainability needs to cover the "three legs of the stool" - environmental, social and financial and economic. Ecos, for example, defines sustainability as managing our society in a way that:

• Preserves and restores ecological integrity (to ensure our life support system stays in place)
Enhances the quality of life of all people (to underpin social, geo-political and market stability)
• Creates value from the process of achieving the above goals (to motivate business and to drive investment)

The social dimension is the least well-understood and articulated stream, and yet this is perhaps the critical dimension affecting how people live their lives. Since before sustainability entered the business lexicon companies have been grouping environment together with health and safety. This social/environmental grouping is variously called safety, health and environment (SHE), health, safety and environment (HSE) and environment, health and safety (EHS). Environmental campaigners sometimes regard this model, by whatever acronym, as corporate obfuscation and as an attempt to dilute the importance of the environment. But from a safety-sustainability viewpoint this positioning is vital.

Linking the well being of people, in this case of workers, to the environmental challenge can be seen as a positive affirmation that the two are deeply inter-related. It is also a practical reality. As noted earlier, major accidents that threaten workers, such as a chemical spill or a tanker catching fire, also can pose a serious threat to communities and the environment. So can a whole range of more minor incidents and exposures. Far from being derided as an environmental cop-out, the SHE model should be encouraged as a step towards business-compatible, people-focused sustainability. That doesn't mean downgrading environmental concerns, but it does mean recognizing that people are critical to the whole equation and that meaningful solutions are unlikely to work without making sustainability very relevant to them.

overcoming the limitations of the SHE model

Unfortunately, the SHE model in all but the most committed of corporations can be a very weak engine room for driving sustainability. This is because while it attempts to integrate the environmental stream with at least one key social criterion, that of workplace safety, the SHE area is often poorly integrated into the real business of the corporation. Many SHE professionals are stuck in an eco-efficiency/risk minimization "silo" which reflects the early demands that they run a company's workplace safety and pollution reduction programs and, perhaps, its reporting. SHE also is viewed as a compliance task and as a cost center, being given a low priority while areas that are seen to create value are ranked more highly.

While SHE professionals are corporate insiders who can help to create Safe Companies, to do so they have to reinvent themselves as drivers of value creation as well as workplace safety and eco-efficiency. They also have to move to a new dimension of guiding the company towards creating a positive footprint rather than primarily reducing its negative footprint. Currently most SHE professionals are not well equipped to make the value arguments within their organizations. They aren't steeped in it and they aren't credible within it, although this can change if they make themselves more relevant to their company's need to grow as well as to avoid risk. Such a transformation will be given great impetus if the company's board and/or CEO are demanding it, and incorporate SHE issues into their own decision-making.

Adding in the focus on value creation can be a powerful driver for making SHE professionals - in the role of sustainability champions - more relevant to the overall business and therefore more able to influence its direction. Like sustainability, health and safety will wield far more influence on the business if seen as a profit center rather than a cost center. SHE professionals also will be empowered if one of their core responsibilities, ensuring the health and safety of workers, is given enhanced standing as an entry point for the "new big thing" - operationalizing sustainability. In short, SHE needs to be taken out of its silo and integrated across and throughout the business as a sustainable or safe growth-oriented framework for all aspects of business behavior and development - a framework that in the first instance ensures the safe delivery of environmentally and socially safe products and services.

The longer-term expectation of civil society stakeholders will be that subsequent generations of SHE programs will not be confined to "pockets" within the company but will define the company as a whole and will influence every decision. The potential value for both the company and society will underpin cooperation that will lead to the challenges faced in a long transition period being overcome. This is a process of evolution. The long-term reward for the company is that it will be seen as an entity that contributes to the safety and security of the individual and society - and therefore to the stability on which business relies so heavily. The reward for the civil society stakeholders is that they will have enlisted new and powerful partners in the quest for a sustainable, and by definition, safe and secure society.

    

in conclusion:

safe companies = business-compatible sustainability

Using workplace safety as a familiar entry point, requiring evidence that value is being created, plotting a course on the Safety-Sustainability Continuum and becoming one of the Safe Companies is a business-compatible approach to operationalizing sustainability.

In practical terms, the company-wide challenge of delivering workplace safety is a strong entry point for the more far-reaching task of making sustainability "real" for the business. Workplace safety is not a perfect microcosm of the sustainability challenge, but there are enough similarities (as Table 1 shows) to make it extremely useful. For corporations, this focus on protecting workers helps to bring business meaning to the sometimes vague and often disputed concept of sustainability. This arises at levels like:

• Understanding the dimensions of the management and other commitment required
• Recognizing the need to align management with other stakeholders including workers and suppliers
• Developing the capacity to deal with subjective issues
• Confronting the business case issues raised by sustainability-type issues
• Fostering a solutions-focused organizational culture, and
• Abandoning self-serving business concepts like "affordable or acceptable risk" and embracing bold targets to drive change.

We see three main scenarios for companies wanting to pursue sustainability based on the conclusions of this paper. They are:

• Start at the beginning - Companies that want to make a start on sustainability should develop their workplace safety expertise and culture as a way of fostering the required corporate mindset, skills and processes. This includes companies with no significant focus on workplace safety and those with a compliance-based approach to OHS/SHE. By using the Safety-Sustainability Continuum as a guide it will be possible to start on the sustainability challenge simultaneously with the workplace safety one
• Exploit a head start - Companies that have a genuine safety/SHE culture and/or the skills and processes to achieve strongly beyond-compliance outcomes on workplace safety and other SHE challenges can re-deploy and re-energize their efforts by using the Safety-Sustainability Continuum. This will require board/CEO level support for changing the focus of SHE to a sustainable growth approach
• Apply the principles - Companies with a very strong core value/s other than workplace safety may choose to use it as an entry point for operationalizing sustainability. The general principles of the Continuum may still be useful in moving forward but nothing we have encountered has the utility of workplace safety as an entry point and safety more broadly as a driver

(NOTE: In all cases we advocate that a focus on value creation also be used. Value is the primary motivator for many people, especially in business, and a partial motivator for just about everyone. But safety motivates the heart and the deep human instinct for survival. Used together they represent a powerful "combo" for framing a business response to the sustainability challenge.)

About the Authors

Paul Gilding assists in formulating sustainable business strategies for some of the world's leading corporations. As a former Executive Director of Greenpeace International, his 20-year involvement with social change organizations has given him a comprehensive insight into the processes of transformation, enabling him to assist business in forecasting and taking advantage of emerging trends. He has a thorough understanding of the challenges sustainability poses for companies, as well as the commercial opportunities it presents. Since establishing Ecos Corporation in 1995, Paul has advised leading international corporations including DuPont, SC Johnson, the Ford Motor Company, Placer Dome, BP (formally BP Amoco) and Suncor Energy as well as Australian corporations including BHP, Lend Lease, Pacific Power and Western Mining Corporation. In 1997, Paul received the prestigious Tomorrow Magazine Environmental Leadership Award. In December 1994, he was listed by Time International in its "Time's Global 100 Young Leaders for the New Millennium" and in 1993 the Australian Prime Minister presented Paul with an Australia Day Award for Outstanding Achievement for services to the environment. In 1992, the influential World Economic Forum (WEF) appointed him a Global Leader for Tomorrow at its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

Rick Humphries has extensive international experience in campaigning and activism, working to protect the environment on major projects in marine conservation, pastoral lands, forestry protection and in mitigating the impacts of mining. Before joining Ecos Corporation, Rick worked as Strategic Director for the Wilderness Society in Australia and previously established Greenpeace's Genetic Engineering campaign in Sweden. Rick has also worked for Greenpeace International, managing a major Ocean Ecology campaign, and in Australia as the organization's principal lobbyist in Canberra. He was also with the Australian Conservation Foundation for six years. At Ecos Corporation, he project manages one of our largest projects, with DuPont Safety Resources, and acts as one of our key stakeholder engagement experts.

Murray Hogarth joined Ecos Corporation in 1999 after working as Environment Editor at Australia's leading quality newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald. His award-winning, 21-year career in print and television journalism gives him extensive expertise in communications, research and analysis. Murray plays a leading role in Ecos Corporation's internal and external writing and publishing affairs, including producing articles on sustainable growth issues for international journals. He writes a monthly column for Sustainable Business Insider (www.sustainablebusiness.com). Much of his research and analysis - together with that of others in the Ecos team - centers on the sustainability value case for business and, more recently, the safety-sustainability theme. Murray also works directly with clients on value case and safety issues and across a range of other areas including biotechnology, transport, mining, water and sustainable agriculture.

Footnotes

• Footnote 1: The Safety-Sustainability Continuum is an Ecos Corporation tool presented on page 10 of this paper

• Footnote 2: The important role that focusing on value creation can play in driving a company's sustainability strategizing and operationalizing will be dealt with in a separate Ecos Corporation discussion paper. There is, however, a brief discussion of a safety+value approach later in this paper.
• Footnote 3: See speech by US Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, formerly chairman and CEO of Alcoa from 1987-2000, at the National Safety Summit, Georgetown University, Washington DC on March 30, 2001. O'Neill, an ardent safety champion, said: "For me, this is not about safety, per se; it's about leadership. And it's about a conviction I have that a truly great organization requires that people be aligned around important values and they understand what they are. And no matter where you are in the world, they're the same."
• Footnote 4: From comments by DuPont's global vice president for safety, health and environment since 1993, Dr Paul V. Tebo, who cites safety as being DuPont's culturally comfortable "managing process" for sustainable growth while also highlighting its "strong connect to human values".
• Footnote 5: OHS consultant Malcolm Brown, formerly manager of health, safety and environment at Shell Australia, writing in the Australian Financial Review December 12, 2001
• Footnote 6: Ecos business case expert Don Reed, formerly of the World Resources Institute, is leading our work in this area. Eminent sources on this issue include Professor Michael E. Porter of Harvard University. In a presentation in 2000 Porter said: "Just as competitive firms benefit from productive use of resources and energy, they also need well trained workers with a sense of opportunity, and workers who are healthy with safe working conditions." In our experience companies often cite improved ability to recruit and retain the best employees as one of the early benefits of a sustainability or corporate responsibility strategy.