The three walls.
Many executives still believe sustainability is separate from the core business. It isn't.
Three walls stand between the value it creates and the credit it gets.
Surface the value. Quantify it. Communicate it credibly.
Surface
Sustainability creates value in four places, not one: Customers, Operations, Risks, Employees. That is CORE. Examine three of the four and you will underestimate the whole, because the benefits you skipped were never counted as zero. They were never counted at all.
Quantify
Most of the value is submerged, which means unseen, not intangible. One company counted two lines on a waste project. Underneath sat roughly two dozen more. On average the submerged portion runs four to ten times the visible one, and it can run further.
Communicate
Surfacing a number is not the same as being believed. Start with the audiences, what they already know, and the metrics they judge by. Then explore an interactive model together rather than defending a static report, so an objection changes a figure on screen instead of sinking the result.
"There are only two departments that come into my office asking for money without numbers: HR and sustainability."
The gap is not conviction. It is arithmetic that never got done. When something cannot be quantified confidently, it tends to be left out, and leaving it out assigns it the one number it cannot possibly be worth: zero.
About $3 million a year in talent related value, with her own C-Suite likely to call it $300,000.
About $30 million a year. Ten times her estimate, and a hundred times the figure her leadership would have used.
If the real number is a hundred times what executives assume, the question is no longer whether to invest. It is how much has already been left on the table.
Breaking Through, by Daniel Aronson. Nine pages, with the examples and the numbers behind the summary above.
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Unseen doesn't mean not there.