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Business sustainability: It is about time

Pratima Bansal and Mark R. DesJardine
Strategic Organization 2014 12: 70
DOI: 10.1177/1476127013520265

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research-article2014
SOQ0010.1177/1476127013520265Strategic OrganizationBansal and DesJardine

So!apbox Essay

Strategic Organization

Business sustainability: It is
2014, Vol. 12(1) 70­–78
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1476127013520265
soq.sagepub.com

Pratima Bansal and Mark R. DesJardine

Western University, Canada

Abstract
Sustainability is fast becoming fashionable in strategic management, and yet its meaning is often elusive.
Some people restrict sustainability to environmental issues, and others use it synonymously with corporate
social responsibility. In this essay, we return to the roots of its original meaning and argue that sustainability
requires the consideration of time. Sustainability obliges firms to make intertemporal trade-offs to safeguard
intergenerational equity. In this essay, we clarify the meaning of sustainability by showing that the notion
of ‘time’ discriminates sustainability from responsibility and other similar concepts. We then argue that the
omission of time from most strategic management has contributed to short-termism, which is the bane sus-
tainability. We conclude with directions for future research that will integrate sustainability into strategy and
contribute to a world in which both business and society can thrive for generations to come.

Keywords
Business sustainability, short-termism, corporate social responsibility, systems thinking

On 26 November 2010, Unilever announced that in the future it would release its earnings figures
semiannually, not quarterly. The company’s share price fell with this announcement, but two years
later the share price was 35% higher than its pre-announcement level. Through this measure and
several others, Unilever reduced the percentage ownership of short-term hedge funds from 15% in
2010 to 5% in 2012 and attracted more patient capital.
Paul Polman, Unilever’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), believes that short-termism “lies at the
heart of many of today’s problems” (Polman, 2013). He has been publicly “scathing of companies
that claim their hands are tied by fiduciary duty to maximise profits for shareholders in the short
term, arguing that this is too narrow a model of Milton Friedman’s old thinking” (Confino, 2012).
Polman sees short-termism as the bane of sustainability. Through their Sustainable Living Plan,
Unilever aims to double their revenue and halve their environmental footprint by 2020. But, as
Polman has realized, this goal cannot be achieved if Unilever’s quarterly net income is hostage to
the demands of short-term shareholders. He wants the latitude to make investments that do not
necessarily deliver short-term returns, but realize long-term benefits. Polman sees sustainability
not as acts of kindness, but as creating long-term business value.

Corresponding author:
Pratima Bansal, Ivey Business School, Western University, 1255 Western Road, London, ON N6G 0N1, Canada.
Email: tbansal@ivey.ca

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Bansal and DesJardine 71

In this editorial, we argue that time is central to sustainability, which differentiates it from other
similar concepts, such as corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate citizenship, and even the
triple bottom line. Sustainable businesses are those that manage intertemporal trade-offs in strate-
gic decision making, so that both the short and long term are considered. We argue that time should
be at the center of organizational theorizing, in order to enhance both organizational and societal
outcomes over the long term.

What is sustainability?
Commonly defined as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and
Development (WCED), 1987), sustainability aims to secure intergenerational equity. Expressed in
this way, the principles of sustainability are indisputable. Most people want to live as well as their
parents and they want their children to enjoy similar opportunities. The same logic applies in
business—most managers want their business to be at least as profitable as in the past and, ideally,
for profits to grow. Based on this logic, business sustainability can be defined as the ability of firms
to respond to their short-term financial needs without compromising their (or others’) ability to
meet their future needs. Thus, time is central to the notion of sustainability.
The WCED conceptualized sustainability from a systems perspective. In conditions of resource
constraints, industry must develop, use, and dispose of natural resources to protect the regenerative
health of the planet and equitably distribute the wealth generated in order to meet the needs of
future generations. For economic, societal, and ecological systems to remain in balance at the
macro-level, resources must be distributed at micro-levels across time.
Firms are systems nested within larger macro-systems. For firms to survive, managers must
administer their investments to secure both short-term profit and a long-term income stream. Firms
that do not manage intertemporal trade-offs well are exposed to risks at the micro- and macro-
levels of analysis. At the micro-level, firms confront direct risks by failing to manage their income
flow. For example, if firms underinvest in research and development, they could erode their long-
term value. At the macro-level, firms are exposed to indirect risks if the system collapses because
firms collectively fail to balance the short and long term (Hayes and Abernathy, 1980). Hence,
firms that manage both the short and long term mitigate risks within a single level of analysis and
across levels of analyses.
Sustainability requires trade-offs, especially across time. Firms must choose between investing
less for smaller profits sooner and investing more for greater profits later (Laverty, 1996). These
same principles apply to the trade-off between exploitation and exploration (March, 1991). Firms
profit from exploitation by marketing and selling current products and services, but must also
invest in exploration activities, such as research and development, to secure a future pipeline of
products and services.

Sustainability is not responsibility

CSR, on the other hand, does not necessarily require trade-offs. Most responsibility scholars argue
that CSR represents the set of organizational activities that are good for society and the firm
(McWilliams and Siegel, 2001). Framed in this way, responsibility is nothing more than good busi-
ness. Concepts like “shared value” and “win-wins” suggest that firms can create value for both
business and society simultaneously (Porter and Kramer, 2006). Even the “triple bottom line,”
which is how sustainability is often conceptualized (Bansal, 2005; Elkington, 1998; Hart and

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72 Strategic Organization 12(1)

Milstein, 2003), looks more like responsibility than sustainability because it misses the critical
insight that sustainability requires intertemporal trade-offs.

Different paradigms
Ethics, morality, and norms permeate CSR. These moral imperatives stem from individuals inside
the organization or from external stakeholders. In either case, firms must choose the most accept-
able actions to pursue, even if such actions do not always—or even often—align with its overarch-
ing strategy. The responsibility challenge, therefore, is to balance the competing demands of
various stakeholders.
No such moral imperative dictates what a firm should or should not do for sustainability. By
focusing on systems, sustainability scholars analyze the balance or consistency between the organ-
izational and macro-systems over time. A specific system is not judged as right or wrong, nor are
individuals assumed to be morally responsible to society. Indeed, a sustainability lens can be just
as likely applied to understanding the operations of the Mafia as to the Catholic Church. Whereas
sustainability scholars can comment on excess greenhouse gas emissions creating change in cli-
mate systems, they do not have the tools to judge whether the new climate regimes are relatively
good or bad.

Different outcomes
The concern for intertemporal equity can lead to different outcomes for sustainable versus
responsible businesses. CSR aims to create shared value by addressing competing stakeholder
interests; however, the focus on current stakeholder interests can obscure intertemporal trade-
offs. For example, mining companies create shared value when they build local schools and
hospitals—a healthy, educated local workforce helps generate the profits which are redistributed
back into the community. However, these responsible actions may not necessarily be sustainable
if the surrounding environment is degraded and traditional lifestyles are disrupted, even if the
local community participates in the initial decision making. One only has to witness the erosion
of aboriginal communities through economic development or treaty agreements to see that even
the community leaders failed to fully anticipate their future needs. CSR encourages firms to
reconcile economic and societal goals, but the pursuit of social legitimacy can sometimes result
in perfunctory measures.
Even more troubling is that the pursuit of shared value can stimulate rapid, unsustainable
growth, as firms seek ever-accelerating returns to generate wealth for the firm and society. Such
returns often borrow resources from the future, magnifying the imbalance in the distribution of
resources between the short and long term. The pursuit of shared value, in the absence of ana-
lyzing intertemporal trade-offs, has the potential to not only contribute to systems failure but
accelerate it.

Sometimes different practices

The confusion between CSR and business sustainability is understandable, given that society’s
time scales are longer than those of business. Acts of CSR, such as philanthropy or community
volunteering, create value for both business and society in the short-run, but do not necessarily
sustain the viability of micro- and macro-systems in the long run.
There are some activities, however, that are either responsible or sustainable, but not both.
For instance, charitable donations that relieve social problems are responsible, but they are

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Bansal and DesJardine 73

not sustainable if they do not resolve the underlying issue. For example, new infrastructure
often requires ongoing servicing. Mining companies that construct schools and hospitals but
do not build a community’s capacity to provide teaching and medical services or provide
ongoing funds to maintain the buildings may exacerbate local economic stress. The local
community could be left with the responsibility to maintain and support both the physical and
human capital over time.
As well, some sustainable actions are neither responsible nor irresponsible. Sustainable prac-
tices align organizations with their larger systems over time. These practices are often flexible and
modular, so the firm can adapt more quickly to environmental change (Teece, 2007). For example,
three-dimensional (3D) printing can contribute to the sustainability of firms and the larger systems
in which they are embedded, because firms produce only what is needed, thereby using less mate-
rial resources and rapidly adjusting to new technologies and designs. In fact, sustainability and
strategy meet in the space where products and services are designed to more readily and flexibly
adapt to new macro-demands to manage intertemporal trade-offs.

The threat to sustainability and strategy: short-termism

If sustainability is the ability of the firm to balance the short and long term, then temporal
imbalances are among sustainability’s greatest threats. Nowhere is this more evident than
in the increasing short-termism among firms. In a landmark study of 400 executives, pri-
marily chief financial officers (CFOs), Graham et al. (2005) found that nearly four out of
every five executives willingly sacrificed long-term value creation in order to smooth earn-
ings or meet short-term earnings targets. Furthermore, research on hyperbolic discounting
also shows that managers are discounting the future more today than they ever did, so that
many investments that could create long-term value are being overlooked (Dasgupta and
Maskin, 2005).
Short-termism can be defined as “decisions and outcomes that pursue a course of action that is
best for the short term but suboptimal over the long run” (Laverty, 1996: 826). Humans have a bias
for immediate gratification and temporal discounting (Loewenstein and Thaler, 1989); we gener-
ally prefer to consume less now than wait for more later. Urgency and uncertainty exacerbate this
bias, because people want more rewards now and future rewards are obscured.
Short-termism can lead to suboptimal outcomes for both the firm and society for several rea-
sons. First, investments driven by short-term payoffs tend to be incremental, rather than transfor-
mational. Firms tend to focus on operational efficiencies or adjacent moves into new product
markets, and are unlikely to make the necessary strategic investments in disruptive technologies
that will help them leapfrog their competitors. In contrast, firms that can manage the long term and
the short term are more likely to invest strategically in research and development for new product
and process innovations, train employees for higher productivity and lower turnover, and build
enduring relationships with the community to ensure that resources are developed responsibly
(Slawinski and Bansal, 2012). Much like runners who pace themselves through a marathon, these
firms understand how to manage their limited resources.
Second, firms that rely too heavily on short-term investments experience more volatile earn-
ings. As managers become increasingly myopic, the returns on their investments either become
more marginal or managers take significant risks to potentially secure windfall gains. In either
case, these firms often fail to build long-term value, as a win is often followed by a loss. This per-
petual cycle of wins and losses encourages, according to behavioral economists, even greater risk-
taking to compensate for earlier losses (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979), contributing to what
Perlow et al. (2002) refer to as a speed trap and even shorter term decisions. Managers start

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74 Strategic Organization 12(1)

managing their reported earnings to meet or beat short-term earnings benchmarks, perhaps by
delaying important investments or making contentious investments or operational decisions. It is
for these behavioral reasons that Polman stopped providing earnings guidance to analysts shortly
after he took the helm of Unilever.
Executives can feel hamstrung, unable to make the investments needed to preserve the long-
term viability of their companies. Unilever’s decision to report “quarterly” earnings semiannually
reflects a more widespread frustration among business leaders with the temporal myopia that per-
vades financial markets. These same pressures fueled Michael Dell’s fight to buy out the company
he originally founded; Dell wanted to gain a “freer hand to restructure the company without having
to worry about quarterly reports or worried shareholders” (The Economist, 2013). Indeed, there is
a growing trend for public companies to abandon the practice of providing earnings guidance alto-
gether (Hsieh et al., 2006).
Short-termism is the arena in which strategy comes up against sustainability. Current theories of
strategic management are contributing to short-term decision making. Not only is short-termism
potentially hazardous to organizations, it can contribute to systems failure, which ultimately leads
to firm failure. Realizing this connection, we argue that strategy must integrate sustainability in its
theorizing.

A research agenda at the intersection of sustainability and

strategy
Sustainable competitive advantage has been the primary concern of strategic management theories,
garnering attention from industrial organization economics, the resource-based view, and dynamic
capabilities. Sustainable competitive advantage is not to be confused with business sustainability.
Most strategy theorists argue that firms can achieve a competitive advantage that endures over
time, enabling them to generate above-normal profits. For example, industrial organization eco-
nomics argues that firms create sustainable competitive advantage by creating mobility barriers
that buffer competition and preserve economic rents (e.g. Caves and Porter, 1977). Under the
resource-based view, firms create sustainable competitive advantage by developing valuable, rare,
and, most importantly, inimitable resources, which preserve firm-specific advantages (Barney,
1991). Although a dynamic capabilities perspective acknowledges that firms operate within
dynamic environments, firms can sustain their competitive advantage through sensing, seizing, and
reconfiguring processes (Teece et al., 1997).
However, a sustainability perspective calls into question whether competitive advantage can be
sustained over a long period of time. Above-normal profits cannot be assured with a systems view,
given that systems tend to cycle through periods of munificence and impoverishment. This nonlin-
earity of complex systems means that above-normal profits cannot be prescribed or predicted. With
this in mind, we echo Shrivastava’s (1994) call for a “fundamental revision of organization studies
concepts and theories” (p. 721) by offering two suggestions for integrating business sustainability
more fully into business strategy research.

A dynamic systems view of strategy

Theories of the firm are inherently temporal (e.g. Zaheer et al., 1999), since all companies must
pace and sequence organizational actions. Nevertheless, there is a relatively limited body of strat-
egy research that addresses time at either the individual or firm level in strategy research

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Bansal and DesJardine 75

(Mosakowski and Earley, 2000), and even less that integrates time into the two levels of analysis
concurrently.
Most strategic management theories aim to describe organizational decisions and actions by
analyzing firm-level outcomes, but they ignore the larger system in which the firm is embedded.
For example, theories of competition tend to take a macro-perspective, exploring how strategy
affects the action and reaction of competitors. The resource-based view focuses on the firm level
of analysis, exploring the resources and capabilities that offer the firm a competitive advantage.
Corporate governance dives deeper still into the organization, exploring the relationship between
principals and agents that can help the firm achieve its desired outcomes. The tendency of most
strategic management theories to focus on a single level of analysis obscures system dynamics
over time, which is particularly salient in understanding the sustainability of the firm and the sys-
tem, and which will ultimately offer insights into the success of organizational strategies.
Organizational scholars often focus on a single level of analysis because the more proximate the
dependent variable to the independent variable, the more predictive the outcome (Kozlowski and
Klein, 2000). Consequently, researchers are better able to identify the relationships that will help
inform managers about good strategy. However, this approach also offers an incomplete picture of
organizations. Dynamic systems theories shift the lens to the bigger picture, so that the temporal
effects become more salient as the feedback mechanisms within and between levels of analysis
come into view. As a result, the firm’s outcomes are seen as part of a larger system of outcomes,
and issues of sustainability and organizational viability over time become important. Questions
about the availability of natural resources and product waste, the durability of stakeholder relation-
ships, and concerns for employee burnout start to dampen the inadvertent prescriptions that push
firms toward short-termism. Although dynamic systems models may not allow managers to as
easily predict and control as do current strategic management theories, they do place in sharper
focus issues that will ultimately affect organizational outcomes.

Firm performance that captures long-term value

Strategy researchers often use financial performance to measure the outcomes of business strategy,
usually via accounting, market-based, or growth measures. Accounting measures quantify profit-
ability through metrics like annual net income, which is calculated by subtracting costs from rev-
enues over a given period. Often net income is normalized by the size of an investment or firm
assets or equity (return on investment (ROI), return on asset (ROA), or return on equity (ROE)).
Market-based measures include share price or earnings per share and growth measures include
changes in size over time.
Each measure collapses data that are recorded over time into a single number, which removes
the temporal dimension. Although accounting-based performance measures are historical, they
aggregate revenues and costs into a single point in time. The share price also collapses income
flows over time into a single figure that reflects the net present value (NPV) of discounted future
cash flows. Even mixed market-based and accounting measures, such as Tobin’s q (market value
of the firm’s asset relative to its replacement cost) or economic value added (the value that the firm
creates beyond the market return demanded for its risk profile), remove time and are collapsed into
a single number. In fact, market measures that look far into the future use discount rates so that
future earnings are valued less than present earnings, whereas sustainability scholars aim to give
equal or more value to the future. At the heart of most strategic performance measures are assump-
tions that might be at odds with sustainability.
By emphasizing single-dimension financial performance measures, strategy “fail[s] to incor-
porate the temporal assumptions of individual or firm-level actors” (Mosakowski and Earley,

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76 Strategic Organization 12(1)

2000: 803). Even if market measures accurately represent future cash flows, there is no way of
assessing the temporality of that flow. The effect of compounding is that high earnings in the
distant future, discounted at a lower rate, often drive the same share price as moderate earnings
in the near future. NPV is a similarly flawed measure in that it awards higher values to projects
with more immediate payoffs, especially when yield curves slope upward. NPV risks overvalu-
ing the short-term and systematically undervaluing investments with longer payoff horizons,
despite the possibility that such projects may produce greater overall value to the firm. Because
money is fungible across time, many strategic performance measures lose the informational
value that time holds.
Sustainability research calls for a wider measure of firm performance that accommodates time-
based information: one that can convey not only the firm’s profitability at a point in time but also
its sustainability over time. One promising approach, for example, is organizational resilience,
which deals with the ability of systems to overcome shocks. For four decades, ecologists have been
exploring the resilience of ecosystems to understand how changes in traits affect the health of the
entire system over the long term (Holling, 1973). Much like dynamic capabilities, such as absorp-
tive capacity and learning, resilience is “sticky” and path-dependent, so that it emerges over time.
Systems build resilience through periods of munificence and impoverishment, and lose resilience
when pushed past their thresholds. In contrast, profitability measures aggregate firm performance
over a period of time and can be widely unstable and not predictive of the firms’ sustainability.

Mainstreaming sustainability in strategy

Even though sustainability has fast become the fashion, short-termism is increasingly the practice.
Yet, short-termism is not sustainable, nor is it a good strategy. There is little debate that strategic
management and organizational theories can benefit by accommodating time more fully in deci-
sion making. In so doing, strategy will integrate sustainability.
The impact of this integration could be profound. The bitter contest between business and soci-
ety will abate when time is incorporated in strategy and organizations. And impact on society
comes into sharper focus when the long-term impacts of strategic decisions are considered, because
longer term investments tend to align business with society. Sustainability, therefore, can contrib-
ute to responsibility, so that responsible practices are seen as part of good strategy, and not just
peripheral to it.
Sustainability is more than just a fad. It is surfacing a new paradigm that acknowledges the
complexity of systems and the inequities or imbalances that can undermine their sustainability.
Sustainability is diffusing across all disciplines, from ecology to art, and agriculture to architecture.
It challenges decision makers not just to manage resources at a point in time, but manage resources
across time. By incorporating time, it also recognizes that the future is not always knowable and
controllable, but that such uncertainty is acceptable when systems are resilient.
Paul Polman may appear to be a maverick among the CEOs of the world’s largest corporations,
but he is not alone. He is one of a growing number of prominent leaders who think similarly,
including Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos. Together, these leaders are challenging the assumptions
central to strategy. Buffet argues against earnings guidance and frequent earnings announcements,
which they claim distract managers from thinking long term. And, even though Amazon operates
in an industry that shifts quickly, Bezos’ annual letter to shareholders advises them to think long
term. In Wired magazine, Bezos says,

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Bansal and DesJardine 77

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of
people … Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never
otherwise pursue. (Levy, 2011)

With industry leaders trying to buck the trend to short-termism, it is about time that strategy more
fully integrated sustainability.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

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Author biographies
Pratima Bansal is the Canada Research Chair in Business Sustainability at the Ivey Business School, Western
University (London, Canada). She also holds the Taylor/Mingay Chair in Business Sustainability. She is
interested in how time, space, and scale can shed light on business strategy to contribute to sustainability. Her
research has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Journal
of International Business Studies, among others. She has just completed a 3-year term as an Associate Editor
at the Academy of Management Journal. She also founded and directs the Network for Business Sustainability,
which aims to bridge research and practice. Address: Ivey Business School, Western University, 1255
Western Road, London, ON N6G 0N1, Canada. [email: tbansal@ivey.ca]
Mark R. DesJardine is a PhD Candidate in Strategy and Sustainability at the Ivey Business School, Western
University (London, Canada). His research interests surround corporate short-termism. Drawing on his back-
ground in investor relations, Mark’s dissertation focuses on the challenges that financial market pressures
present for managers in creating long-term sustainable value. Address: Ivey Business School, Western
University, 1255 Western Road, London, ON N6G 0N1, Canada. [email: mdesjardine@ivey.ca]

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