Advisor

Francesco Marsella, Petter Kilefors, Maximilian Scherr, Ralf Baron, Satya Easwaran

In this Advisor, we explore two trends uncovered by ADL’s 2024 “CEO Insights” study: CEOs plan to continue existing growth strategies and are increasing their growth investments.

Article

Cynthia Clark

The contemporary context of corporate responsibility involves a deep and wide set of concepts and tasks. Fundamentally, it involves working with multiple stakeholders and a range of disciplines. Managers then face decisions around how to take ownership of a number of company impacts throughout the value chain, including design, production, marketing, sales, and communications. And because corporate responsibility is tethered to calls for greater accountability, managers must also consider how their corporate governance framework serves to encourage, restrict, and ultimately shape the company’s relationship with society. In this issue of Amplify, we explore the conflicting pressures governments, shareholders, customers, and workforces are exerting on firms and their leaders in emerging corporate responsibility strategies involving ESG issues.

Article

Oana Branzei, Dusya Vera, Kimberley Young Milani

Oana Branzei, Dusya Vera, and Kimberley Young Milani take a deep dive into leadership in the eye of the “ESG storm.” The authors look at how today’s frames change tomorrow’s leaders and leadership, a critical aspect of the future of corporate responsibility. The stakes on leading responsibly have never been higher, they write, with leading business outlets warning companies about getting ESG “just right” while calling on leaders to “act purposefully.” How leaders solve this paradigm will change the future of corporate responsibility, say the authors. They then describe a framework that can help leaders see the future as the poly-activation of character dimensions and argue that as leaders activate a broader expanse of dimensions, including temperance, integrity, drive, and deep collaboration, their judgment becomes stronger, and additional futures open up. And as more character dimensions are exercised, the future’s leaders become more inclusive, collaborative, and sustainable — with or without the letters E, S, and G.

Article

Ryan Flaim, Maureen Wolff

Ryan Flaim and Maureen Wolff offer detailed advice on how to combat anti-ESG sentiment. Acknowledging that ESG has become a political tinderbox, the authors say companies can still reap the benefits of their ESG initiatives. They suggest a three-pronged solution that starts with closely aligning ESG goals with corporate strategies, as Trane Technologies and Adidas have done. Second, tell a cohesive, integrated ESG story, including how your company refers to these efforts (use “ESG” or maybe go with “impact” or “sustainability”), using KPIs and case studies and ensuring your metrics are validated. The latter is not only the best antidote to greenwashing accusations, it’s also been shown to lead companies to make more carbon-emission reductions than companies that don’t externally verify their data. Third, Flaim and Wolff advise taking a proactive, creative approach to stakeholder engagement. One-on-one meetings with analysts and stewardship teams, ESG investor briefings (perhaps less controversially called “Sustainability Days”), and developing employee ambassadors could all be in the mix. Recent backlash doesn’t necessarily mean an ESG strategy isn’t relevant, assert the authors. Rather, by focusing on strategy, transparency, accountability, and performance, ESG can be a meaningful competitive advantage and an enabler of responsible business.

Article

Ryan Bouldin, Elizabeth Levy

Ryan M. Bouldin and Elizabeth Levy look at corporate responsibility through the lens of product design. The authors point out that when sustainability considerations are incorporated at the end of design, inefficiencies and excess costs often result. One reason these efforts come so late is that two-thirds of chief sustainability officers report through functions far from product decisions, such as corporate affairs, general counsel, or HR. Bouldin and Levy suggest a new framework for incorporating corporate responsibility into product design; its categories include equity and justice, transparency, health and safety impacts, circularity, and climate and ecosystem impacts. The authors explain how this method results in an inclusive design process that embodies corporate responsibility. Done this way, product design would include verifying worker protection, specifying greenhouse gas emissions alongside chemical and material-safety data, and choosing chemicals and materials for their lack of hazards. Finally, the authors note, although companies should be transparent about their circularity goals, they should not market their initial efforts as sustainable, as this could open them up to greenwashing claims.

Article

Punit Arora

Punit Arora considers how companies might live up to various environmental commitments, a topic where we need more insight. Arora takes us into the motivation behind corporate environmental disclosures — specifically the practices of greenwashing and “brownwashing” and their relationship to innovation. The author points to brownwashing firms, which are either content with their sustainability performance or hesitant to acknowledge it for fear of backlash. These firms don’t exhibit a significant appetite for what Arora calls “ecovation” (the relationship between environmental disclosure and environmental innovation). At the other end of the spectrum are “greenwashers,” companies that express false environmental commitments. Although the press is keen to report on these instances, Arora points out that we don’t yet have data on the long-term effects of greenwashing. What the author calls “green highlighting” may be the answer: a balance of substantive action with symbolic disclosures that research suggests makes firms more likely to live up to their environmental commitments.

Advisor

Subhasis Ray, Ritesh Kumar Dubey

The buzz around the circular economy is not new, but the pandemic and climate change have led to more serious discussions and activities for large companies like Apple, Nike, and Unilever. This Advisor explores how these companies and others are supporting circularity and communicating their progress.

Executive Update

Curt Hall

Technological and economic developments are accelerating the exploration of the cosmos and leading to the formation of a next-generation space economy that promises to significantly impact life on Earth and in outer space. This Amplify Update examines commercial developments in conjunction with key trends in emerging technologies and how they are helping to accelerate space exploration.

Advisor

Sylvester Kaczmarek

AI is increasingly being used for tasks in space like satellite repair, spacecraft maintenance, planetary-surface exploration, and data processing. However, there is a risk of system compromise, either through cyberattacks or internal failures. This Advisor explores AI-driven space systems and ways to mitigate the risks associated with them.

Advisor

Cynthia Clark

In this Advisor, Cynthia E. Clarke delves into climate strategies for boards of directors, including avoiding greenwashing, staying up to speed on potential regulatory changes, reporting on the risks of transitioning to net zero, and having a dedicated team accountable for ESG reporting to ensure information accuracy.

Advisor

Ani Melkonyan Gottschalk, Maximilian Palmié

This Advisor explores the relationship between urban density and transport-related energy consumption and offers strategies for decarbonizing urban transportation systems.

Article

Sk. Riad Bin Ashraf, Denis Daus, Tobias Kuester Campioni

Sk. Riad Bin Ashraf, Denis Daus, and Tobias Kuester-Campioni delve into transport-oriented development (TOD) by describing a proposal to municipal authorities in Dortmund, Germany, to help the city achieve its sustainable development objectives. Although Dortmund has a comprehensive public transportation system, it’s not convenient enough to discourage private car use, especially given the city’s urban sprawl. The proposal includes adding micromobility hubs at major transit points; installing AI-based adjustable bus routing; adding pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly infrastructure; and adding high-density, mixed-use development near transit hubs. Finally, the authors point to TOD projects in India, China, Indonesia, and Australia that can serve as examples for urban planners as they work on their sustainable development objectives.

Article

Kerstin Kopal, Dirk Wittowsky

Kerstin Kopal and Dirk Wittowsky holistically examine the interaction between societal benefits and public health aspects. As integrated as these functions are, public health concerns are usually included too late or not at all in urban planning processes today. The authors use a survey on walkability conducted in 2021 in Essen, Germany, to show how cities can identify key relationships between the built environment and healthy mobility behavior. The goal is to promote active mobility interventions by city planners; along the way, Kopal and Wittowsky describe how walkability data can be used by stakeholders like real estate companies and public transportation operators.

Article

François Joseph Van Audenhove, Hans Arby

François-Joseph Van Audenhove and Hans Arby look at recent MaaS trends and detail four causes for slow progress: lack of demand, offerings that don’t match demand, suboptimal enablement, and lack of viable business cases. The answer, they believe, lies in cities setting priorities to help extract value at the system level. Van Audenhove and Arby advocate for a comprehensive framework that includes framing dimensions (e.g., mobility patterns and system characteristics and creating the right conditions for mobility service providers) and enabling dimensions (e.g., integration support, regulations that allow open collaboration, and systems to ensure learnings from experimentation are extracted and shared). “One size fits all” is not the answer for MaaS, write the authors. Rather, comprehensive approaches and increased collaboration between public and private stakeholders are needed.

Article

Christian Müller, Jochen Gönsch, Louisa Albrecht, Max Staskiewicz

Christian Müller, Jochen Gönsch, Louisa Albrecht, and Max Staskiewicz explore dynamic pricing mechanisms for car-sharing services. Their data-driven model predicts future vehicle movements and the expected profit of each vehicle, then uses machine learning and AI to combine various data sources. This results in different prices for the same vehicle for different customers, depending on their location, thus rebalancing cars in the pickup/drop-off zone without the operator having to relocate cars (adding emissions). According to the authors, an extensive computational study and a case study showed the approach outperforms all benchmarks, saves providers operational costs, and improves sustainability via clear decarbonization benefits.

Article

Andrea Lorenzini

Andrea Lorenzini explains how SUMPs can help local and regional authorities meet targets set out in the European Green Deal. Six laboratories (in Belgium, Romania, the UK, Lithuania, Italy, and Greece) were set up to show how cities can develop the next generation of SUMPs and “put mobility at the heart of sustainable urban transformation.” These labs are finding a need for strong coordination and collaboration at the local and regional levels (including cross-sectoral links), and Lorenzini describes what this could look like. He points out that achieving net zero carbon by 2025 will require radical changes in transport and governance, followed by a periodic realignment of local planning objectives, partnerships, and frameworks with the high-level policy goals set at EU, national, and regional levels.

Article

Ani Melkonyan Gottschalk

Innovative technologies such as MaaS, blockchain, big data, Internet of Things, augmented reality, AI, autonomous driving, and digital twins are being implemented to decarbonize transportation and mobility systems. This issue of Amplify highlights the potential of technologies and new actors to develop mobility services so innovative that they can transform the current system into a more widely accepted, sustainable, resilient, and integrated model.

Advisor

Curt Hall

GenAI appears to be lowering the barrier to entry for developing sophisticated cyberattacks and scams. However, the technology also offers solutions to help meet the threats imposed by hackers, cybercriminals, and state actors. This Advisor examines the evolving GenAI threat and solution landscape.

Advisor

Natacha Prudent, Mary Crossan

DEI has evolved from “nice to have” to a mission-critical component ensuring an organization’s progress and competitiveness in the global market. The questions in this Advisor serve as a guide to activate transcendence and drive, which are important character traits for leading DEI efforts.

Advisor

Francesco Marsella, Petter Kilefors, Maximilian Scherr, Ralf Baron, Satya Easwaran

In this Advisor, we explore a key trend revealed through ADL's CEO Insights research analysis: while a shift has occurred in ESG priorities, approaches to it have matured, and most leaders still see its importance.