Peter A. Soyka - Creating a Sustainable Organization: Approaches for Enhancing Corporate Value Through Sustainability

Peter brings together the wide-ranging aspects of present and future organizations to bolster environmental, social, and governance (ES&G) performance, presenting a clean and clear understanding of organizational sustainability. There are two ways to take over the world in business within the income statement and balance sheetcash and profits! Peter presents anecdotal and factual evidence for translating typical ES&G data into financial knowledge, ultimately to decrease bad costs, optimize use of assets, and increase the profitability of revenue streams.

Michael R. Pisarcik, Director, Environment & Safety Management Systems, Sara Lee Corporation

Peter Soykas book Creating a Sustainable Organization offers an informative, comprehensive look at many foundational issues for the emerging field of sustainable business management.

Carol Singer Neuvelt, Executive Director, National Association for Environmental Management (NAEM)

Peter Soyka is a master at bringing clarity to concepts, deconstructing the labels in vogue, and offering a multidisciplinary, grounded perspective that links socially responsible investing to corporate sustainability. He also diagnoses the changes, challenges, demands, and expectations of the paradigm shift involving the EHS/sustainability and financial communities. This book is for organizations seeking to catalyze sustainability thinking and practice, develop a sustainability DNA, and stimulate the right conditions for value creation.

Donna Vincent Roa, PhD, ABC, CSR-P, Managing Partner & Chief Strategist, Water Sector Communication Expert, Vincent Roa Group, LLC

Peters message is clear: Sustainability leadership is now synonymous with business leadership. The book is a clear roadmap to leverage sustainability thinking to create shareholder value.

Tim Mohin, Corporate Responsibility Director, Advanced Micro Devices; author of Changing Business from the Inside Out: A Treehuggers Guide to Working in Corporations

Ive worked with Peter for more than 25 years. This is exactly the kind of work Id expect from him. Its a book for current and aspiring sustainability professionals, and moves the discussion from the emotional, green, crunchy granola appeal of sustainability to the argument that appeals to the brain. Creating a Sustainable Organization presents the theory, the evidence, and the organizational case underpinning the argument for green; it shows why caring about sustainability is good for the bottom line and the economy as well as the earth.

Lawrence G. Buc, President, SLS Consulting, Inc.

Peter Soyka conducts a full-field scan of sustainability in the marketplace as well as a full-body organizational, behavioral, and historical scan of how corporations are responding to it. In a dispassionate and thorough treatment, he makes a reasoned case that the interrelatedness and magnitude of the sustainability/ES&G issue requires an integrative corporate response. There is a sea change coming. Companies and managerial professionals need more dialogue to meet this change with a shared understanding of sustainability. Getting people to understand sustainabilitys interconnections is a core challenge Soyka diagnoses well through a come-let-us-reason-together approach and tone. He more than achieves his purpose of demonstrating how the complex nature of sustainability and the show-me character of the corporation can meet to mutual benefit and to societal and stakeholder gain. He achieves this not only with clarity in his arguments but with evidence from a wealth of field experience. His advice, frameworks, and approaches will help anyone serious about sustainability to promote it faster and better, and those who may not be, to become more so.

David J. Vidal, Director, Center for Sustainability, The Conference Board

With characteristic modesty, Peter Soyka says he is not a paradigm-busting pioneer or visionary. He is, on this particular, self-effacing point, simply wrong.

By admirably pursuing the aim of bridging the conceptual and semantic gaps that divide rather than unite witting and unwitting stakeholders in the business of sustainability and the sustainability of business, he provides a template that cannot but be of inestimable value to all such stakeholders: corporate executives, managers, employees, suppliers, distributors, and customers; sustainability professionals, scholars, students, advocates, and critics; government officials and administrators; financial analysts and investors; representatives of non-governmental organizations in the environmental, safety, health, business-commerce-trade, development, human rights, public interest, and educational fields; citizens, communities, and the media; and, yes, even specialists in the field of national security, robustly conceived.

By impressively achieving his aim, along the way heightening the sophistication of our understanding of sustainability, underscoring the essential importance of thinking and acting holistically, entreating us to assume a multidisciplinary posture, awakening us to the need for an entirely new repertoire of skills attuned to the 21st century, and advocating integrative approaches that cut across organizational, institutional, sectoral, national, and even international lines, he makes an enduring intellectual and operational contribution of truly strategic import.

Gregory D. Foster, Professor of National Security Studies; Director, Environment Industry Study, Industrial College of the Armed Forces, National Defense University

Approaches for Enhancing Corporate Value Through Sustainability

Peter A. Soyka

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2012 by Pearson Education, Inc.
Publishing as FT Press
Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458

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Printed in the United States of America

First Printing February 2012

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ISBN-10: 0-13-287440-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-13-287440-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Soyka, Peter Arnim, 1958
Creating a sustainable organization : approaches for enhancing corporate value through sustainability / Peter A. Soyka. -- 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-13-287440-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Organizational effectiveness. 2. Organizational change. 3. Sustainable development. 4. Investments--Environmental aspects. I. Title.