For its report, ‘Four Steps to Lead in Sustainability,’ Bain & Company surveyed 100 organisational leaders across 11 countries and eight industries to learn how the MENA region can advance its sustainability agenda.
From this, research highlighted the key challenges, best practices and four essential steps to help organisations progress on sustainability.
These four steps are:
- Link sustainability ambitions to corporate strategies
- Engage cross-functional teams
- Activate achievable sustainability missions, and
- Drive innovation and rapidly scale sustainable business solutions
Speaking about this, Samer Bohsali, Senior Partner who leads the Public Sector practice at Bain & Company Middle East, said: “We found that while 70% of organizations in MENA say they integrate sustainability into their business models, only 3% are on track to achieve their sustainability goals. The gap between ambition and action occurs despite universal agreement on the case for change. More than 90% of executives believe their core business and operating models need to change to operate more sustainably.”
Wissam Yassine, partner and leader in the Sustainability practice at Bain & Company Middle East added: “As we asked ourselves ‘how do we bridge this massive gap between ambition and action’ we identified 4 things that best-in-class companies are doing differently which we summarized in the ‘LEAD’ framework.”
“L stands for Linking sustainability to strategy. E for Engaging the full organization from the board to the frontline. A is about Activating sustainability through clear implementable missions. And lastly, D encourages Driving innovation.”
Lana Kahaleh, a senior manager at Bain & Company Middle East, noted: “The majority organizations surveyed believe government policies and interventions are critical for them to improve their sustainability practices, examples of which include capacity building and training and national standards.”
Read the full report here.
