Summary of A Six Sigma Approach to Sustainability

Corporate social responsibility matters more now than ever.

Boosting a company’s social-responsibility profile can ensure its longevity. Social responsibility means adopting institutional behavior that will sustain a pool of customers and employees – plus access to suppliers and resources – for centuries.

With the rise of social media, customers and investors gained more power in influencing corporate behavior and more ways to respond to corporate activities. Public perception of a firm’s behavior can attract and keep customers, employees and investors – or it can have the opposite effect. A community can be welcoming or hostile toward a company that wants to set up shop locally, depending on the business’s social-responsibility profile.

Strive for a level of sustainability measured not in decades, but in centuries. Consider the Japanese construction company Kongo Gumi, which began in 578 AD and stayed in business for the next 1,500 years. When you evaluate potential sustainability initiatives, ask if they’re sufficiently robust enough to keep you in business for 15 centuries.

In the past, industry lacked an agreed-on definition of social...