Are Many Other Companies Also Competing on Sustainability?

In this book I distinguish between business competitive strategy and business corporate strategy. I rely on the watershed thinking of the strategy author, lecturer, and consultant Michael Raynor. In his seminal book, The Strategy Paradox, Raynor says that competitive strategy “is about creating and capturing value.”³ It is focused on short-and intermediate-term decisions taken to best position a company’s products and services as the solutions of choice in the minds of target customers. As such, competitive strategy is crafted and employed by the business units.

By contrast, corporate strategy “may primarily be about the identification and management of strategic risk.”⁴ So corporate strategy entails risk assessments like “What happens if oil reaches $200 per barrel, carbon is priced at $50 per ton, or an automotive fuel standard of 50 miles per gallon is reached and enacted globally?” As we will see throughout this book, employing sustainability in competitive strategy requires including sustainability issues separately in both competitive and corporate strategy processes; it also requires that competitive and corporate strategy-planning processes work jointly.