News at the Center for Responsible Business and Leadership

Dear Responsible Leaders,

This newsletter brings some special announcements and first-hand news.

Last Wednesday, 13th of November, we launched the new Annual Report of the Observatory of the SDGs in Portuguese companies. The positive results from this year make us feel extremely enthusiastic and expectant about the future. This public event also marked my debut as the new Executive Director for our Center while our founder and mentor – Nuno Moreira da Cruz – steps into a new role as Dean for Executive Education at our School.

My role in this new phase of the Center will be to deep dive into our mission and re-ignite the energy of the Center as a producer of knowledge and practical tools for companies to prosper as Responsible Businesses. This mission is being fully supported by our founding partner – BP - and its ever-supporting team led by Sílvia Barata, who always holds up our optimistic, but not na?ve, vision of “Having a society where we have only Responsible companies, led by Responsible leaders.”

For that, and considering a global context of extreme instability and some step-backs from many companies (moved by shareholders and short-term demands), our efforts will be very clear: make it evident for companies that betting on a Sustainable Strategy is the best economic and financial option for them. This effort will make us prove the Business case for action of sustainability, showing that companies can have strong sustainable strategies if they are guided by a deep sense of Purpose and have Responsible Leaders guiding their paths. This triple-focused ‘guide for action’ will keep inspiring us to serve companies in Portugal and abroad in their sustainability path, not only to be sustainable, but also to prosper in the markets as leaders of the future. For this great mission ahead, we are very open to partnerships of all kinds, so let us know if you believe we can create value together!

Indeed, one of the projects where our Center is creating more of what we can call ‘shared value’ is the Observatory of the SDGs in Portuguese companies. This project was launched in 2021, with the support of BPI and Funda??o “la Caixa”, and since then, we have just kept expanding more and more our activities. We started with an annual report, and today we have activities also including research notes, practical tools for companies to advance the SDG Agenda, good practices, educational moments, personalized feedback, networking moments, and a strong community of companies that also makes this project the strongest database about sustainability and the private sector in our country. The project, recognized in 2023 by the United Nations as one of the 25 best practices in the world developed by academic institutions, is nowadays at the forefront of the value creation strategy of our Center.

This year, even surprisingly for many of us, companies keep increasing their alignment with the SDG agenda and Sustainability (when this alignment was already high), and the data collected allows us to get seven main conclusions:

1. The strategic alignment of companies and the SDGs increased;
2. This increase is particularly evident in Large companies (LC), resulting in a larger gap between Large Companies and SMEs;
3. In the case of Large Companies, the gap between their intentions to implement the SDGs and the effective implementation decreased to almost zero. This shows a high implementation. However, this gap remains for SMEs;
4. Companies keep aligning with the same kind of SDGs, not changing in relevant ways their sustainability ambitions for the social, economic, and environmental objectives of the last year;
5. The most important barriers to implementing the SDGs are lack of knowledge of the SDGs and lack of knowledge on how to implement the Goals, but also their (distant) language for business (for Large companies) and lack of resources (in the case of SMEs);
6. Economic motivations to implement the SDG agenda increased. Talent caption and retention became the major motivation for SMEs;
7. Sustainability Reporting and SDG reporting increased.

Just so you have in mind some of our data, this year, we concluded that the majority of Large Companies (87,9%) ?and SMEs (66,7%) perceive the SDGs as a business opportunity. They also consider the SDGs in their strategic decision-making process (79,3% for LC? and 66,7% for SMEs). Moreover, 98,3% of the LC and 13,6% of SMEs publish a Sustainability Report. They also refer to the SDGs more than in the previous year: 93% for LC and 72,2% for the SMEs. Not surprisingly, but the good news is that 86,2% of our LCs (67,2% last year) and 16,7% of SMEs (7,4% last year) also know well the new reporting law requirements (CSRD) and have someone responsible for their implementation.

If you want to know more about this project and our 3rd Report, you can always check our complete Report .

We will keep you in the loop regarding our upcoming news. Another one, just to announce, is that we will have a newsletter per month dedicated to scientific evidence of the Business Case for Action for Sustainability. Hope you will enjoy and learn a bit from that. We promise to keep producing knowledge for your use and learm, and to keep proving to the world that Sustainability is the Strategy for Success. ?

Have a great and impactful week!

Filipa Pires de Almeida , Executive Director Center for Responsible Business & Leadership

Indeed, sustainability is not an option anymore, and as Paul Polman mentions: “It is better to make the dust than eat the dust!”