Why sustainability is key for a company’s survival

Often people have it in their minds that profit and sustainability are incompatible, but I think nothing could be further from the truth.

I actually think the exact opposite, that sustainability and profitability are interconnected in the long term. In fact, I think that ultimately there can be no profitability, even in the medium term, without thinking about sustainability.

Here’s why:

Sustainability means efficiency, and so does profit

The market naturally looks for efficiency, and this is what drives things like technological innovation forward. In fact, it could be said that the profit motive has had a lot to do with a lot of the technologies that have been extremely beneficial to the human race over the past century.

A hundred years ago, coal was still common for heating people’s living spaces in cold weather. Today, we have much better alternatives. Today, they have been replaced by methods that are superior in every way, but, above all else, more efficient.

In turn, coal back in its day was a huge innovation, which saved people from using biomass as fuel. As good as a wood-oven pizza tastes, or as romantic a blazing fire can be, we can be thankful that that’s no longer our only option for heating and cooking anymore!

Naturally, in the future we will have improved existing technologies and invested new ones that will make things even better, safer and cleaner. For example, can you imagine a world like the one described by the late author Robert Anton Wilson, where we have reliable wireless transmission of energy, allowing us to operate nuclear power plants from orbit?

Investors are smarter and more conscious than ever

Technology has brought us a lot of problems, but one definite positive side to the technology available to us at the time of this writing is that it has made us the most informed humans who have ever existed.

In the investing world, this is starting to have an amazing disruptive effect on whole industries. Today’s public companies are much more likely to be held accountable by their investors for how environmentally friendly they are, for example.

This means that many companies that are environmentally and socially conscious are being sought out by savvy investors these days. We are going to be seeing companies more and more focus on sustainable growth and profit as part of their core values in order to satisfy both their customers and their shareholders.