Greensight Guide
As senior leaders on the board and in the C-suite, you know a problem cannot be solved until it’s understood. Sustainability is the defining challenge of our times. Greensight helps company directors, the C-suite and leaders by:
- Simplifying the alphabet soup of sustainability jargon into board language
- Providing references, infographics, explanatory tables and checklists
- Framing four typologies for business sustainability readiness
- Clearly outlining sustainability governance and accountabilities for boards and C-suites
Worldwide, regulations changing your accountability and exposure are in place or in the pipeline. Investors, who increasingly care about sustainability and its impact on the quality of the business and its valuations, are asking pointy questions. Customers and employees are, too.
As leaders, how do you get everyone onboard for the sustainability transition? How do you get measurable results that address both environmental concerns and financial needs? How do you ensure you have the right attitudes, culture, and governance in place to thrive, not just survive, in the world of tomorrow? Greensight is your answer to these challenges.
About the Author + Joanne
Joanne Flinn is an award-winning global business advisor with over 25 years of board experience. Twice a TEDx speaker and former country head for Financial Services Consulting at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Joanne works with boards, chairs, and C-suites to integrate sustainability, strategy, and culture for business results. She facilitates workshops, leads masterclasses, and speaks on business sustainability, performance, and how to apply Greensight for business results in your organisation.
From our Advance Readers
In this highly accessible Greensight guide, board members and senior management gain a comprehensive road map detailing what they must consider and where they must lead..
Every boardroom should have a copy; every chair should build governance discussions around it; and it should be required reading for every director and every CEO.
At last, a how-to manual on sustainability that prepares company directors for converting today’s voluntary disclosures to tomorrow’s preconditions for corporate survival.
Greensight allows directors to become proactive champions for a healthier planet, whilst leading their companies to long-term, sustainable profits.
As organizational leaders and boards become increasingly aware of the complexity of the sustainability agenda, they can feel overwhelmed. This is where Joanne’s book is essential. A simple but not simplistic, practical guide for organizational directors and leaders to understand the foundational role sustainability (people, planet, and profit) plays in governance. For leaders who want to ensure they are approaching and embedding this into the essence of their responsibilities and the fabric of good governance, Greensight is a must read!
Greensight give leaders insights on how to turn good intentions into impactful action. With the magnitude of challenge every board faces, this easy-to-read book distills the essences of change management and contextual foresight into an actionable handbook for directors and other leaders.
The urgency of the challenge and Joanne’s elegant clarity for simplified action will help you start now. Do not await perfection or universal accounting regulations, thus wasting time we don’t have while the planet burns. It is better start now with Greensight and learn from doing our best.
This great book deciphers the complexity of the inevitability of sustainability. It is perceptive, well researched, and cogently argued. The alphabet soup within ESG has never been clearer. A straightforward, intelligent road map to mitigate existential risks!
A must-read for boards, the C-Suite, and management.
Sustainability will be the single biggest trend shaping our future on the planet in the decade ahead. We must look at it as an opportunity to transform our approach to economics as we transition from the current linear systems and adopt circular approaches. Greensight provides an effective framework to guide this transition into a new way of thinking, where ESG is an integral risk and growth framework to adopt for organizations. Immensely readable and outlines a practical approach.
The sustainability imperative requires urgent decisiveness from every corporate leader. Decisiveness can only be attained through clarity of the relevant issues and risks. Greensight provides this clarity, cutting through the complexity, jargon, and shifting sands of this critical topic. By shedding light on the knowns and the unknowns that every organization must contend with, this practical book is overflowing with mission-critical, generous, and actionable advice. An important contribution to the field of leadership and sustainability.
This timely, well-structured book addresses something I have seen first-hand—that boards (like many people) have their “general” understanding of ESG and their own biases around what they think that means for business. Greensight takes one on a useful journey of learning what the actual state of play is, what sustainability means, and how one ought to be approaching it—especially as a director. I recommend and advise all directors and prospective directors to read this book to understand this important issue. Frankly all senior managers in companies ought to read it, too!
Greensight is a book for the times, as the broad theme of sustainability refashions business behavior and actions for stakeholders and guardians of governance. What is great about the book, is Joanne’s clear sighted exposition of sustainability and where we are now, leading into how environment and business behavior is evolving with clear thoughts on focused action. This book is a must read for today’s business leader.
Written by a director for directors, this book will help you communicate sustainability clearly and effectively to business minded leaders—so that you get your organization in action behind you!
If you want to get your business partners, suppliers, and network aligned with your sustainability efforts, give them Greensight. This way not only you but your entire supply chain will know what to do to stay on procurement lists, get referrals, and be future fit.
Detailed Reviews
Joanne Flinn’s Greensight is, in my mind, the most important book to guide business leaders at this point in time:
When we are all in danger of wallowing in the economic and geopolitical implications of war in Europe; when we are in the process of emerging from a debilitating pandemic that has impacted the health and economic performance of countries and companies the world over; when we are finally facing up to the realities of the climate emergency after ignoring all the early warning systems for 20 years or so—along comes the insight and practical advice that company directors need to address what’s coming.
Addressing climate change and adopting sustainable practices have been conveniently kicked into the long grass by businesses large and small that prefer to wait for governments to tell them what to do, by way of laws, regulations, and even taxes. These are coming.
Here’s your chance to get on top of it. Start moving in the right direction. All the help you need is here. Read it and act.
In Greensight – The Sustainability Guide for Company Directors, Joanne Flinn, provides a great reference for boards starting on their journey, or looking for structure in their sustainability road map.
While this book is suitable for mid-sized and large corporate boards, there is plenty that a small company board or entrepreneur can apply.
Note: this book is not a step-by-step guide for managing the media after a sustainability catastrophe! Instead, we are provided with succinct guidance to create a culture and structure a plan that will reduce the risk of such events.
The book highlights early on that, while sustainability may be a tool to set oneself apart, sustainability will, in the long term, be business as usual. This is a critical concept to fully appreciate. It is one that is likely, in time, to be forced on slow movers by way of tariffs, legislation, and taxes.
Much of the book is devoted to the considerations necessary for a board developing the business plan for a sustainable future, with extended analysis around stakeholder management and the roles of various C-suite members.
While covering core topics such as scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, it also touches briefly on wider topics such as plastics and biodiversity. Perhaps most importantly, Greensight takes time to consider the implications for cost of capital and profitability.
Marrying the need to meet shareholder expectations and to satisfy a range of stakeholders has always been challenging, but today under ever-increasing public scrutiny, company boards have to stay ahead of the game.
It is rare in business that an industry follower or laggard can overnight become a leader, without some revolutionary development. Right here and now, there is the opportunity to be the green leader for a given industry, to innovate in a sustainable way. Joanne Flinn provides a road map we would all do well to at least consider.
As an investment lead, a strategic advisor, and a board director, I have worked for over two decades to enable investment and delivery of sustainable, resilient, and inclusive infrastructure and services across Asia and the world.
As the pace of change and volatility has accelerated, board directors and company leaders are putting more and more thought and resources into strategically future proofing our companies and their investment programs. In fact, to stay at the forefront in terms of risk management, regulatory compliance, market considerations, and even reputation, companies both big and small are also realizing that it is no longer optional but essential to put sustainability planning and action into the central part of our board agenda.
However, a key stumbling block is a lack of internal expertise to make sense of the mesh of regulations, criteria, and frameworks that have mushroomed in recent years. Even for investment and sustainability professionals, the rapid evolution of ESG nomenclature and proliferation of standards in recent years has it made it difficult to keep up and report against them to the various ratings providers.
Reading Joanne Flinn’s new book Greensight reminded me just why she’s so good. The book is a timely and authoritative synthesis of all the latest tools, frameworks, and action points on ESG, told in well-packaged and actionable bites. At the same time, Joanne writes in a fun and user-friendly style peppered with examples from her own extensive experience as a strategy consultant and a board chair. She looks at how things have evolved, but also peers round the bend to give a glimpse of what is likely to come.
There are checklists of useful framing questions that you, as a board director or CEO/CXO, can ask of yourselves and your team to get up to speed very quickly. And since she has taken care to offer frameworks and diagrams that are MECE (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive), this book is both a primer to get you started and a reference book you will dip into again and again. Boards and management would do well to buy Greensight and hand it out to their executives!