Business Sustainability: It’s About Time to Future-Proof Growth

Abstract

To achieve a sustainable competitive advantage, proactive managerial and leadership reactions are required in an organization that integrates the strategic intent, operations processes and corporate culture with long term institutional goals. Such alignment generates a high level of performance, resilience and ultimately delivers sustainable results against fast evolving environment dynamics and thereby supports the foundation of long-term success.

This study clarifies the concept of sustainability as it shows the character of the temporal dimension that distinguishes it from responsibility and similar concepts. Subsequently, the authors suggest that the widespread failure to consider time in strategic management has led to short termism - a phenomenon that fundamentally undermines sustainability. The paper concludes by specifying the directions for future research that will seek more fully to integrate sustainability into the strategic formulation process in the hope of creating the conditions that will allow business entities and society to flourish simultaneously over successive generations.