Sustainability as a mindset: how to think sustainably in your life and in your business
There are business ideas that come to life within a week, others that take years to be developed. In my case, it was 2019 when I started to conceive what later became my consulting and training business.
After more than 10 years spent in project management within major companies, I felt the need to assess my career path. Studying for my second master’s degree (in Management and Marketing) within a sustainability-oriented school led me to plunge into the world of sustainable development.
Throughout my career, I found myself continually working on improving the existing, and I had already educated and trained myself on agile management, lean, quality, workplace well-being and collective intelligence. Getting involved with the main topics of sustainability gave me the opportunity to formalise concepts that I already owned but was not always able to convey in the right way.
My experience combined with personal research on these subjects has led me to make a fundamental observation: today there are many companies that operate sustainably despite not being aware of it.. I therefore wondered what it is that binds human beings to sustainability and how it is possible to conceive de facto sustainable projects without being obliged to do so.
During the preparation of my thesis and then during the creation of my company vision, I dug deep into the themes of ethics, values, responsibility, engagement, positive impact, and realised that the evolution of society has caused us to forget how to make use of resources that are innate in human beings.
Such issues need time, which we often do not have or decide not to devote to them. Attending a debate, reading a book, joining an association, volunteering: these are activities that often go by the wayside in a hyper-technological society that makes every answer available to us with one click.
Yet, and this is the spirit of this blog, sometimes you have to pause, take a step back and reflect, to be able to come to a reasoned decision. This rule applies to our life in general but also to our professional and entrepreneurial activity.
It was on the basis of these considerations that Business Diamonds and its method, Sustainability as a mindset, came to life.
The idea of Business Diamonds, and the logo is highly illustrative in this respect, is that businesses can bring to life ideas that are like diamonds: resilient, transparent, elegant and in harmony with the outside world.
The motto Sustainability as a mindset refers specifically to the method used in both consultancy and training: going to the foundations of sustainability, soliciting the interlocutor with specific techniques in order to stimulate parts of our brain that we are no longer used to employ. This method brings the entrepreneur back into a situation of balance with the values supporting his project as well as with his sustainable goals.
As a result, the sustainable transition is no longer seen as a duty but becomes a natural business progression, integrating a state of balance with the context inside and outside the company.
Easy to say at the time I am writing to you. The journey that led me to this conclusion was not that easy. Following my learnings on agile management, I thought that the most obvious thing to do was the following: try, check, correct, retry. I started out tby testing what I could offer and with a desire to understand the real needs of companies that were looking for sustinability without finding their way to it.
But all this was not enough: I made it my priority from the beginning to offer a service that was accessible to SMEs: flexible, responsive, intuitive, reasonably priced and customised. It is a fact that in today’s market this kind of service is mostly designed for major companies, which are also the ones from which the most revenue can be derived. Despite this evidence, recent updates of the European regulation on non-financial reporting have opened the eyes to the fact that there are thousands of small companies that have their own role but also their own impact not only on the economy but also on society and the environment.
Hence the need to offer a service that can prove useful (and usable) even for smaller companies.
Having established my goal, I called upon all available resources: the school where I obtained my master’s degree, my network, the services of the chamber of commerce, associations, books, studies, articles, surveys, private consultants, peers working in the field, just to name a few.
Once I understood what I wanted to do, I headed straight for my goal. And it paid off.
But I did not stop there. In addition to my business, I decided to found this blog with the intention of making my studies and contents available to a broader public: sustainable thinking has become a necessity for everyone, and it is by acting in this sense, by becoming aware of the problem and of our own potential, as well as by implementing specific actions that we can improve the lives of all human and non-human animals that populate the planet Earth.
For more information, feel free to contact me at the following email address: info@theslowcorner.com