AMCE Negócios Sustentáveis: Corporate Sustainability on the Rise in Brazil

Interview with Ana Esteves, Founding Partner and Consultant at AMCE Negócios Sustentáveis (AMCE Sustainable Business)

How would you define the term “sustainability”?

Sustainability, in its origin, is a term which expresses the human quest for conditions that allows their permanence – and the presence of other forms of life necessary for their existence – on a long-term in the planet. In this sense, sustainability represents the demand of human beings by combining objective, and subjective conditions of survival and quality of life with more general conditions necessary for the preservation of life in their habitat.

However, in the organizational environment, sustainability often acquires formats that value pragmatism. There are two well-known approaches. One adopts as a language the so-called triple bottom line – and, more simply, proposes that the organization negotiates internally, and in the supply chain, goals that are able to create through time, a dynamic balance between economic, social and environmental outcomes. The other approach – which almost always shows up combined with the first, represents the effort to produce more using fewer resources, less power and generating less environmental impacts. Both are quite affordable to people who work in organizational environments because they adopt a simple and direct language and because tasks are reasonable, and susceptible to measurement. In addition, it conquers some extras in terms of organizational image.

Some organizations, largely because of the nature of their activity, adopt sustainability as the axis in their long-term strategies. For these organizations, in addition to their “homework” to improve performance in terms of the use of resources and energy, and the generation of less environmental impacts, there is the challenge in introducing a new business logic, in which the economic dependency holds great perusal of future scenarios and careful observation of social and environmental aspects socially legitimated. Sustainability, within these organizations, is built by collectives formed by different stakeholders, expressing an understanding that it is not possible to be “sustainable” alone. Relationships, rather than indicators, thus assume major importance. Innovation, rather than maintenance of standards, becomes essential. Ability to think, rather than simply delivering tasks, is a critical success factor.

Can profit be the only success indicator of a firm?

Profit is, traditionally, the main success indicator of an enterprise in a capitalist society, which is based on expected investment returns. People make assessments and projections and take important decisions based mainly on financial and economic indicators. As much as sustainability comes pointing social and environmental emergencies that need to be faced by everyone, the logic of capital has been prevalent when forwarding solutions, which may explain why the actions through which you cannot build any expectation of economic gain, have had historically a short lifespan.

However, it is known that the realization of profit in contemporary organizations is increasingly resulting from a complex of actions where sustainability has a decisive role. There is a fear that increases annually, from the destruction of economic value due to not knowing how to interpret and deal adequately with social and environmental demands that afflict contemporary society. Mostly investors have shown interest in the support of time and results of the combined actions, more than just the profit achieved. The assumption is that if administrators know how to deal effectively with the complexity, they have greater chances of maximizing profit. Therefore, today there is a set of indicators which reflect the success of a joint venture – and the profit realized in the period is no longer as important as it was.

Many companies are now promoting sustainable products. Do you think “sustainability” is reduced to being a trend nowadays?

An organizational plan built on sustainability needs to articulate with the references and the ongoing debate in society or it does not take place as proposed. Sustainability that only serves individual interests, and generally of low social significance, does not adapt into the world and, therefore, does not take a valid meaning to legitimize it. Today we cannot summarize sustainability as the reduction of resources or green products. People who still insist in this, do not understand anything. What is needed is an attitude for the preservation of life – perhaps this is now the main emergency to be faced – and a new purpose for organizations, which take people into consideration. It’s good to improve the performance on the use of resources, energy expenditure, and the prevention of pollution, but we need to review, as a society, our way of doing business because it has been harmful in many ways. Organizations that have had sustainability in the axis of their strategies already understood that, and know, everyone in their own way, what they need to change.

Could you give us some knowledge background on AMCE Negócios Sustentáveis?

AMCE was founded in 1997, at a time where sustainability was a topic restricted to lectures in small boards of entrepreneurs, executives and a few stakeholders. To describe better this scenario where everyone was still crawling, Accountability had just been created two years before in 1995, and the Institute Ethos was just opened in 1998. AMCE perhaps was the first Brazilian consultant company specialized in sustainability and certainly, the first to introduce the methodology of collective construction in the referral of sustainable solutions.

Today, AMCE Negócios Sustentáveis is a company which operates in the processes of organizational change and special projects within management, education and communication. Throughout the years, AMCE was the protagonist in many important realizations for the advance of this matter in Brazil: in 2000, we structured our first template of sustainability reports for the Ethos Institute and we did the first trial about diversity value for OIT, which we presented in a discussion board at the Global Dialogue in Hannover. In 2003, we made a report for UNICEF stating diversity for the first time, and we built the first performance indicators for involved organizations with implementations of principles of the Global Compact. In 2005, we built the social indicators for the Corporate Sustainability Index of the Sao Paulo’s Stock Exchange and, in 2007, we developed the project Vale do Paraiba’s Ecological Corridor, in association with Fibria, the Tomie Ohtake Institute, Ethos Institute, SOS Rain Forest, Oikos Institute and Santander Bank. Since its opening, AMCE has been involved with sustainability issues of the most important companies in Brazil.

What are your areas of actuation?

AMCE operates, mainly, in three areas: management, education and communication of sustainability. In management, we guide both the strategy and the building of sustainability solutions within our clients’ relationships with their stakeholders; in education, we build with our clients spaces for dialogue and learning that allow the inserting of sustainability perspective into organizational routine; and in communication we work with institutional placement, several sustainability reports involving many stakeholders and channels of communication.

What kind of sustainability projects are you working on now?

Today we are managing the repositioning strategy of an industrial company from a set of current sustainability references and we just delivered a sectorial report – integrating the results of different companies – and another one of a major media group. We are also involved in the guidance of a line of action focused on valuing diversity for a client, with studies about energy and the publication of two books: one for students and individuals interested in narrating the process of a company that introduced sustainability as the axis of its strategy and the other one for a more specialized audience, which can be summarized as a dialogue between philosophy and sustainability.

Can you tell us more about AMCE’s most important achievements?

I believe I already listed above the projects with bigger scope that we participated in. However, I cannot fail to mention that each project on sustainability is unique, built specifically for that circumstance, and in this sense, we think that all the work we have done with customers and partners is important regarding the expansion of consciousness, and we must act observing certain limitations of people and the environment, but that does not mean we are losing value. For example: the political development of sustainability in one of the biggest pension fund in Latin America, or even the relationship policy with the community, that involved representatives of the local community around the operational unities of a company working with cellulose and paper.

How do you see AMCE Negócios Sustentáveis 5 years from now?

At the moment we are working on repositioning AMCE. Organizations are already at another time. Their demands are more complex and more interesting and require differentiated knowledge. We are investing in working primarily with complex issues of sustainability – that offer better returns for our clients and the society. In addition, we are strengthening our activities in communication because we identify a certain stagnation in the agencies and difficulty for companies involved with sustainability to make their identity. In the field of education, we are starting to work with learning methods that value the exercise of thinking, an increasing requisite of companies that are more advanced and cannot continue to adopt simplified solutions to take care of the sustainability issues in their field. So, in five years from now we intend to keep working with more relevant and complex solutions in sustainability for the current issues.