Moreover, L’Oréal possess the characteristics of what we defined in the literature review as a
“Liberated Organization”; its high resource availability together with its high flexibility allowed to embrace such a visionary process and, so far, to implement it successfully (Figure 4, p.42).
In addition, as explained in the literature review section, we compared the “Purpose” P of performance to Vision, for the reason that these two concepts are highly interrelated. Once a clear vision toward sustainability is developed, the company needs to identify how to reach this sustainable development.
If monitoring can be described as the capability that enables an organization to define where to go, more specifically, to form and shape a vision (i.e. I am in point A and I want to go to point B.), “Seizing” can be described as the strategic plan through which the organization decides how to move from A to B (i.e. “Sharing Beauty with All” program).
In addition, as from the definition of Wu et al. (2013), “Seizing” concerns the company’s ability to design strategic plans to navigate the development of cutting-edge sustainable initiatives and, at the same time, to encourage employees to share best practices and brand-new sustainable ideas.
From Graph 1 (p.73) emerges that this capability is most frequently linked to Process. This makes perfect sense, as this capability is more concerned with driving change and enabling the company to modify its processes toward a sustainable future.
However, the second highest number in the graph is “people” and this is the reason why we decided to link seizing to this change management pillar. Indeed, if a modification process has to be implemented and managed, the people involved in it and their reaction will need to be managed synchronously.
At this point, once the organization has decided which strategic plan to implement, the successive step is to reconfigure the internal resources in order to reach the desired future. In fact, the organization needs to modify the internal processes of the organization and to receive
“support for change” from the people involved in the process.
These two pillars (people and processes) must be managed simultaneously, as it is meaningless to modify the organization’s routines and processes if the people involved will oppose resistance. Vice versa, it is aimless to aspire at convincing people that the shift is needed, without changing processes in order to achieve it.
Finally, as we could observe from Graph 1 (p.73), “Reconfiguring” is mainly linked to
“process”. This seems to be perfectly reasonable due to the intrinsic processual nature of this capability, concerned with the modification of the company’s processes and practices.
However, from the definition of Reconfiguring itself and from the words of our interviewees, this capability continuously influences all the three change management pillars, as it is concerned with auditing and risk analysis, with periodic measures of the efficiency levels and the management of external factors that may cause negative sustainable impact through all the value chain.
Therefore, as a result of these analyses of management processes, people will revise their attitudes and beliefs, processes will need to be re-adjusted from time to time and vision will need to be re-shaped if discovered that the company focuses on matters that are not entirely critical for external stakeholders.
A practical example of this model at work was handed out to us from Mr Bo Lund Mathisen, who explained how the Group recently substituted the gates at the warehouse.
They’re departure point A was the heat waste that occurred every time a truck approached the warehouse. In fact, the difference in dimension between the building and the truck was responsible for the heat loss, especially in winter. They’re desired arrival point B was a reduction in heat loss. What they did was to investigate the possible ways to solve this problem (monitoring) and formerly to decide to build a seal that inflates around the truck (Seizing). This modified the inbound delivery process and the procedure by which the employees empty the trucks (Reconfiguring).
The result was a reduction in heat loss, in heating expenses and an improved temperature in the warehouse. With only one initiative, they touched all the three points of the triple bottom line: they reduced the CO2 emissions (environmental), they improved employees’ working conditions (social) and they reduced the warehouse expenses (economic).
The model we developed can be virtually multiplied by all the initiatives L’Oréal has undertaken since its first commitment to sustainability (Figure 8); in fact, this is only one operational example of how the organization is working: one minor component of a broad scenario that is “Sharing Beauty with All” program.
Figure 8: L’Oréal Sustainability Agenda
The strategic program “Sharing Beauty with All” helps the single countries and country managers prioritize projects: now, when they are obliged to decide between investing in different initiatives, they give precedence to the sustainable ones, as Mr. Mathisen told us during the warehouse visit.
As shown in the example above, L’Oréal demonstrated how the paradox between profitability and responsibility has become redundant and irrelevant. They proved to have a certain set of dynamic capabilities that enabled them to drive a shift toward sustainability without eroding economic performance.
What we can argue is that sustainability is “just” another strategic opportunity, as was the integration of technology into business or the “digitalization” a number of years ago. The ability of an organization to survive to the dynamics of the market depends on its capability to anticipate, manage and exploit these novel trends: sustainability is the state-of-the-art of business and companies that are not investing in it are at risk of perishing. This is also what has been declared by the L’Oréal’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Alexandra Palt, during the
“Annual General Meeting” in 2015: “Sustainable development and economic performance are not a contradiction in terms. Our Sharing Beauty With All program favours employees’
retention and talent acquisition. We are ready for the future because we are already responsive to its environmental and societal changes. With Sharing Beauty With All we are preparing an environment that will allow L’Oréal to over perform the market over the long-term”.
It is obvious, however, that companies need to pick between the infinite numbers of possibilities that sustainability presents and they need to accomplish that by listening to all their stakeholders. Moreover, if they aspire to succeed in this process, they are compelled to pose sustainability at the core of their strategy and not to face it with an “end-of-pipe”
approach.