Conviction is no longer the problem
For a decade, sustainability had to argue for its place in the business. That debate is largely over. The harder problem, which almost no one has solved, is capture: the returns are genuine and repeatable across operations, supply chains and the cost of capital, yet most of them never reach the bottom line.
What separates the firms that get hold of this value from the rest is almost never ambition. They have the targets, the intent, and usually the raw data too. What they lack is a way to use it. That data sits scattered across systems that were never built to speak to each other, still less to the people allocating capital, so it never becomes a number a CFO can act on. Fixing that takes two things: the digital capability to turn scattered inputs into decision-grade figures, and the governance to carry them through.
The capability that decides the outcome
This is the heart of what SE Advisory Services’ analysis with IESE Business School’s Institute for Sustainability Leadership described as a capability multiplier: the value a company captures is the value at stake, times its capability to act on it. That capability rests on governance and digital systems. Because measuring exposure and acting on it both run on digital infrastructure, digitalisation is the lever that decides the result.