The new report from WWF could hardly be hardly be more congenial to Actics. Although focused on sustainability branding and marketing strategies there’s a very short way from Actics’ ethical TQM like advice to ‘integrate your ethics into all parts of your company for better business performance’ to WWF’s advices to ‘integrate sustainability into all parts of your operation and unlock vast innovative and commercial potentials’.

Here’s a very lightly modified (most of this is quotes!) list of WWF advises we can very much agree to:

1. Observe and understand the values of your present and potential customers
2. Get your own house in order: improve your internal processes, from office management to production and logistics
3. From CSR to CSO: The Corporate Responsibility Function should be a driver of innovation. Focus on opportunities rather than risk
4. Motivate employees: Make part of their performance review depend on how they perform their job, in line with company/brand values
5. Collaborate: Include personnel from all relevant functions
6. Communicate: If you are open, honest and heartfelt then a bit of sniping here and there from your critics will just be grist to your mill. Think about how consumers interact with the new media landscape. Facilitate new channels of dialogue.
7. Engage your consumers in your ethical journey
8. Measure and monitor: Find ways of identifying, measuring, evaluating and reporting various elements of brand value, including those that relate to ethics, so they can be used by managers as indicators of performance.

Go read the report. Good stuff!