In this series, I have argued that a viable sustainability strategy rests on three pillars: Risk, Reward, and Responsibility. The first two are relatively quantifiable in a boardroom. Risk management is familiar territory for all senior executives, especially those in finance and legal teams. Reward, framed as competitive advantage, value creation or cost efficiency, resonates strongly with executives and is how sustainability can prove its worth. Responsibility is far harder to land; it is elusive because the erosion of trust rarely shows up on a quarterly P&L until it is too late. It is the pillar most likely to provoke eye-rolls, least likely to drive consensus and most at peril of being dropped when budgets tighten. Yet I think we have lost something in the rather precipitous recent retreat from it.
The purpose bubble, and what it left behind
A few years ago, “purpose” became a corporate obsession; boards commissioned purpose statements and consultants were hired to help firms find theirs. It was an odd time, largely because purpose cannot be grafted onto a business not built around one. The bubble has deflated, and the backlash has been swift. ESG budgets have been cut, and the vocabulary has shifted to terms like “legacy” and “resilience” away from the previous focus on sustainability and purpose. It is arguably more honest and genuine, but in discarding the language, have we also discarded some of the underlying benefits and discipline that come with strong business ethics and commitments to corporate responsibility?
A recent Economist piece on corporate governance observed that boards, having faced pressure from sustainability campaigners through 2020 and 2021, are now “contending with agitators of the cold-blooded capitalist variety.” The pendulum has swung, and shareholder primacy is back in fashion; this is the context in which the responsibility pillar has to now make its case.
Responsibility as a condition of longevity
My argument is not a moral one, or not primarily. It is a commercial one.
During my time as a private equity investor, two experiences shaped how I think about this. The first was in an investment committee discussion about a care home acquisition. A senior partner asked me whether we risked featuring in the Daily Mail for poor care standards. His concern was reputational, not ethical, but the conclusion was the same: in a business whose product is care, cutting corners is not just wrong, it is commercially self-defeating. The second was watching a healthcare staffing business collapse because the NHS eventually realised it was buying back its own staff at double the price. The business had pursued a short-term market inefficiency but ignored the lack of defensible barriers to entry. The lesson I took was blunt: don’t extract value from a counterparty so aggressively that they are motivated to remove you from the equation, as the forces of competitive advantage will, in time, catch up with you. A strategy that targets short-term gain risks meeting a long-term backlash.
These examples are not about purpose in the evangelical sense. They are about the sustainability of a business model, which is precisely where responsibility connects to strategy.
Quiet responsibility, not loud purpose
The HBR framework of “deep purpose”[1] — where social and commercial goals are genuinely integrated, not merely adjacent — describes this well. The companies that navigate it best are not the ones with the most arresting mission statements. They are the ones whose leadership has internalised a simple test: does what we are doing hold up? Mars, Lego, and Novo Nordisk come to mind. Their responsibility is not performed; it is structural, and it shapes decisions before the question of reputation even arises.
This is what I call quiet responsibility. It requires leaders to be willing to ask, with genuine honesty, whether their business model depends on something that will not, in the long run, be tolerated by regulators, customers, public-sector counterparties on whom they rely, or common ethics. This “not doing bad” can be easily framed in a board conversation about risk management. Yet, leaders who go beyond this can recognise significant value in quietly “doing the right thing” for people and the planet. It can attract staff and encourage retention; nurture brand loyalty and draw in new customers; stabilise supply chains and foster goodwill.
And to be clear, when I refer to corporate responsibility, I’m not talking about organised beach clean-ups or corporate charity donations. I’m referring to operational resilience through strategies for business ethics, human rights, anti-corruption and bribery, employee rights, DEI and environmental commitments. Collectively, corporate values.
As we are currently witnessing, geopolitical shocks can alter what “doing the right thing” looks like, which is why commitments to corporate values make strategic sense. This way, the board conversation can turn to tactics that are altogether more manageable in the face of business-critical decisions, rather than questions of business strategy.
Where this leaves boards
The responsibility pillar is the weakest driver of action for sustainability; as I argued in the first article in this series, it is creating consensus in a boardroom on risk and financial returns that will drive a sustainability strategy. But responsibility, framed not as ideology but as a condition of longevity, has a place in the conversation, and it can indeed prove to be the steadfast anchor a firm needs in uncertain times.
[1] Ranjay Gulati, ‘The Messy but Essential Pursuit of Purpose’, Harvard Business Review, March–April 2022, pp. 44–51
Jill Ridley-Smith 
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