9 January, 2026

Not all sustainability efforts are created equal, and new evidence is helping to quantify the difference. John Elkington, in a recent Substack article, reflects on how some companies are moving beyond surface-level initiatives toward deeper, system-level transformation, and suggests that companies embedding sustainability deeply into their operations are already seeing the benefits. 

That evidence comes from the Leonardo Centre on Business for Society’s work using the GOLDEN sustainability dataset, which captures more than 2.6 million initiatives from 23,000 companies around the world.  

Using natural language processing, initiatives were categorised by their alignment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and by what they were trying to do. The analysis grouped them according to whether they represented advocacy-focused action (externally focused efforts like donations, volunteering and community engagement), preparation (internal activity including training, incentives and measurement systems), and transformation, which is about deep organisational and operational change embedded in products, business models and value chains. 

It then assessed how sustainability behaviour links to performance and environmental impact and found that companies that operate in the top quartile of transformation are generating a 2.5% annual alpha in terms of their share price, equivalent to nearly 40% cumulative, risk-adjusted return over the 13 years over which the study ran.  

Evidently, the greatest value comes when sustainability moves from the margins into the core of the business. Preparation-style actions (which Elkington notes are visible and auditable, and therefore what is often recognised by benchmarks and ESG rankings) did not correlate with improved company performance.  

It’s through this transformational focus that the real business case for sustainability can be generated, not in the commitments and disclosures that often get the spotlight but in what the business actually does in terms of innovation and supply-chain reengineering. While preparation and advocacy are important foundations for transformation, it’s the transformative measures that create both meaningful impact and improved profitability and share price returns.   

By Sirisha Venkatesh