Angie Ison holds a Bachelors in Commerce, a postgraduate diploma in economics and an MBA. She is also a licensed realtor, and is constantly working with businesses to make them more sustainable and profitable over the long-term, communicating with various departments and stakeholders internationally.
Angie Ison’s focus is ensuring that businesses run and scale sustainably and successfully.
A focus point of Ison’s career has been on corporate sustainability, but not just in the environmental sense. According to Ison, there are many factors that go into ensuring a corporation is sustainable and that it benefits the people and communities it touches.
One of those factors is leadership. Ison says that leadership is one of the most important elements of an organisation, and that most leaders are born with an innate skill that often cannot be taught. Ison chuckles “it certainly is contradictory to what we learn in Universities with a strong literature on leadership being a learned tool, I was always up for the fight to beg to differ”.
A key statement from Ison of which she is proud to defer to literature, based on her own experiences “the great leaders of the world can both lead and manage, and when you bring both together you have a powerful leader”. This is where Ison believes management can be taught, however, leadership comes from within.
When talking about corporate sustainability, Ison prefers to break the concept down into a few fundamental pillars: social, economic and environmental factors. Honing in and focusing on these pillars is what makes an organisation viable well into the future.
In simple terms, Ison says, “It’s about building a model that is able to achieve the growth needs of a business as well as the well-being of the planet.”
So, how does Angie Ison recommend assessing the sustainability of an organisation, and then working on improving corporate sustainability?
She recommends starting with the question: “Who are our team?” Then, it’s important to ask yourself what qualifications they have and what ongoing training they need. This is because people are at the core of an organisation and the team is primarily what makes it sustainable and able to operate effectively.
One of the first things Ison does when helping a business assess their corporate sustainability is take a look at their human capital. According to Angie Ison, it’s about assessing the changes that need to be made, and then bridging the gap.
Aside from assessing the people working within the organisation, Ison also looks to the legal and governance side of business, which are essential elements that allow the organisation to operate.
When delving into the social aspect of corporate sustainability, Angie Ison says that it’s all about promoting practices that take the health, safety and wellbeing of employees, customers and community into account.
There are many ways of achieving this, and some examples include protecting access to essential resources, ensuring that communication with customers is clear and ensuring they have all the information they need to use a product safely.
The economic aspect of corporate sustainability means developing profitable and sustainable business models. According to Angie Ison, this means using more efficient technology and cutting costs by reducing an organisation’s overall carbon footprint.
She adds that when businesses thrive in corporate sustainability, it creates a template for other businesses to follow.
When it comes to the community and societal effects of corporate sustainability, Angie Ison says that it’s important for organisations to find new innovative ways to collectively promote financial profits and humanity within its core structure.
“A business with a strong corporate sustainability culture and practice would find it easier to acquire capital from traditional sources such as banks, as well as alternative investors such as private equity and venture capital.”
Today, investors are looking towards the future, and a strong corporate sustainability model has the ability to make an organisation thrive over the long-term.
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