Key information

Duration: 5 days (on-campus)

Programme dates:

9 - 13 December 2024

30 June - 4 July 2025

Location:

London, UK

Fees: £6,950

Programme overview

The societal and environmental challenges in front of us are existential. Addressing them calls for a collective effort from all parts of society, including business. Sustainability is no longer an option; it is a requirement for every organisation on the planet to develop and execute sustainability strategies. At the same time there are significant opportunities to develop businesses or propositions and improve the lives of customers, colleagues and across society.

Being sustainable in strategy, practice and impact requires going beyond compliance. It involves designing and implementing business sustainability strategies that create positive and tangible impact and value for your entire ecosystem of stakeholders.

This calls for a holistic and integrated approach that drives value and sustained growth; growth that meets the needs of today as well as those of tomorrow.

To move from sustainability strategies to holistic and cost-effective actions plans, organisations need new processes underpinned by systems thinking, a reined organisational purpose, structural changes, and the systemic controls to align and inspire your team. This programme will provide the tools to protect your sustainability action plan from the perils and pitfalls that lie ahead. Some challenges are common to all strategic initiatives – others deeply specific to executing sustainability strategies.

Designed and delivered by Executive Education Imperial College Business School in collaboration with the Imperial College Leonardo Centre and the and the Sargent Centre for Process Systems Engineering, our Executing Sustainability Strategies course is a unique executive education learning journey.

The programme gives you the depth, time and space you need to refine and implement your sustainability strategy—with continuous, follow-through support and guidance from the Imperial College ecosystem of world experts in sustainability and leadership.

Who should attend?

The Executing Sustainability Strategies programme will accelerate your capacity to validate, refine, and upgrade your strategy, and drive its successful implementation. It is designed for leaders who want to develop their ability to deliver an existing or preliminary sustainability strategy.

This programme is suitable for those who are either responsible for, or playing a key role in, implementing a sustainability strategy for their business including (but not limited to):

Senior leaders involved in overseeing the development and implementation of the organisation or business unit’s sustainability strategy, policies and initiatives. Leaders who engage with internal and external stakeholders, report on sustainability performance, and ensure compliance with relevant regulations and standards.

Sustainability champions who provide expert advice and support on sustainability issues, conduct research and analysis, develop and implement sustainability projects and programmes, and communicate sustainability outcomes and impacts.

Innovators and change agents who use creativity and innovation to solve sustainability challenges, design and develop sustainable products, services, or solutions, educate and inspire others on sustainability topics, and drive change towards a more sustainable future, creating and communicating a compelling sustainability case for their organisation or sector.

Learning Objectives

Through a blended approach of on-campus, self-paced learning, mentoring and next-generation meditation techniques, you will develop a sustainable mindset, build the insights, tools and leadership capabilities to:

Refine and upgrade your existing sustainability strategy and build the skills to articulate the business case for change.
Identify and navigate the cultural and political challenges to systemic change within your organisation.
Enact procedures and control mechanisms and engage the right internal and external stakeholders to execute your sustainability strategy.
Champion systemic change and play a critical role in building the capabilities and the resilience to deliver your organisation’s sustainability strategy.

Create an action plan to execute your sustainability strategy (including stakeholder consultation, internal validation and approval, execution)
Lead the execution of your sustainability strategy and support your organisation in the transition phase towards more sustainable business.

Learning Journey

The execution of your strategy is planned with continuous support and mentoring as you discover and apply new ideas and approaches. You start off with a self-paced programme preparation and then join your peers in London to work on the execution of your upgraded strategy plan. Once back to your organisation, you start the execution of your strategy, building on the action plans developed. During this phase, you continue to be supported with optional mentoring sessions and have opportunities to measure the impact and initial results of the deployment of your strategic plan, share with and learn from the rest of the cohort.

Online, self-paced learning (a total of 3 learning hours) and one live virtual session (90 minutes) with faculty and peers.

Access the Online Imperial College Leaning Platform and begin the process of validation of your existing sustainability strategy.

On-campus: Imperial College London

Through case studies, group work, expert-led discussion and guests from industry, you explore a range of critical ideas and issues. You engage in a Strategic Decision Mapping session for their sustainability strategies, including a Risks and Uncertainty Analysis to identify potential obstacles and uncertainties. This ensures the development of strategies that are both effective and resilient to potential disruptions.

You consolidate your sustainability leadership mindset and begin to plan the structural changes and resource allocation needed in your control systems, accounting and reporting, governance and innovation required to deliver your strategies.

You leave the on-campus phase with an action plan to execute your strategy, and you prepare to implement your upgraded sustainability strategy and measure impact.

Online, self-paced learning (a total of 2 learning hours) and one live virtual session (90 minutes) with faculty and peers.

Implement and deploy your strategic plan back in the workplace, engaging internal and external stakeholders. During this phase, you will be supported in small group mentoring sessions facilitated by Imperial’s experts and practitioners to walk with you during the initial phase of your sustainability strategy execution.

A team of expert coaches will be available for those wishing to have additional individual coaching sessions (fees apply).

At the end of this phase, you will check-in with the cohort and the academic leads to measure the impact and initial results of the deployment of your strategic plan in a virtual session.

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Programme faculty and experts

Executing Sustainability Strategies is enriched by insights from Imperial College thought leaders: experts from Imperial College Business School, the Sargent Centre of Process Systems Engineering, and Imperial's Leonardo Centre on Business for Society, which houses the GOLDEN Sustainability Database. Our world-leading faculty and industry experts will expose you to new evidence-backed, approaches to strategy execution with strong links to industry.

Gbemi Oluleye

Gbemi is a thought leader in decision making around interventions for sustainable innovation competitiveness. She has more than 10 years' experience as a consultant, lecturer and researcher in the fields of sustainable innovation development and assessment, energy efficiency, decarbonisation, sustainability, process design and integration and development of digital tools for a sustainable transition. As a consultant she helps organisations establish business cases for investing in sustainable solutions.

She has been a co-founder for two start-ups related to sustainable cooling, and software development for sustainable manufacturing. She is an associated director at the Sargent Centre for Process Systems Engineering, Programme director for Green Skills for a Sustainable Future Professional Development course, and academic lead for Green Industrial Interventions lab. Her research addresses complexities in designing interventions for the adoption and diffusion of key sustainable solutions. She focuses on achieving pivotal tipping points in critical areas such as electrification, hydrogen, carbon capture utilization and storage, and direct air capture, synthetic fuels crucial for decarbonizing energy-intensive sectors.

Her research has been published in several leading journals including Applied Energy, Journal of Cleaner Production, Sustainable Production and Consumption and Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy.

Frank Brueck

Lead of Leadership Lab, Leonardo Centre on Business for Society

Frank Brueck has more than 25 years of experience as a consultant, trainer, lecturer and researcher in the fields of CSR and sustainability, cultural change, cross-cultural management, team building and leadership development.

Frank cofounded the GOLDEN for Impact Foundation and is a founding member of the International Association for Cross-cultural Competence and Management. His research focuses on the methodologies of CSR, cultural comparison, value-based management, sustainability and intercultural management and training. Frank holds a PhD in Business Administration from the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria.

Ed Daniels

Ed is the former Strategy, Sustainability and Corporate Relations Director for Shell Plc. In this role Ed was a member of Shell’s Executive Committee had accountability for the company’s existing Strategy, Sustainability and Corporate Relations organisations.

Ed joined Shell in 1988 and has held roles in Shell’s Upstream, Integrated Gas, Downstream and Projects & Technology businesses. He previously served as Shell’s UK Country Chair, prior to becoming a Director, he was the Executive Vice President Strategy, Portfolio & Sustainability, he led the development of the company’s ‘Powering Progress’ strategy to drive the decarbonisation of the energy system and achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

A British national, Ed grew up in Wales and is married with three daughters. Outside of Shell, he has served as the Technical Vice President for the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), is a Fellow at both the IChemE and the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, and has an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Imperial College London.

Maurizio Zollo

Professor Zollo is the Scientific Director of the School's Leonardo Centre on Business for Society. His research aims to understand how business organisations learn to grow and adapt to environmental turbulence and how managers can guide these evolutionary processes.

His research has been published in several leading journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review and the Strategic Management Journal. His work has been covered in mainstream publications including Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Professor Zollo is Editor-in-Chief of Organization & Environment and a past editor of the European Management Review. He served for a decade on the Executive Committee of the Academy of Business in Society, which he helped establish in 2002.

Eduardo Andrade

Eduardo is a professor of marketing at Imperial College Business School and the Co-Director of the MSc Programme on Climate Change, Management & Finance. As a behavioural researcher, he is interested in how individuals feel, think and make decisions in contexts related to sustainable consumption, inequality, and health.

His articles have appeared in marketing (Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Marketing Research), medicine/public health (Lancet, Public Health Nutrition, Preventive Medicine, JAMA Network Open), and psychology journals (Psychological Science, Nature Human Behaviour), among others.