Over the past year, Corporate Sustainability has been the IOD’s annual theme that it aimed to promote through series of events and activities as the IOD believes that sustainability in any individual company can only be achieved when the Board recognized its significance. From this reason, the IOD celebrated 20-year anniversary last year with a new vision “Boardroom Excellence for Sustainable Growth”. The IOD has firm belief that the Board is the important set of people that can lead the organization toward sustainability. The IOD has, therefore, in the past year developed relevant guidelines and conducted a number of activities to raise awareness and educate the Board on this matter. This article will summarize the IOD’s activities and interesting findings from the past year.

One of the questions often raised to the IOD regarding sustainability was how can small- or medium-sized organization deal with this matter and perhaps only large corporations can afford to cope with sustainability issues given their adequate resources to absorb the costs occurred from tackling this subject. Therefore, the IOD has come up with ways to help small- and medium-sized companies address sustainability issues. The IOD has developed “Board’s Role in Strategy for Business Sustainability” as a guideline or handbook for directors to apply in performing their roles and promoting corporate sustainability. The IOD’s guideline is based on three key principles to drive sustainability.

Besides the guideline, the IOD also sees benefit in learning from experiences and practices of sustainability leaders. Therefore, it has developed a Thought Leadership Report on “Board’s Roles in Strategy for Business Sustainability” through interviews with directors and executives responsible for sustainability issues of leading organizations granted Sustainability Award.  Interesting findings can be summarized as follow:

The study result gave the IOD in-depth information as well as issues and challenges in sustainability development. Therefore, this report should be useful for companies starting to address sustainability. IOD members can access the full report and the guideline through the IOD’s Website.

The IOD will continue to raise directors’ awareness in sustainability. It will introduce a new course next year that will extend from DCP, the foundation course for directors. The new course “Director Leadership Certification Program (DLCP)” emphasizes on Board leadership toward sustainability. Since Board nowadays are facing numerous challenges that make their roles particularly important in driving sustainability, skills and knowledge obtained from DCP may not be sufficient. Directors need to understand the principles, able to adjust with changing business context, and more importantly understand ways to work along with the Management.

Key issues and principles of the new program derived from the trend and expectations toward performance of present Board.

The IOD believes that sustainability will continue to be driven in the years to come and directors are key persons that can make it happen. Although it may seem difficult at the beginning but once sustainability has been widely developed and included into normal practices, organizations will then realize that sustainability is not a distant issue but rather something the organization should pay attention right from the start for its own sake.

Tanakron Pornratananukul
Assistant Vice President
Thai Institute of Directors