CISR: Corporate social responsibility meets continual improvement

To put an effective sustainability program in place, you need three components: an integrated sustainability management system, a performance framework, and a continual improvement (CI) program. Management system standards and performance frameworks both demand a commitment to continually improve. In a management context, continual improvement entails a never-ending effort to expose and eliminate root causes of problems. CI involves making many incremental or small-step changes in an ongoing effort to improve products, services, or processes. Ideally, everyone in the organization will be part of the CI process, which aims to find and eliminate waste in materials, labor, machinery, and production methods. By combining a sustainability management system and a sustainability performance framework with the integrated use of CISR tools and methods, it may be possible to harness the power of sustainability today -- and for as long as this integration can be maintained.