History and Values

Building the Future Economy 

Sustainable Means was founded to contribute to the accelerating sustainable economy paradigm shift, and to execute on a significant business opportunity. 

​

Since 2009, Sustainable Means has catalyzed growth and positive impact for top-tier management consultancies, blue chip financial institutions, international NGOs founded by UHNW venture-philanthropists, global standards organizations, early-stage venture-backed firms and Global 500 companies. We have done this through introducing ESG focused acquisitions and by placing teams, C-suite executives (CEO, COO, CSO) and Managing Director/Partner-level professionals.

​

Our focus has been on helping deliver the future regenerative economy within the business context. As such, we have placed leaders who are skilled in both financial and environmental aspects of value creation. Our leaders mobilize capital and large businesses to achieve substantive positive environmental and social impact while continuing to deliver best-in-class returns to their shareholders. We see these two aspects (impact and financial value) as mutually dependent from a long-term value perspective. 

​

Actions by large and leading asset managers and/or private equity firms and institutional investors like Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, KKR and CalPERS, amply bear out this trend, which continues to accelerate. As political and civil society frameworks shift, and physical impacts become more pressing, mainstream capital is pivoting, realizing the inherent risk in the old economy and the opportunity in the new.

 

​Sustainable Means’ founders have been involved in various ways with the sustainable / one planet economy paradigm shift since the mid-1980s, before the first IPCC.

​

Three decades later as of 2017, 19 out of 20 of the world's most powerful political leaders, almost all the nations of the world, major religious leaders, CEOs of the world's largest firms, a rapidly growing amount of investor capital (a quarter of all US assets under management and half in Europe according to Domini), and increasing numbers of the world's citizens are on a similar page. 

​

We believe the old dichotomies between environmental activism and capital, or jobs versus the environment, no longer serve either side of the debate.

 

The answer is to move forward to planetary solutions at scale as rapidly as possible. Such solutions provide the largest and longest duration financial opportunity of the 21st century. Well-deployed capital and entrepreneurship within a broader values perspective, and with the best leadership possible, are vital to the mission of sustainable well-being for all. Providing the leaders is where Sustainable Means comes in.

​​