Our society experiences a massive upheaval. New value concepts pose great challenges for businesses and politics. The call for responsible use of natural resources and social justice is becoming ever louder. Sustainable and value-oriented corporate management answers the questions of why the respective company should continue to exist in the next five to ten years.

Initial situation

Against this background, a top-class working group of the Institute for Corporate Governance in the German Real Estate Industry ICG has developed an innovative practitioner’s guide for the real estate industry on the topic of ‘Sustainable Management and Compensation Systems.’

Objective

The challenge in developing the recommendations for action for the real estate industry was to create a clear understanding and definition of sustainability for the respective companies in industry clusters. Under these conditions, the derived sustainability criteria lead to impactful control effects.

Result

For companies to be able to solve this challenging task, it is of central importance to realistically assess the company’s understanding of sustainability. concern has defined strategy clusters for this purpose, which served as a frame of reference. These strategy clusters differ in the dimensions “risk avoidance versus opportunity search” and “focus on companies versus society.” There are four clusters in this space: