“Just because everything is different doesn’t mean anything has changed.” (Irene Peter)

If I have learned anything over the past 30 years, both as an experienced practitioner and keen student of business strategy, it is this: Those who run companies have one basic responsibility. No, it is not to make money. It is to keep their respective companies running. The core of any strategy must, therefore, be sustainability.

Too often, you will hear the same answer, told smugly, when asked about the essence of business enterprise. Business, it will be knowingly explained, is about making money…the more, the merrier. In fact, greed is about making money, the more the merrier. Business is about building an enterprise that is capable of making money over the long haul. Strategies that yield unsustainable profits are short-sighted, short term and doomed to failure. Greed is short-sighted and almost never sustainable.

So, more than just building a profitable organizations, business leaders must be focused on building sustainable ones. A company must be able to withstand economic volatility, a hyper-competitive market, lengthy supply chain disruptions and, yes, catastrophic events. It is easy to make money when your boat, like those around it, is rising with the tide. But can your boat survive a tsunami? Can it survive a protracted industry slump? Can it survive the Chinese? How about new technologies? Sweeping regulatory changes? What would happen to your organization in the event of a major acquisition?

Sustainability in the management context is about ensuring that a company’s product or service offering responds to the needs of its customer base and that it will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. It is about its operations being as productive and as low cost as its competitors. It is about having a strong and stable customer base and a reliable supply chain. It is about having a stable cash flow and not having bank covenants that could strangle it when things become volatile. And, yes, it is about being prepared for catastrophe.

So, what is the first step in becoming a company from which investors can count on reliable, consistent returns well into the future? How does an organization become sustainable?

The answer is somewhat paradoxical. To be sustainable, a company must change. To change, the company must begin by strengthening the status quo.

Sustainability strategies require leaders to take a long-term view of their business. Getting the future right, however, first requires getting the present right. You cannot attract good people unless you take proper care of your current people. You cannot attract new customers unless you are adept at keeping the ones you have. You cannot usefully leverage a weak product portfolio. You cannot successfully expand a weak geographic base. Jim Collins writes Good to Great because you cannot go from Bad to Great. Without a strong foundation, you cannot get to there from here.

Sustainability, therefore, begins with understanding what you are doing right and then doing it better. Build from the foundation up, not the roof down. In other words, do not change. Evolve.

In a fast changing world, where most advisors would say that to succeed you must learn to change, it’s a paradox, to be sure.