Sustainability+Impact Consulting Entrepreneurship is equal parts science and arts. Identify client needs through cultural intelligence is the moat which does not arise overnight. A knowledge of context through history and cultural values informs what constitutes value in a specific juncture. And value through ROI and capacity building towards resilience, often undefined and fuzzy, is the key selling point in a crowded market powered by LLMs.

And clients hardly buy a report, they buy resilience through a pain point solution.

Fun fact : The famed physicist Richard Feynman, also did industrial consulting by the side earning him a good income to support his family. His solutions often saved his clients a lot of money through optimisation work.

The elephant regarding the sustainability question, at all levels and scales is the dreaded undertone which almost every sustainability practitioner struggles to give a clean answer: what is the ROI of this sustainability spend, when business is volatile in this era of wars, supply chain disruptions and AI mayhem? Sustainability for long has been the feel good enabler and soft compliance imperative for market access.

In the polycrisis, where are the interventions which deliver long term value and cost savings?

And the meta question, where are touch points which create resilience?

It’s my Mother’s birthday today. A woman who has the zeal to live fully despite multiple health challenges over the past three years. She is my anchor when my world collapsed a few years back, and gave me the ballast to live again. She loves the classroom, and even taught when we told her to rest. The zest comes naturally as she went to the mountains of Dhofar on the Yemen Border to teach in government schools in the early 1990s, learnt Arabic and taught two generations of Omanis. She misses Muscat, our home dearly. I am hence a Gulf Scholar by accident of destiny.

So grateful for her, and even today she tells me to keep writing my PhD thesis which she wants me to complete. I told her, i will do it for her.

Ustaza Smita, still continues to read and analyse today while taking a barrage of medicines to keep healthy.

The value of sustainability spend is in the capacity one builds while doing your human rights due diligence training, POSH workshops, sustainability reports and your CSDDD preparation for next year. One report at a time, we curate the culture of safety in an era of war. Do good, by updating that human rights policy or HSE policy that no one bothers after probation, or by understanding that corporate reputation can be dented, irrespective of which crisis communication rockstar agency that you can hire which could have killed a bad story in a previous generation.

We are all worried regarding blockages of the maritime and the cardiac sort. And it is not good for our health, the financial kind. Lender and Sustainable finance towards electro states building (channelling Tooze) will be on the uptake as energy security will dominate the loan books.

The green transition is an ethical way of building the solar grids and transmission lines we need, without the accidents and violence.

Sustainability measures accumulate over time, create culture of psychological safety and resilience, the practice of it and not the definition.

Sustainability for the post war will mean less hype, more substance.

In this regional conflict with world war-esque potential/ where oil will probably shatter records this week and have several second order impacts, it is surprising to not read about AI boosting productivity or carbon markets being the silver bullet. Wars change the paradigm.