SUSTAINABILITY AS CRITERION FOR DECISION MAKING AND PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

Abstract

Nowadays sustainability is becoming more and more important in our life, we started keeping an increasing attention at it, changing our behaviours and our lifestyle. We became more careful about our decision as we gave more weight to them, focusing on the possible side effects, sometimes even overshadowing the possible higher costs that we will bear. We do this because in these situations we know that there is something more important than the mere expense. Costs are becoming less important in our valuations and in our decision-making process as we are becoming more aware about the importance of sustainability. Therefore, why if this reasoning is so important for us as people, shouldn’t be the same also for the companies? The world is changing and the enterprises that have not done this yet, should start considering sustainability as guiding principle to use in decision making and profitability analysis. The objective of this paper is to investigate how sustainability can be introduced as a fundamental guiding line for companies. The document is dived in three main parts where in the first I try to give a clear definition of what sustainability is, then the focus moves on the traditional methods used by companies in the decision-making process and in the profitability analysis. In the second part some of the modern approaches that take in consideration sustainability as a fundamental criterion for decision making and ex-post analysis is issued. In the last part I try to analyse a real company, understanding how it takes decision and analyses the profitability, giving some guidelines for the application of the modern criteria mentioned above. The paper is closed by some conclusion about this project.