Vertex Views

Tag: cost

  • Why Sustainability Is Key for Business Survival

    Most businesses don’t adopt sustainability because they “care about the planet.”
    They do it because their margins are screaming. Their customers are angry. The world is on fire — sometimes literally.

    And that’s fine.
    Motivations don’t have to be noble to be useful.

    In tough times, sustainability becomes essential. It stops being a PR stunt. It turns into a strategy for survival.
    It’s a method to make fewer dumb decisions. It helps save money and build a resilient business. The business won’t collapse at the first sign of chaos.

    So here are six brutally honest, business-first reasons sustainability is your best friend when the economy decides to body-slam you.

    1. Sustainability Cuts Costs (Like, Actually Cuts Costs)

    Forget the glossy brochures showing happy employees near green plants.
    Sustainability’s first superpower is painfully practical:

    It saves money.

    Lower energy bills.
    Lower waste bills.
    Lower resource bills.
    Lower “oh shit, why is everything so expensive?” bills.

    Most companies don’t need a sustainability officer.
    They need someone who can look at a spreadsheet and say:

    “Why the hell are we burning money like this?”

    Efficiency isn’t sexy.
    But in tough times, it’s the difference between survival and becoming a sad case study on LinkedIn.

    2. Sustainable Brands Earn Trust — And Trust Converts

    Consumers today can smell BS faster than ever.
    They’ve seen enough greenwashing to last multiple lifetimes.

    People don’t want brands that pretend to care.
    They want brands that give a damn, consistently, without whining about it.

    Real sustainability — the kind you can prove, not the kind you Photoshop — builds trust.

    And trust is recession-proof.

    When people don’t know who to believe, they choose brands that seem trustworthy. They buy from those brands that feel least likely to lie to them at 2 AM.

    Sustainability ≠ moral superiority.
    It’s an economic moat.

    3. Investors Have Developed a Fetish for Resilient Companies

    Let’s be honest: VCs and investors don’t wake up thinking,
    “Hmm, how do we save the planet today?”

    They wake up thinking,
    “How do I not lose my ass on this investment?”

    And nothing screams “future-proof” like a business that:

    • uses fewer resources
    • survives supply chain shocks
    • manages risks better
    • avoids regulatory nightmares
    • actually thinks long-term for once

    Sustainability signals resilience — and resilience attracts capital like a magnet dipped in money.

    4. Sustainable Operations Are Shock-Proof

    You know what breaks supply chains?
    Everything.

    Pandemics.
    Wars.
    Floods.
    Heatwaves.
    Cost spikes.
    “Unforeseen circumstances.”
    That one ship that blocked that one canal and ruined everyone’s week.

    Companies that diversify their energy sources, materials, logistics, and suppliers stay resilient. They don’t crumble when the world does what it does best: create chaos.

    Sustainability isn’t about being eco-friendly.
    It’s about not falling apart the second something goes wrong — which, by the way, is basically every Tuesday now.

    5. Sustainability Attracts Talent (Especially the Good Kind)

    Here’s the truth companies hate hearing:

    Top talent doesn’t want to work for a business that feels like a moral dumpster fire.

    People want meaningful work.
    Not “mission statements,” not “brochures,” not “our founder’s vision.”
    Actual meaning.

    A sustainable company signals:

    • responsibility
    • stability
    • long-term thinking
    • “We don’t treat employees like replaceable cogs”

    And you know what happens when you attract emotionally intelligent, mission-driven people?

    Innovation.
    Better decisions.
    Less drama.
    Fewer HR complaints.
    Smarter growth.

    Basically, everything your CEO keeps yelling about.

    6. Sustainability Drives Innovation Because Constraints Force Creativity

    Innovation doesn’t happen when you have unlimited resources.
    It happens when you’re cornered and sweating and thinking:

    “How do we solve this without blowing all our money?”

    Sustainability forces companies to:

    • redesign products
    • rethink materials
    • reinvent processes
    • question old assumptions
    • stop making dumb choices “because that’s how it’s always been done”

    Tough times squeeze companies.
    Sustainability makes them smarter under pressure.

    The future belongs to businesses that can reinvent themselves. It does not belong to those clinging to outdated models like a toxic ex.

    So… Is Sustainability the Answer to Everything?

    No.
    Sustainability won’t magically fix a terrible business model. It won’t fix bad leadership either. It also can’t fix a culture that’s held together with coffee and passive-aggressive emails.

    But it will make any organisation:

    • leaner
    • stronger
    • more credible
    • more resilient
    • more innovative
    • and more profitable than the “grow at any cost” dinosaurs

    Sustainability is not a trend.
    It’s not a phase.
    It’s not a nice-to-have.

    It’s the new survival strategy.

    The world is changing too fast for businesses that are slow, sloppy, or short-sighted.

    If growth is your goal, sustainability is your playbook.

    Not because it’s ethical.
    Not because it’s inspiring.
    But because it works.

  • Create Compelling Spectacles

    Striking imagery and grand symbolic gestures create the aura of power — everyone responds to them. Stage the spectacles for those around you, full of arresting visuals and radiant symbols that heighten your presence. Dazzled by appearances, no one will notice what you are really doing.

    In the 1780s word spread through Berlin of the strange and spectacular medical practice of a Dr Weisleder who performed miracles by curing people with the moon. He would expose his patients to the rays of the moon, they would eventually get better, word spread and he was dubbed “The Moon Doctor of Berlin” — the rich and poor all flocked to him.

    Weisleder may have understood very little about medicine, but he understood the psychology of people and human behaviour.

    He recognized people do not always want words, or rational explanations, or demonstrations of the powers of science they want an immediate appeal to their emotions.

    At the time there was no scientific evidence that could refute his methods. Instead, he conjured up a hypothesis that he knew wasn’t real, his patients simply did the rest by believing in his spectacles.

    Understand the Primacy of Sight among the Senses

    1. The visual has come to dominate the other senses and is the sense we most depend on and trust. As Gracian said, “The truth is generally seen, rarely heard.”
    2. Never neglect the way you arrange things visually. Factors like colour, for example, have enormous symbolic resonance.
    3. The visual contains great emotional power. Find and associate yourself with the images and symbols that will communicate in this immediate way today, and you will have untold power.
    4. Most effective of all is a new combination—a fusion of images and symbols that have not been seen together before, but that through their association clearly demonstrate your new idea, message or religion. The creation of new images and symbols out of old ones in this way has a poetic effect— viewers’ associations run rampant, giving them a sense of participation.

    Incorporate and organize your images and symbols into a show or performance that inspires awe and distracts people from their mundane lives. Always pay attention to how you arrange things visually — put the most important images at the centre; use colour as well. Create compelling spectacles and words won’t be necessary.

  • Court Attention At All Cost

    Part I: Surround Your Name With The Sensational And Scandalous

    The court of the Louis the XIV was filled with many talented creatives, beautiful women and people of nobility.

    But there was no one more talked about than the Duc de Lauzun. For comparison, this Duke represented the personality type many know as Tyrion Lanistor, of the HBO series Game Of Thrones. The Duke was dwarfish, he slept with the king’s mistress, openly insulted not only other courtiers, but the King himself — very similar to how Tyrion behaved.

    Louis, however, was so beguiled (enchanted) by the duke’s eccentricities that he could not bare his absences from the court. It was so simple. The strangeness of the Duke’s character attracted attention. Once people were enthralled by him, they wanted him around, at any cost.
    “Society craves larger-than-life figures, people who stand above the general mediocrity. Never be afraid, then, of the qualities that set you apart and draw attention to you. Court controversy, even scandal. It is better to be attacked, even slandered, than ignored.”

    Thomas Edison would create dazzling experiments to display his discoveries within electricity and boast about future inventions that seemed amazingly breakthrough for the time.

    He would talk loudly about all these future inventions which drew the public’s attention as Edison become a frequent topic of conversation. He did everything he could to make sure he received more attention than his rival Nikola Tesla, who arguably may have been more brilliant and talented than Edison, although far less known.

    In 1915 it was rumored that Edison and Tesla would be joint recipients of the years Nobel prize in physics. However, the prize wasn’t given to either of them in the end. It was later discovered the committee had actually approached Edison on a joint Nobel prize, but he had turned them down refusing to share the prize with Tesla. By that time Edison’s fame was much more secure than Tesla’s, thus he thought it was smarter to refuse the honor than allow his rival the attention that would’ve come from sharing the prize.

    If you find yourself in a lowly position that offers little opportunity for you to draw attention, an effective trick is to attack the most visible, most famous, most powerful person you can find.

    When Pietro Aretino, a young Roman servant boy of the early sixteenth century, wanted to get attention as a writer of verses, he decided to publish a series of satirical poems ridiculing the pope and his affection for a pet elephant. The attack put Aretino in the public eye immediately. A slanderous attack on a person in a position of power would have a similar effect. Remember, however, to use such tactics sparingly after you have the public’s attention, then the act can wear thin.

    Part II: Create An Air Of Mystery

    In the past, the world was filled with the terrifying and unknowable—diseases, disasters, capricious despots, the mystery of death itself. What we could not understand we re-imagined as myths and spirits. Over the centuries, though, we have managed, through science and reason, to illuminate the darkness; what was mysterious and forbidding has grown familiar and comfortable. Yet this light has a price: in a world that is ever more banal, that has had its mystery and myth squeezed out of it, we secretly crave enigmas, people or things that cannot be instantly interpreted, seized, and consumed.

    That is the power of the mysterious: It invites layers of interpretation, excites our imagination, seduces us into believing that it conceals something marvellous. The world has become so familiar and its inhabitants so predictable that what wraps itself in mystery will almost always draw the limelight to it and make us watch it.

    Do not imagine that to create an air of mystery you have to be grand and awe-inspiring. Mystery that is woven into your day-to-day demeanor, and is subtle, has that much more power to fascinate and attract attention. Remember: Most people are upfront, can be read like an open book, take little care to control their words or image, and are hopelessly predictable. By simply holding back, keeping silent, occasionally uttering ambiguous phrases, deliberately appearing inconsistent, and acting odd in the subtlest of ways, you will emanate an aura of mystery. The people around you will then magnify that aura by constantly trying to interpret you.

    Both artists and con artists understand the vital link between being mysterious and attracting interest. Count Victor Lustig, the aristocrat of swindlers, played the game to perfection. He was always doing things that were different, or seemed to make no sense. He would show up at the best hotels in a limo driven by a Japanese chauffeur; no one had ever seen a Japanese chauffeur before, so this seemed exotic and strange. Lustig would dress in the most expensive clothing, but always with something—a medal, a flower, an armband—out of place, at least in conventional terms. This was seen not as tasteless but as odd and intriguing. In hotels he would be seen receiving telegrams at all hours, one after the other, brought to him by his Japanese chauffeur—telegrams he would tear up with utter nonchalance. (In fact they were fakes, completely blank.) He would sit alone in the dining room, reading a large and impressive-looking book, smiling at people yet remaining aloof. Within a few days, of course, the entire hotel would be abuzz with interest in this strange man.

    All this attention allowed Lustig to lure suckers in with ease. They would beg for his confidence and his company. Everyone wanted to be seen with this mysterious aristocrat. And in the presence of this distracting enigma, they wouldn’t even notice that they were being robbed blind.

    An air of mystery can make the mediocre appear intelligent and profound. It made Mata Hari, a woman of average appearance and intelligence, seem like a goddess, and her dancing divinely inspired. An air of mystery about an artist makes his or her artwork immediately more intriguing, a trick Marcel Duchamp played to great effect. It is all very easy to do—say little about your work, tease and titillate with alluring, even contradictory comments, then stand back and let others try to make sense of it all.