Total Sustainability Management

This paper argues that the challenge managers face today when trying to justify investments in sustainability is reminiscent of the challenge of investing in quality management in the 1980s. Quality managers relied on evidence rather than ideology to select investment projects in quality and defined optimal investment budgets with cost of quality reports. In the first part of the paper, a quality–sustainability analogy is used to adapt lessons learned from Total Quality Management into a Total Sustainability Management framework. In the second part of the paper, the focus shifts to the adaptation of the cost of quality report into a cost of sustainability report. The credibility of the cost of the sustainability model is compared to extant knowledge from the sustainability literature. The discussion shows how many topical questions about sustainability—which can only be answered today through a recourse to ideology—could be answered more factually if we applied quality management knowledge and techniques.