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In March 2005, FBDS signed a partnership agreement with the Forum for Corporate Sustainability Management of the Swiss institute IMD (CSM/IMD, see www.imd.ch/csm), one of the most reputable business schools in the world, to conduct the study on The Brazilian Business Case for Corporate Sustainability. This research is scheduled to end in April 2006, and focuses on the sustainability issue in three business sectors in Brazil, adopting the methodology used by CSM/IMD in a similar study in 2003 and 2004 in partnership with WWF on companies in Europe, USA and Japan in nine business sectors.

The results of the Brazilian study carried out by FBDS, and which also has the technical research support of the COPPEAD Graduation School of Business Administration, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), will be analyzed jointly with the results of the IMD study in order to compare the behavior of the Brazilian companies under study with that of the Europeans, Americans and Japanese.

The objective of this research is to use interviews with executives from selected companies and applied questionnaires to chart the key questions on corporate sustainability in three business sectors: pulp and paper, food and beverages and electric power utilities.

As a basic concept of the study, the Business Case for corporate sustainability is considered as a strategy that is able to create economic value by improving social and environmental performances, not forgetting the ethical aspects and corporate governance. In other terms, the sustainability of the organization is aligned to the triple bottom line concept according to which the environmental, social and economic-financial dimensions add value to the company.

Basically, the questions assessed in the companies involve:

• Motivation: knowledge of concept, susceptibility to outside pressures (NGOs, customers, regulating agencies, capital markets), inner strengths and weaknesses and the information system;
• Capacity to implement: leadership, cultural and organizational alignment, more or less resistant areas and preponderance of financial aspects in decision making;
• Use of management tools: inclusion of sustainability in tools that perform the strategy and performance assessment of the company;
• Alignment of the various areas in the organization: vision, impact and effort in the organization's different areas with regard to sustainability and identifying points of resistance;
• Identifying peculiarities in the business sector: influence of sectoral and national characteristics on the sustainability design.

An important aspect of the study is the fact that a number of executives from different areas in each company under study were interviewed individually - generally the CEO, CFO, director for sustainability (if any) and other directors or managers (environment, supplier relations, communication, human resources, regulatory matters and strategy).

Accordingly, the study in these sectors looks to:

• Examine the difference in perception, attitude and behavior patterns between the managers responsible for sustainability and other policy-makers in the companies;
• Identify potential differences specific to the industrial sectors in values, restrictions, etc.;
• Examine the pressures faced by the companies to respond to internal demands (such as management changes) or outside demands (such as the shareholders' expectations of return);
• Examine whether companies use alarm systems or other diagnosis tools to check social and environmental expectations.

Next, it is hoped to be able to undertake a sectoral analysis on sustainability, by identifying successful vectors and the main drawbacks against adopting policies and practices compatible with a sustainable growth model.

Accordingly, at the end of the study, the research must produce the following results:

• Papers analyzing the key sustainability-related questions for each industrial sector studied (pulp and paper, electric power utilities, and food and beverages);
• Statistical treatment of questionnaire results, also permitting comparison with the results of the study run by CSM/IMD;
• Presentations of practical success stories, always in mutual agreement with the company;
• Final seminars in April 2006 (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo) to present all results in the presence of members of the CSM Faculty.