Redefining the Checkbox

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My Sustainable Encounter with Jangoo Dalal

by Albert Schiller

The Hidden Complexity

The conversation around Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) often oversimplifies a complex undertaking. Many organizations underestimate its pervasive nature. Jangoo Dalal points out a common misconception: companies frequently delegate ESG as a task to a single person or department. This approach, he observes, fails to grasp its multi-departmental and multi-functional reach within an enterprise. Data for compliance, encompassing diverse metrics like emissions, energy, waste, social aspects, and governance details, resides across numerous organizational silos. These include disparate factory units, functional heads, and various stakeholders. Dalal explains that this inherent fragmentation fundamentally complicates data collection. Furthermore, he argues that staff responsible for this data often already manage demanding full-time roles, rendering additional requests an additional burden.

Charting Outcomes

To understand the necessity of this doctrine, one must first understand the character of the environment. India's renewable energy industry is not a predictable, market-driven landscape. It is, in Manglani's words, "regulatory driven". This means the fundamental rules of operation are not set by supply and demand but by political and policy decisions that can shift quickly. She describes a system where "the regulations are changing in a snap". In such an environment, traditional long-term strategic planning becomes futile. A single government notification can render a meticulously crafted and approved five-year roadmap obsolete. This creates a condition of perpetual change, an unstable habitat where the most valuable asset is not the quality of a well-derived, static plan but the capacity for a dynamic response. The system does not reward rigidity or long-term adherence to a fixed strategy. It rewards the ability to absorb shocks and pivot without hesitation.

Charting Outcomes

A further challenge Dalal identifies is that organizations frequently embark on the ESG journey without clearly defining their desired outcomes. He stresses that without "actually charting out what the outcome they want is," efforts can become misdirected. He emphasizes the importance of clearly defined goals from the outset. This ensures that data collection serves a strategic purpose beyond mere reporting. His approach involves strategically mapping the organization to actively engage more people. This focuses on generating enthusiasm for the sustainability journey. Securing "tone from the top" is crucial, as he states, for driving things forward. This comprehensive engagement establishes proper data flows, transforming raw data into actionable business intelligence.

The Low-Hanging-Fruit

The true power of ESG data emerges when viewed through a business lens. Dalal provides a clear example from a manufacturing company producing steel products with multiple facilities. His team analyzed energy intensity across all factories. They found that if one factory's energy intensity was 1.2 times another's for the same product, it immediately signaled a "low-hanging fruit" for process and cost optimization. This insight transformed ESG data from a compliance burden into a tool for internal operational improvement. This shows how rigorous data analysis, even for seemingly external ESG concerns, can directly impact a company's bottom line by uncovering efficiencies and generating significant cost savings.

Waste as a Healthcare Resource

Another illustration of data transforming into value comes from a healthcare company with a chain of testing laboratories. Dalal's team systematically measured different types of waste across its facilities, mapping waste generation over several months. They then calculated waste intensity per rupee of revenue. Significant variances emerged, with some centers showing 40% higher waste intensity than others. Dalal points out that "Waste doesn't start as waste. It always starts as something useful, right in the end, it becomes waste." This insight led to a critical realization: higher waste intensity signals a broken internal process, a problem entirely within organizational control. These discoveries immediately captured senior management's attention, shifting their perspective on waste from disposal cost to operational inefficiency.

The Paradigm Shift

These examples collectively illustrate a critical paradigm shift that Dalal champions. When analyzed from a "business angle," he affirms that "even ESG data can give you business outcomes, business value which people don't think about." ESG data yields not only compliance reports but also actionable insights that drive cost benefits and operational efficiency. This demonstrated value makes the journey easier for the enterprise and its internal champions. The challenge lies in shifting perception: it transforms ESG from a perceived regulatory obligation or a box-ticking exercise into a strategic asset. Dalal's work demonstrates that sustainability is not a separate, burdensome activity, but an integral part of optimizing and future-proofing a business.

So what can we take from his approach?

Questions for Audience

1. The blog frames agility as a survival mechanism in a volatile political landscape. How can large organizations develop genuine agility without dismantling the very structures that give them scale and stability in more predictable markets?

2. Manglani's success came from a lean structure that mirrored its chaotic environment. If the Indian renewable energy sector were to stabilize, would her agile model become less effective? Does "structural fitness" demand that an organization must change its core identity as its environment evolves?