The Four Organizational Factors That Built Kimberly-Clark's Remarkable Sustainability Goals

Peggy Ward, director of the Enterprise Sustainability Strategy Team at Kimberly-Clark Corporation, says that having strong support from the company’s CEO, global leadership team, four business units, and an external advisory board have been crucial to building and meeting aggressive sustainability metrics.
As director of the Enterprise Sustainability Strategy Team at Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Peggy Ward helps to oversee a company with a long and impressive history. The consumer packaged goods company is close to 140 years old, and today has 57,000 employees in 36 countries. Every day, more than a billion people use its products, which include Kleenex tissues, Huggies diapers and Kotex feminine care products.
Kimberly-Clark’s extensive sustainability efforts have garnered the company the number-one-rated consumer goods company ranking on the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index from 2005 to 2009. The company issues a sustainability report every five years and is now at work on an ambitious set of 2015 goals, which it calls Sustainability 2015.
In a conversation with David Kiron, executive editor of Innovation Hubs at MIT Sloan Management Review, Ward details the wide-ranging goals the company hopes to meet in the next three years, the organization structure that helped set that direction and the employee engagement project that has achieved 25% participation in its first year alone.