In collaboration with Maersk, Mannaz facilitated a roundtable session during the stakeholder forum Recharge, organised by the Danish-UK Association in November 2025 in London.
Our session focused on aspects of leading both sustainability and competitiveness. We chose this dual focus because achieving both increased sustainability and competitiveness is important and challenging for today’s leaders.
Below, we have listed the key perspectives discussed at the session. The points for each perspective are combining insights from Maersk, Mannaz and the participating businesses, organisations, and academia.
Upholding company values consistently, while applying them with sensitivity to the diverse contexts where the company operates. Translating global principles into locally meaningful actions ensures that purpose is not lost in translation but reinforced through contextual relevance.
How a company lives its values ultimately shapes its legacy and applying them with sensitivity can influence both its immediate local relationships and its long-term global credibility and competitiveness.
Company strategy is grounded in scenario planning, where the chosen direction provides focus, while alternative scenarios remain active to enable swift adaptation in today’s volatile environment. This approach blends foresight with agility. By continually scanning for emerging signals and integrating external insights into strategy reviews, organisations can adjust course in time.
In this way, you still set a strategic course, making it possible to invest and act. But factor in that other scenarios may become reality in a specific market, region or overall, with an unpredictable timing.
Different scenarios makes it either harder or easier to combine sustainability and competitiveness.
Growth and competitiveness in the net-zero economy highly depend on the abilities to innovate and collaborate in the value chain. True progress emerges when companies co-create new business models and services with suppliers, customers and other partners.
At the same time, collaboration now extends beyond traditional boundaries. Partnerships with startups, academia, and competitors are becoming critical to strengthen resilience, accelerate technology adoption, and reshape markets around shared sustainability outcomes.
It makes is essential to be skilful at listening and creating trust and (enough) common ground for the relevant parties to choose to collaborate.
Addressing the need for more extensive risk-sharing across the full value chain to jointly navigate uncertainties, foster innovation, and build resilience. Shared responsibility creates space for necessary experimentation that strengthens the joint ability to anticipate challenges and adapt together.
Navigating the demand for both short-term profit and long-term relevance is part of the risk-sharing challenge. Short-term profit can be supported through energy savings and more simple/easily implementable sustainability focused solutions. The long-term (more) sustainable solution will often demand the willingness to look at the bigger picture, the role of business, and the long-term market relevance and demands seeking out available funding in the value chain or ecosystem. The upside is that, when done well, this is a way to increase both sustainability and competitiveness, both short-term and long-term.
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