What this episode is about
Germán Granda runs Forética, the Spanish business association that has worked on corporate ethics and sustainability since 1999, when it was literally born as a forum for business ethics. More than two hundred companies now sit inside that network, and Forética is part of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, which gives Germán a rare panoramic view of what is happening inside companies in Europe, the United States, China and India.
He returns to La Trastienda for a second recording, after a first attempt lost to technical problems, with a thesis that cuts against the mood of the moment: sustainability does not run on regulation alone. The conversation with Juanjo Mestre moves from the credibility of ESG teams after the Omnibus, through the pendulum swing in European regulation, to the hard financial data that keeps sustainability at the centre of any serious business plan.
From fried egg to scrambled eggs
Have sustainability teams lost credibility? Germán reframes the question. What is happening, he says, is a recalibration. Sustainability used to sit in the middle of the company like a fried egg: a clearly defined yolk that reported to everyone and slowly gained weight, even reaching the board. Now it looks more like scrambled eggs, spread across the whole organisation. There can no longer be a CFO, a head of HR or a procurement lead who does not understand this field.
That redistribution has a cost. Some individual sustainability departments have lost weight in the process, even as the company as a whole has gained it. Others adapted well and became the place where finance, technology and operations coordinate. The dividing line, for Germán, is time horizon: anyone who manages for the short term will always experience sustainability as a toll, because the returns sit further out.
The regulatory pendulum
Germán is candid about Europe. The post-financial-crisis instinct to regulate produced real benefits in transparency and comparability, but the sheer weight of rules eventually collided with competitiveness. When a company feels that sustainability is a brake rather than an engine, resistance appears, especially when the United States and China play by different rules.
He reads the Omnibus recalibration as the pendulum swinging back towards balance, not as a retreat. The examples are concrete: many large companies do not believe the PPWR packaging rules will be implemented as drafted, and in Spain the CSRD transposition is stuck while the draft law waits in a stalled Congress. That uncertainty is expensive. Europe now needs to build: energy autonomy, a clean industrial base, and a circular economy for the critical minerals it lacks, given that China controls 19 of the 20 that renewables depend on. For a deeper look at the reporting side of this, see our CSRD resource hub.
The business case and the hard data
Is there really a business case, or is it the holy grail everyone chases and nobody finds? Germán’s answer is that there is no single business case that fits every company; each one has to find its own. But the aggregate data is hard to argue with. In a recent report with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, around 90% of companies still see sustainability as a competitive advantage, and more than 70% name political and regulatory uncertainty, not sustainability itself, as their biggest risk.
The physical data points the same way. Extreme weather events and billion-dollar climate impacts have both risen more than 70% in recent years, something insurers can no longer ignore. Studies from index providers such as MSCI show that companies with the strongest sustainability profiles tend to have higher revenues, better margins, lower staff turnover and a lower cost of capital. Measuring all of this, including Scope 3 and the water footprint of the data centres behind the AI boom, is exactly where a platform like Dcycle’s carbon footprint tooling earns its place.
The astronaut economy
Germán closes with a mental model borrowed from ecological economics: we have to move from the cowboy economy, which extracts and discards as if the plains were infinite, to the astronaut economy, which accepts that we live inside a finite, shared vessel and have to keep ten billion people living well within planetary limits. His two book recommendations, “It’s Not the End of the World” by Hannah Ritchie and Clayton Christensen’s “How Will You Measure Your Life?”, point in the same direction: the future is a decision, not a forecast.
If your company is trying to turn sustainability into competitiveness rather than compliance, you can book a demo with Dcycle and see how we work.