Flourishing Business Community
Speakers Series: Stories from the Field #25
Is Your Business Model Flourishing? Tools to Measure True Sustainability Performance with Bob Willard
| Date: Tuesday, December 9, 2025 |
| Time: 16h00 UTC – 08h00 PST, 11h00 EST, 15h00 BST, 16h00 CET, 01h00 + 1day JST. To convert UTC to your time zone, click here |
| Duration: 1 hour |
| Registration: Required via Eventbrite at bit.ly/SFF25-Register |
For our twenty fifth monthly flourishing business community speaker series: stories from the field, the community is delighted to welcome Dr. Bob Willard from Sustainability Advantage, based in Ontario, Canada.
The Flourishing Enterprise Co-lab is grateful for the support of Social Innovation at Georgian College, Ontario, Canada, to put on our speaker series.
Bob is the Founder and Chief Sustainability Champion of his sole proprietorship: Sustainability Advantage. Sustainability Advantage is a sole proprietorship that provides six Master Slide Decks that help sustainability champions put forward the best justification for authentic sustainability, plus over two dozen free, open-source tools and resources for sustainability champions that help them be more effective change agents.
Bob is a leading expert on authentic sustainability justifications, reporting frameworks, and sustainable procurement. Bob applies his business and leadership experience from his 34-year career at IBM Canada to engage the business community in proactively avoiding risks and capturing opportunities by using authentic environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices. Over the last 23 years, he has given over 1,800 presentations, has authored six books, and published two white papers. This work included initiating the work that became the first science-based authentic sustainability assessment system, the Future-Fit Business Benchmark, and a light weight assessment tool based on it, the Basic Sustainability Assessment Tool (BSAT).
The Flourishing Business Canvas is based on the same best available science that Bob used as the basis for the Future-Fit Business Benchmark – the The Eight Sustainable Principles from the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development.
Bob used the Flourishing Business Canvas to help him clarify how the purpose of his business, “to ensure future generations have the opportunity for at least the quality of life that we have enjoyed”, could be best enacted in his business model to ensure he was authentically walking the talk on his vision, “a sustainable world, in which people and businesses flourish within nature’s limits”.
In his work teaching graduate students around the world he connects useful sustainability and financial metrics, such as the Basic Sustainability Assessment Tool with the Flourishing Business Canvas (FBC).
At the end of Bob’s presentation, participants will be able to:
- Use the nested interdependencies model to explain the essence of authentic sustainability
- Explain how the FBC represents any generic business model
- Describe how the free, open-source Basic Sustainable Assessment Tool (BSAT) can provide sustainability metrics for the FBC
- What does Sustainability Advantage hope to gain from participating in the Flourishing Business Community?
- What can Sustainability Advantage offer to the community?
At the end of his talk Bob will take questions from members of the community. After the event, a video of the talk plus slides will be shared in the “Speaker Series” space of the Flourishing Business Community. Please join other flourishing business leaders and become a full member to access.