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Sustainability plans can lose ambition without a public reversal: the goals remain in the strategy deck, while everyday choices gradually favor what is easier to measure, fund, or deliver. Manuel Reppmann and Eduard Esau’s account of six early-stage sustainability and social-impact ventures suggests one way this happens: teams frame commercial viability and impact as competing stages—“profit or purpose”—then make early choices that leave little room to pursue both.
How a sustainability transformation loses ambition
The erosion can look like sensible incremental decisions. A team softens a target, postpones a difficult measurement, or chooses an implementation path that favors near-term viability. Each decision may have a defensible rationale; together, they can move the initiative back toward what the organization would have done without its sustainability plan. The aspiration survives on paper even as the working model changes.
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Reppmann and Esau’s article, published in September 2026 and identified as originally published by MIT Sloan Management Review, describes this pattern through six sustainability or social-impact startups tracked for more than two years, from early idea through proof of concept or collapse. Three of the six collapsed. That is a finding within this small set of ventures—not a general startup or corporate failure rate—and it does not establish that mindset alone determines outcomes. The authors argue that how teams frame the tension between viability and impact can shape the structures and decisions through which a transformation develops. Reppmann and Esau’s article
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Why treating profit and purpose as sequential goals can backfire
An either/or frame often turns into a sequence: deliver impact first and figure out viability later, or establish a business case and add impact after scaling. The risk is structural. The first stage influences the offer, costs, measures, and capabilities the team builds; by the time it is complete, the second aim may be expensive or impractical to recover.
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Impact first, viability later
One venture in the authors’ account began with high standards and idealism but did not first find a simpler way to test whether its model could work commercially. The viability problem emerged too late for easy simplification. The lesson is not to lower the impact goal; it is to test whether a workable delivery model can support it before committing to a design that is difficult to change.
Scale first, impact later
Another team prioritized building its business case and planned to pursue social impact after scaling. The company did not reach that later stage. As the authors put it, “The second leg never happened.” A future commitment cannot protect impact if the decisions made now build an organization, product, or set of metrics that do not serve it.
What a both/and approach changes in practice
Both/and does not mean trade-offs vanish or every sustainability goal can be met alongside every commercial target. It means testing and discussing both aims within the same decisions instead of assigning one to a distant future phase. In the ventures the authors describe as developing durable, mission-aligned models, teams kept both objectives in view, tried simpler early prototypes, and sought stakeholder feedback that could challenge their assumptions. “They didn’t resolve the tension; they worked through it, decision by decision,” Reppmann and Esau write.
For a team designing a new offer or transformation, that approach can be made concrete with four questions:
- What is the simplest prototype that can test both? Identify what would show whether customers or the business model are viable, and what evidence would indicate the intended impact. Avoid building an elaborate solution before either assumption has been tested.
- Who can challenge the plan early? Bring in stakeholders whose experience can expose assumptions the team may not see, including people affected by the outcome and relevant customers or partners.
- Do measures and reporting keep both aims visible? Check whether early KPIs and reporting relationships track commercial progress and sustainability outcomes, or whether one becomes invisible in routine reviews.
- Which choices will be hard to reverse? Before each implementation step, identify the assumptions it embeds in the offer, operating model, or measures. Test uncertain assumptions while changing course is still feasible.
Why team mindset is only part of the explanation
Team framing matters, but it operates inside wider systems. A 2023 conceptual paper by Struben and colleagues describes “capability traps”: short-term performance pressure can favor lower-ambition measures with visible near-term returns over work that requires new capabilities and has delayed, uncertain payback. That pressure can make a promising initiative look unattractive before the organization has built what it needs to deliver it. Struben et al., “From low-hanging fruit to high-impact sustainability transformations”
Some transformations also depend on conditions no single company controls. Compatible products, common standards, consumer willingness, the roles of other firms, regulation, and industry coordination can all affect whether a solution can scale. A team may need to distinguish a weak business model from a promising model blocked by missing infrastructure—and recognize where partnerships or collective action are necessary. The exact mix differs by initiative; the systems paper offers an explanation of these dynamics, not a universal operational checklist.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to diagnose quiet drift
When a sustainability initiative seems less ambitious than its original plan, examine both the team’s decisions and the conditions around them. The following questions are diagnostic prompts, not a validated scoring system:
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1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches- Has the initiative shifted from testing impact and viability together to postponing one of them?
- Do the KPIs and reporting lines make both outcomes visible in ordinary decisions?
- Is short-term performance pressure crowding out investment in capabilities the initiative still needs?
- Are returns delayed or uncertain in ways that current measures fail to capture?
- Does progress depend on suppliers, customers, standards, complementary products, regulation, or coordination beyond the company?
- Which implementation decisions have narrowed the options available for restoring the original ambition?
The first questions point toward choices the team can revisit; the later ones help reveal constraints that require capability-building, a longer view of performance, or action with other organizations. Treat the startup cases as a management hypothesis for established companies, not proof that the same mechanism explains every stalled corporate transformation.
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