On Emma Stewart’s triumph, the myth of the finished mission, and why the champion of non-financial value belongs leading in the C-suite Emma Stewart deserves real credit. In nearly six years as Netflix's first Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) she built a function from nothing, helped the company set real emissions targets, and — more distinctively than most of her peers — got sustainability into the storytelling itself, threading climate consciousness through hundreds of scripts and a library of more than 200 titles seen in 190 countries. When she announced her departure this summer to join Climate Spring, she offered a generous explanation: she had reached the point every CSO hopes to reach, the point at which sustainability is so fully absorbed into the operations of the business that a dedicated champion is no longer necessary.
I want to take that claim seriously, because it is offered in good faith and because too many well intentioned people will nod along with it. And then I want to respectfully, and completely, disagree with it. The disagreement is not about Stewart's record. It is about what the role of Chief Sustainability Officer actually is. If we misunderstand the office, we will keep celebrating its retirement at exactly the moment we should be arguing for its permanence.
The test we don't apply anywhere else
No company, on achieving a decade of clean audits and a mature FP&A function, announces that financial discipline has now been "embedded" everywhere and disbands the office of the CFO. No general counsel, however successful at building a culture of compliance across every business unit, is told that legal judgment has become so pervasive that the company no longer needs a CLO. We do not treat the internalization of financial rigor or legal prudence as grounds
for eliminating the executive who holds institutional responsibility for it. We treat that internalization as the evidence the function is working — and we keep the function anyway, because capital markets shift, exposure changes, and the world does not hold still.
Sustainability should pass the same test. The claim that a CSO is no longer needed once sustainability is "embedded" quietly assumes that corporate sustainability is a project with a finish line, rather than a permanent condition of operating a modern enterprise. That assumption is the category error — and it is, I think, downstream of a deeper problem: a great deal of how well sustainability gets engineered into a globally scaling corporation depends on how corporate sustainability is defined in the first place.
What corporate sustainability actually is — and why the definition is the whole argument
We have known better since at least 1999, when the Dow Jones Sustainability Index offered one of the first serious definitions of the term: corporate sustainability as the discipline of managing the opportunities and risks that arise from environmental and social change. Notice what that definition does not say. It does not say sustainability is a set of practices to be installed and then left alone. It says sustainability is an ongoing act of managing something that is itself moving — environmental and social change does not pause once a company gets good at responding to it.
This matters because the popular imagination still hasn't caught up. To the uninitiated, "corporate sustainability" still conjures a tree-planting day, a diversity statement, a foundation's discretionary grantmaking — worthy things, but optional things, add-ons a company could, in principle, do without. That is not a fringe misreading. It is close to the assumption embedded in Emma Stewart's own framing: that sustainability succeeds by disappearing into the wallpaper.
But look at what has actually happened to the definition of corporate sustainability over the last several years, as it has moved from voluntary best practice into binding law. The European Union's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and its companion Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, the IFRS Foundation's ISSB standards now being adopted across dozens of jurisdictions, and California's SB 253 here at home have all converged, independently, on a definition of corporate sustainability that tracks the DJSI's 1999 formulation far more closely than it tracks the philanthropic caricature: the management of material
environmental and social risks and opportunities across the enterprise and its value chain, over time. That convergence is the great, underappreciated contribution of the global move to mandatory reporting. It has forced regulators, investors, and boards to reckon with corporate sustainability as something vastly broader and deeper than discretionary good works — as a discipline as structurally serious, and now nearly as codified, as financial reporting itself.
A discipline that serious, newly encoded into law on three continents, is not a discipline that graduates itself out of needing an executive champion. It is a discipline whose champion has just been handed a much bigger mandate.
Vision, under conditions of accelerating breakdown
Dignity First Leadership argues that an enterprise's Vision is not a slogan but a structure — the integration of the corporation's purpose (why it exists), its superpower (the differentiated capability only it can bring to bear), and its values (the commitments it will not trade away under pressure). Articulating and maintaining that integration is difficult in any era. It is a different order of difficult in this one, as human-caused climate and environmental breakdown accelerates faster than most institutions' planning horizons were built to absorb.
This is precisely the terrain a CSO is positioned to hold, and no one else in the C-suite is positioned to hold it in quite the same way. The CFO's instruments are built to price the known.The CLO's instruments are built to bound the permissible. The CSO's distinctive competence is to keep the corporation's purpose, superpower, and values legible and actionable while the physical and social ground beneath the business is shifting — to keep re-deriving what the Vision requires as the facts of environmental and social change keep changing. That is not a task with an end state. It is the task of leadership under conditions that will not stabilize in our
lifetimes.
The influence platform: how the work actually gets done
None of this is abstract for us at SR Inc. Across our member companies, we have repeatedly found that the CSO's real leverage does not come from a sustainability department acting alone— it comes from convening and chairing a global, cross-functional steering committee with the standing to recognize and elevate the company's Vision, Governance, Strategy, Guidance, Implementation, and Reporting results, and to keep those six elements coherent with one another as conditions change. And the enterprise works to mange it nonfiancial risks and opportunities deriving from accelerating social and environmental change.
That committee structure — drawing in finance, legal, operations, human resources, investor relations, and the businesses themselves — is the actual influence platform through which a CSO advances the CEO's forward vision of multi-stakeholder value creation across the near, mid, and long term simultaneously.
That platform is not a phase of organizational development that a company outgrows once sustainability is "embedded" It is the opposite: it is infrastructure that has to be actively chaired, refreshed, and defended year over year, because the moment no one owns the coherence of Vision through Reporting across a global, matrixed organization, that coherence degrades —quietly, functionally, and often invisibly until a material risk or a stakeholder relationship breaks. Someone has to hold the seat at the head of that table on an ongoing basis. That is the CSO's job description, not a transitional assignment.
What can be outsourced — and what cannot
This is also where the "no longer needed" argument collapses under its own weight, because it conflates two very different things: the specialized work of sustainability and the office that answers for it. The work has become highly technical, and a great deal of it should be, can be, and increasingly is outsourced to specialized managed-service providers — and that trend deserves celebration, not suspicion. Carbon accounting, sustainable product and service innovation, sustainable enterprise software platforms, data controls and assurance-grade data management, water management, Life Cycle Assessments, ERP integration, accounting controllership for sustainability metrics, and even government and regulatory relationship management can be distributed and partially or fully performed by outside specialists who do that one thing better, faster, and more cost-effectively than a large internal team could. A mature market of vendors and managed-service firms doing this work well is exactly what we should want, and it is exactly what SR Inc's own members increasingly rely on.
But notice what does not get outsourced alongside any of that specialized work: the most senior executive accountable for the position, its standing in the global organization, and how the enterprise as a whole responds to environmental and social risks and opportunities that are mounting in a manner without precedent in human experience. You can outsource carbon measurement. You cannot outsource the judgment about what the company's carbon exposure means for its strategy, its capital allocation, its relationships with regulators and communities, and its long-term license to operate. You can outsource the LCA. You cannot outsource the decision about which findings from that LCA the CEO and the board actually need to act on, and when. That accountability is inherently non-delegable, for the same reason a CFO does not outsource the CFO's office even while outsourcing payroll processing, or a CLO does not outsource the general counsel's seat even while outsourcing document review to outside firms. Specialized execution scales through vendors. Institutional accountability for the enterprise's
response to a changing world does not — it has to sit with a senior executive, inside the company, permanently.
So the distribution of specialized work and the rise of outsourced sustainability managed services is not evidence that the CSO's office is dissolving into the market. It is closer to the opposite: it is what maturity looks like. A function graduates from doing everything in-house,sub-optimally, to buying specialized execution well and freeing its most senior accountable executives to do the one thing that cannot be bought — hold the enterprise-wide judgment, sit at the head of the cross-functional table, and keep answering, year after year, for how the whole company is meeting risks and opportunities that keep changing faster than any vendor contract
can anticipate.
Above the CFO's brief, not beside it
I want to be clear here, because this argument can wrongly heard as a slight to the CFO's office, and it is not. The CFO's discipline — rigorous capital allocation, defensible ROI, balance-sheet integrity — is indispensable, and a CSO who does not respect it will not last long in the room. But the CFO's brief is regularly, by design and by necessity, oriented to the project, the quarter, the capital cycle. That is exactly what makes a CFO good at being a CFO.
The CSO's brief looks out towards the future. It is oriented to the CEO's forward vision and to the creation of value for multiple stakeholders across the near, mid, and long term simultaneously — which means the CSO must sometimes advocate for commitments that will not clear a simple project-level ROI test, because the return they are protecting build into the quality of the corporations relationship capital with the human communities that give the corporation its life, its power, and its creative capacity in the first place. Its talent, its customers, its host communities, its supply chain relationships, the trust of the regulators and capital markets it depends on. That is not a case against financial rigor. It is a case for a second, complementary executive discipline — one that keeps the enterprise's eye on value that a project's ROI was never built to see.
Leadership, not management
Dignity First Leadership draws this distinction directly, and it is worth stating plainly: management and leadership are not two points on the same scale, where leadership is simply "more" management. Management optimizes within a known frame — it takes the variables as given and improves performance against them. Leadership is the formation of individuals and communities so that they can act with judgment, coherence, and purpose when the frame itself is what is moving. In a moment of compounding complexity — geopolitical, technological, ecological, social — the reflex is to reach for more management: more process, more metrics,
more control. Management is necessary, and good management deserves respect at every level, from the CFO's ledger to the plant floor. But management cannot supply what this moment actually requires, because the frame will not hold still long enough for management alone to optimize against it.
That is the real office the CSO holds. Not "sustainability manager" administering a checklist that can eventually be automated into every function and then retired. Sustainability leader — the executive whose job is to support the positive ongoing moral formation of the individuals and communities who make up and surround the enterprise. So that they can act with judgment advancing corporate purpose and differentiating positioning amid conditions too complex to fully specify in advance. That is a permanent office, at the Executive, Enterprise, and Economic levels alike, for exactly as long as the world keeps being this complicated. Which is to say: for the foreseeable future.
Financial gravity does not take a day off
There is a further, more urgent problem with declaring the CSO's mission accomplished, and Eric Ries names it precisely in Incorruptible: what he calls "financial gravity," the unconscious, structural force — built into standard fiduciary duty and standard corporate charters — that pulls every organization back toward short-term financial return, regardless of what its leaders originally intended. Ries's point is not that companies are led by bad people. It is that good
intentions do not survive contact with markets unless they are structurally protected, because the pull is built into the system and does not depend on anyone's motives.
His central case study makes the point unanswerably. Vectura, a UK-based respiratory health company, drew a takeover bid from Philip Morris International — a company whose core business was directly antithetical to Vectura's mission of treating lung disease. Medical professionals and respiratory-health advocates publicly urged the board to reject the offer. The board, by its own account, felt its hands were tied by a fiduciary duty encoded in the standard corporate charter to accept the higher bid. Philip Morris spent roughly £1.1 billion, took a $900 million write-down within three years, and sold the company off for parts. Nothing about that
outcome required villainy. It required only the ordinary operation of financial gravity, unopposed.
To believe a CSO becomes unnecessary once sustainability is embedded is to believe financial gravity has been permanently switched off inside the corporation. It has not. It is never switched off. It is a constant, the way gravity is a constant on a bridge — you don't defeat it once; you engineer against it continuously, for as long as the bridge has to stand. The CSO is one of the load-bearing elements of that engineering: the executive whose institutional job is to keep pulling the corporation's attention back toward the multi-stakeholder value and the human communities that financial gravity, left to itself, will always discount. Remove that office in the very moment sustainability's stakes are rising, and you have not completed the mission. You have disarmed the one structure built to resist the pull.
The seat is not a phase
Emma Stewart's generosity in describing her tenure leading at Netflix is a credit to her and those in those six years she created a real institutional achievement worth studying. But full institutionalization of sustainability does not mean the champion is no longer needed. It means the champion has earned the argument for permanence — a seat as ongoing, as structurally necessary, and as deserving of executive-level leadership rather than mere administration, as the seats already held by the CFO and the General Counsel. Not despite the fact that the world is more complex than it has ever been, but because of it. And not despite financial gravity, but precisely because financial gravity never stops pulling.
Jim Boyle is CEO & Founder of Sustainability Roundtable, Inc. and the author of Dignity First Leadership: Developing & Driving a World-Class Sustainability Strategy.