Dr. Rohan Fernando will speak on ‘sustainability’ at the CIMA Technical symposium 2010

Dr.  Rohan Fernando who is the head of Plantations and Business Development at Aitken Spence Plc, will deliver paper 1 on ‘Bringing ethics and sustainability to mainstream strategy’ at the CIMA Technical Symposium to be held at the Cinnamon Lakeside Hotel on 24 November.

He has extensive experience in the plantation industry both in the public and private sectors and played a key role in the plantations privatisation programme.  

He has played an important role in the rebranding strategy of Aitken Spence and also leads the CSR and Sustainability Initiatives of the group. He was awarded the Brand Leadership Award at the Asia Brand Congress 2008.

In the ever changing world of business and globalisation, climate change and sustainability of business have emerged as key challenges in developing a successful business enterprise.

Ethics and sustainability still continue to remain on the surface in many  organisations, although majority of firms have recognised that ethics and sustainability are not two ends of the business spectrum but both intertwined together to form the basis of corporate strategy in an  organisation.

The road to integrating ethics and sustainability through mainstream corporate strategy is through both a combination of strong leadership and structural interventions. Besides, there has also been an ongoing appreciation of integrating these two elements amongst the employees of the organisation through strong implementation of human resources development practices at all levels. Details of some of these initiatives will form the ingredients of Dr. Fernando’s paper.

 ‘Transformation: the compulsory choice’ is the topical theme of this year’s symposium and will focus on timely and vital areas such as the impact of globalisation and technological on management accounting, ethics and sustainability, innovative decision-making, business and supply chain agility, finance transformation and leading a knowledge workforce; and the deliberations will be made by eminent local and foreign speakers.