Sustainable Strategic Management (GES): Sustainability in small business

The importance of sustainability for the development of society requires organizations to make complex efforts that allow them to continue with their endless struggle to maintain or create competitiveness and, at the same time, to responsibly take on their leading role in improving the social and environmental impacts of human activities. For small companies, the planning and operationalization of efforts required to turn them into sustainable organizations represent an even greater challenge, which adds to the lack of sustainable management models in the specialized literature. The objective of this research was to develop a management model called Sustainable Strategic Management - GES. Well-established conceptual bases such as Strategic Management, Triple Bottom Line, and Balanced Scorecard were used to build an integrated model that allows for small businesses to insert sustainability into their activities in a holistic, feasible, and controllable manner, resulting in competitive advantage. Also, the planning and implementation of GES were tested in a small Brazilian company. In conclusion, a theoretically validated tool was obtained, which will still require evidence to show, in the long run, the effectiveness of its purpose. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.