Curtis Ravenel dates his enthusiasm for purpose-driven business to his first job as a program associate with the National Recycling Coalition. “I got very interested in the idea that being an environmentalist need not hurt your economic opportunities,” he recalls.

But it would be some time before the notion defined Ravenel’s career.

Ravenel joined Bloomberg LP in 2002 as a financial analyst for internal operations. He eventually rose to a management position in the firm’s capital planning group. Still, his interest in reconciling environmental issues with business was dormant rather than defeated.

Recognized as a smart manager on the rise, in 2006 Ravenel was invited to participate in a global manager-training program. “One night they said to us, ‘We want you to come up with an idea for Bloomberg, and we want you to flesh it out a little bit. You have exactly 18 hours’”, he recalls.

“I shot out of bed at four o’clock the next morning,” Ravenel says. “It sounds corny, but I saw all of it.” By “it” he means what is today called BGreen – Bloomberg’s internal sustainability plan.

The culture at Bloomberg is unambiguously commercial. It is a business of selling data to make financial markets more efficient – an entity serving money-makers of all stripes. So Ravenel, who is today Bloomberg’s sustainability manager, envisioned an internal effort to reduce resource use that would focus just as heavily on financial savings as environmental benefits, with the cost-cutting accrued directly to the operating groups.

Once BGreen was selected for piloting, Ravenel summoned the guts to nominate himself as its leader. He soon saw that what he’d originally envisioned as an 18-month project had to become much more. “You have to have a full-time, permanent group that constantly pushes the envelope,” he says, because a temporary effort creates only temporary buy-in from business units. “If you’re not a permanent part of the work flow, once you walk away they go back to their old ways.”

To take the sustainability initiative company-wide, he hand-picked team members from key departments in the company, then set the bar high by telling them: “We have to be more professional, more business-minded, and have our shit more together than any other group, because there’s so much inherent skepticism about what we do.”

This emphasis on cutting costs earned Ravenel and his team instant internal credibility and helped build the capacity to take on even bigger game. “Bloomberg is about helping customers make better decisions with quantitative information,” says Ravenel. “Book value only tells a small part of the market cap story. So much is based on intangibles. Sustainability is one example of that.”

So the team set out to “make sustainability performance more quantitative, consumable and actionable.”

As Ravenel made the rounds internally, he brandished his pinstripe suit, his banker’s haircut, and his focus on the bottom line. Over time this “looking the part” helped him move Bloomberg’s sustainability activity beyond reducing the firm’s own footprint to expanding its product line. “Risk bores people,” Ravenel says. “Creating revenue opportunities –that’s exciting.”

On Ravenel’s watch, savings from Bloomberg’s internal sustainability successes were channeled from internal risk management to enhancing customer services. Today the company integrates “ESG” data – environmental, social and governance – on sustainability risks and opportunities into its analytical tools for investors, right alongside more established financial benchmarks. The company offers a clean energy sector market intelligence service and a website that serves as a one-stop shop for executives and policy decision makers seeking information and insights on the business of sustainability. The firm’s editorial arm provides sustainability news.

Together these offerings generate millions of dollars in new revenues for Bloomberg, proving that commercial success is not at odds with sustainability. Indeed, commercial success is the primary metric of business sustainability – and nowhere more than in a culture of purpose.

Commercial drive is the oxygen of business. The Curtis Ravenel story clearly demonstrates that commercial drive can move sustainability beyond internal “greening” to becoming a major engine for revenue-generating products and services.

The four leaders profiled in this series – Bob Kidder of Chrysler, Kees Kruythoff of Unilever, Alberto Weisser of Bunge, and Curtis Ravenel of Bloomberg – show not only what leaders can do to build cultures of purpose, but also that the seeds of such cultures can be found in any organization that thinks aspirationally about business sustainability.

Now for an open invitation to other business leaders: what more might you be doing to build a culture of purpose marked by energy, resilience and openness? What opportunities lie at the intersection of commercial drive and sustainability?

Christoph Lueneburger, author of A Culture of Purpose: How to Choose the Right People and Make the Right People Choose You, founded the sustainability practice and currently leads the private equity practice at Egon Zehnder, the world’s largest privately-held executive search and talent strategy firm.

The values-led business hub is funded by SC Johnson. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled advertisement feature. Find out more here.