Optimizing Business Strategy for Sustainable Growth and Innovation

In an exclusive interaction with Asia Business Outlook, Greg Lukasik, SVP & CEO of Ecolab Southeast Asia, discusses how aligning organizational culture with long-term strategic goals enables companies to foster innovation, sustainability, and operational efficiency. He advocates for a purpose-driven mindset, digital transformation, customer-centric innovation, and workforce development as essential pillars for building resilient, future-ready businesses. A seasoned business leader, Greg Lukasik brings over two decades of global leadership experience across industrial sectors. He specializes in strategy, sales, marketing, and general management, with a strong track record in driving sustainable growth and operational excellence. 

A strong organizational culture is crucial for driving long-term success. How can businesses ensure that their culture is aligned with strategic goals to foster collaboration, innovation, and performance? 

In the evolving business landscape, organizations with a clear, purpose driven culture are better placed to create competitive advantages that sustain the business, encourage innovation, and leave a lasting, realized impact. A strong organizational culture is no longer just an inner strength, but also a strategic differentiator. 

The first stage for any organization is to make sure that leadership openly and consistently defines its purpose and values to employees, customers, community partners, suppliers and other stakeholders in a way that is grounded within their experience of the organization. 

Sustainability is a core of purpose-driven strategies. Leading organizations today embed sustainable practices across all aspects of their operations—from product development to customer engagement to community support. For instance, Ecolab partners with industries to help reduce waste, conserve energy and water, and drive results at lower total costs. Their model demonstrates how sustainability can be both a business imperative and a customer value proposition.  

Mindset is another cultural lever worth promoting. High-performing organizations build leadership frameworks that deliberately prioritize innovation, inclusion, learning, and customer-centricity into their organizational mindsets. These mindsets help teams continuously think about opportunities for value-delivery and ensure they can pivot, adapt to changes, and focus their efforts on the purpose of their work. Investing in the establishment of a culture of high performance that embraces continuous improvement provides not only an opportunity for growth but also strengthens the ability of the company to bring and deliver sustainable solutions to problems of concern.  

Finally, consistency is important. Cultures thrive when values are instilled and reinforced consistently in markets, teams, and even customers, creating a feeling of shared mission while allowing improvisation due to local market adaptations. If a company operates across multiple regions with diverse customer cultures, providing a shared but adaptable culture with a shared core to the organization can bolster collaboration, innovation, and sustainable performance.  

Ultimately, companies that think about culture as a strategic advantage and place the necessary investments into making sure culture is aligned with their long-term vision, enable themselves to collectively build a resilient team that is innovative and high-performing in the future. 

Businesses often struggle to align short-term performance pressures with the need for long-term strategic investment. How can companies effectively balance these two seemingly conflicting priorities to foster sustainable growth? 

Organizations today are feeling constant pressures to produce immediate results while at the same time develop for the future. I believe the capacity to deliver on both short and long-term missions is about establishing a direct and purposeful link between near-term activities and long-term goals. 

This means embedding long-term strategic objectives into everyday decision-making is the first step. This includes establishing performance metrics that reward not just successes, but for making tangible progress against goals, such as building capability, innovation, or entering new markets. Continuous investment in digital technology and building talent isn't going to have an immediate impact on financial performance, but it is important for driving results over the long term and maintaining a competitive advantage.  

An agile approach is equally essential. By breaking down long-term initiatives into manageable milestones, organizations can deliver incremental wins that build confidence, demonstrate value, and allow for adaptation as market conditions evolve. Agility ensures that progress remains steady without losing sight of overarching goals. 

Just as important is fostering a culture of transparency and alignment. Ensuring that every team understands how their daily efforts contribute to the broader strategy creates a sense of ownership and purpose.  

Companies that succeed are those that consistently deliver results while investing boldly in the capabilities and innovations that will define their future.  

Understanding customer needs is essential to drive relevant innovation. How can businesses ensure that their innovation strategies remain customer-centric without being overly influenced by short-term trends? 

Firstly, the best companies are customer-focused and listen continuously. Not just around current challenges, but also their customers’ emerging priorities and future ambitions. By building long-term partnerships focused on solving systemic issues, businesses can align innovation efforts with lasting customer value, rather than fleeting market shifts.

For instance, in sectors facing increasing resource constraints, solutions like circular water management have emerged not because of short-term pressures, but because they address a long-term, structural challenge critical to customers' sustainability and operational resilience.  

Secondly, embedding a robust needs-assessment framework also helps focus action on the objectives that will provide returns on action both now and in the future. The ability to use data insights, horizon-scan market patterns, and leverage co-creation with customers, rather than react to each new trend, allows organizations to mitigate the risk of innovation investments being poorly aligned and provide the most ongoing relevance. For instance, deploying advanced technologies like real-time monitoring of processes, and predictive analytics may expose inefficiencies and reveal risks that the customer may not have yet fully recognized, keeps you ahead in both meeting needs and expectations. 

Thirdly, the best firms instill a balance between agility and discipline in their culture. It’s important to stay responsive to evolving customer requirements without losing sight of the broader mission. Cross-functional integration of research and development, customer-facing, and strategy groups could help organizations look at trends with a view to long-term consumer outcomes.  

To make sure that innovation strategies remain consumer-centric, firms must think beyond short-term trends but rather think about long-term value for consumers. This starts with deep understanding of evolving customer priorities, not just what they need today but what will matter tomorrow. Also embedded in innovation are principles like sustainability, resilience, and compliance, which will help an organization deliver for consumers in relevant and future-fit ways. Businesses can foster lasting customer trust and differentiation in a rapidly changing market by prioritizing solutions that enhance performance while supporting broader environmental and societal outcomes. 

In short, businesses that listen deeply, think long-term, and innovate responsibly will ensure their strategies remain customer-centric, delivering relevance today and resilience for tomorrow. 

Effective resource allocation is a key challenge for businesses aiming for sustainable growth. How can businesses optimize their use of resources to support innovation while maintaining operational efficiency? 

It is important to engage your customers not only on what they need today, but also on their future risks and opportunities. Water and resource scarcity management are major areas of need across our region fast becoming concerns. Businesses that address these challenges today will be better equipped to be resilient in the future. Through creating and implementing advanced AI-driven technologies, providing real-time monitoring, predictive analytics, and proactive maintenance insights - businesses have been able to transition from reactive to preventative actions, anchored within improved operational performance and sustainability in the long run. 

I believe innovation needs to be linked directly to recognized outcomes. Our development of a partnership with Digital Realty (a leading global data center) is an excellent example of this. We implemented AI-driven monitoring into their cooling system to identify inefficiencies and make improvements that will lead to water savings of approximately 15% to conserve operations and protect local watersheds. Businesses that support their innovation and aspirations within a clearly defined environmental and operational ROI can encourage stronger customer loyalty and increased long-term competitive advantage over time. 

Ultimately, businesses should consider their work as part of a systems-level process. As an example, programs like Ecolab Water for Climate demonstrate that organizations can leverage a framework for their work, understand their objectives and intentions, build insights, take action, and measure outcomes, in order to consistently realize sustainability goals as operational reality.  

Equally important is investing in the future workforce. Strengthening technical education and occupational skills development ensures a strong talent pipeline aligned to emerging sectors like water management and digital infrastructure. Companies that invest in skills for the future today will be better positioned to respond to future market demands. 

Customer-oriented innovation is not just about technology; it is a mindset. Companies that embrace a mindset of collaboration invested in future capability that innovates with real world outcomes will not only engage with and meet future challenges but, they will also start to lead and shape the next-generation economy.