When we launched the Sustainable 60 Series, it was a bit of a step into the unknown. After all, sustainability has become synonymous with being green in some quarters.

Or, as PricewaterhouseCoopers partner Julia Hoare says, the term got hijacked.

“There is a nervousness to really use the term but if you were to talk about productivity, if you were to talk about governance, if you were to talk about customer relationships, business relationships, business reputation, and your interaction with the community, business leaders would say yes, they are all incredibly important.”

A quick run through the Sustainable 60 entrants and their stories should be enough to convince anyone that many New Zealand companies are taking sustainability seriously.

We’re not talking about some green initiatives, or some corporate social responsibility add-on picked out of a box. This is a mindset. It isn’t easy. Most of these companies didn’t arrive as fully formed sustainable companies. They’ve thought long and hard about each step they had to take and how it would affect their culture and profitability.

It isn’t about sitting in judgement, although in choosing finalists across the five categories - marketplace, environment, strategy and governance, workplace and community - then category winners and exemplars, some tough decisions had to be made.

As much as anything, it’s an education process. For our partner PwC, it is important to reach out to the business community and highlight areas where companies are doing well.

“What was really important to us was to highlight the particular award categories so companies didn’t have to be exemplars across all categories to showcase what they are doing,” says Hoare.

“By doing that, it becomes more of an education process and there is far more sharing of innovative ideas.”

There was plenty of discussion between Unlimited on behalf of Fairfax Media Business Group and PwC on how to best determine innovative practice. We came up with particular sectors to focus on, and brainstormed around what we felt was important to create sustainable business in those areas. Then we held a stakeholder workshop to road test and refine the ideas, settled on the five categories and then opened for business.

To select finalists, entrants went through a two-stage process. The first stage involved assessment of entries against a set of quantitative criteria developed by PwC and completed by Massey University. For the second stage, PwC validated selected entries through one-on-one interviews to sort out finalists.

Then we invited a broad cross section of judges in for a day to decide on category winners and small, medium and large exemplars. We had planned on choosing an overall winner, but the challenge of the task quickly became obvious because there was such a mix of sustainable business practices and small, medium and large companies.

In the medium exemplar category, for example, how could the judges choose between the New Zealand Merino Company and Urgent Couriers? One transformed an industry while the other has undergone a transformation and become a leader in sustainability in a sector many think is ultimately unsustainable.

“There isn’t one blueprint or template,” says Hoare. “You need to look at what industry you are in and come up with a strategy for that industry and your company. There are some outstanding stories and learning from the series to be shared.”

The judges:

• Rachel Brown: Founder and CEO of the Sustainable Business Network
• Rick Christie: Chairman of Ebos Group
• Rob Fenwick: Company director and co-founder of Living Earth
• Jane Henley: Chief executive of the New Zealand Green Building Council
• June McCabe: Director of Sustainable Prosperity
• Justine Munro: Chief executive of the New Zealand Centre for Social Innovation
• Lester Oakes: Chief executive of Career Services Rapuara
• Rod Oram: Business journalist
• Alison Sykora: Company communications and corporate responsibility, Vodafone New Zealand
• Simon Upton: Adviser to PwC and former chair of the Round Table on Sustainable Development at the OECD