Principles of Sustainable Management of Energy Companies: The Case of Poland

Abstract

In 2016, a law was introduced in Poland that required management bodies of energy companies owned by the state and a municipality to adopt management goals. The remuneration of the board members of these companies depended on the extent to which these goals were implemented. The challenge was that profit became an end in itself. The purpose of this article is to describe the process used to set up strategic goals on the basis of balancing capital within energy companies, which demonstrates a positive impact on the effectiveness of these companies. The solution proposed in this article is an alternative to using profit as the sole measure. The article consists of three parts. The first part is a review of the literature on management goals and how they relate to various economic measures—the main conclusions of this literature review were that, despite many attempts, we were not able to (1) clearly define the purpose of a company and (2) find an indisputable measure of the degree to which such goals were implemented in a firm that would be an alternative to using the outdated profit as a goal. The second part dealt with the results of a study on the formulation of management goals in 2017–2020, which was conducted on more than 150 energy companies. Based on this analysis, it was found that financial goals were gradually replaced by material (investment) goals, but this process was very slow. The final part of the article is our proposal for a new approach to formulating management goals in energy companies, linking them to tools that measure both the efficiency of capital deployment and the introduction of new rules for sustainable capital management in these companies.