The boldest statements at Dell Technologies Summit weren’t directly tied to technology launches. Instead they centered around Dell’s 2030 goals to spur societal change. This included some big, lofty commitments including hiring and retaining women so they account for 50% of the company’s global workforce and 40% of global people managers by 2030, as well as a one-for-one recycling pledge under which the company will recycle an equivalent product for each one that a customer buys.

And — this is key — they are also measurable goals, so we can check back in with Dell in a decade and see if the company met them.

The goals center around four areas: advancing environmental sustainability; cultivating inclusion; transforming lives; and upholding ethics and data privacy. “Our 2030 plan is full of audacious goals grounded in action,” said CEO Michael Dell at the recent Dell Technologies Summit. “And while we don't know exactly how to do all these things today, that’s precisely the point. It stretches us to create new things, just like our 2020 goals did almost a decade ago, and we will tap the brightest minds we can find to help us get there.”

Personally, I believe Dell will meet its 2030 goals. In 2013, the company announced its 2020 Legacy of Good plan, and I previously covered the environmental sustainability pieces. Many of these were industry firsts. This includes things like establishing a certified closed-loop plastics supply chain in 2014, starting to use reclaimed carbon fiber in products a year later, and creating commercial-scale packaging from ocean-bound plastics in 2017.

In July, the company published its final progress report for the 2020 Legacy of Good plan, and said it will complete or exceed more than 75% of the goals before the deadline. For example, it already recovered more than 2 billion pounds of used electronics via responsible recycling, and it reused 100 million pounds of recycled content, plastic, and other sustainable materials in new products.

But there’s another reason that I think Dell will achieve these goals. Hiring women and people of color and cutting your company’s carbon footprint are no longer just nice words to put in marketing materials, they are business imperatives.

Dell’s customers, partners, and prospective employees want to be affiliated with a company that takes ethics, and social and environmental responsibilities seriously, said Karen Quintos, chief customer officer at Dell Technologies. “Whether they decide to work for us, whether they decide to do business with us … the opportunity is real,” she said. By 2024 there will be 1.1 million computing related jobs opening in the U.S., she added. Employers will only fill 45% of those jobs based on the current U.S. graduation rates.

Millennials, who will make up three-quarters of the workforce by 2025, want to work for sustainable companies. Nearly 40% said that they’ve chosen a job in the past because the company performed better on sustainability than alternatives, according to one study. Another found 64% of millennials won’t take a job at a company that isn’t socially and environmentally responsible, and three-quarters said that they’d take a lower salary to work at a company with these values.

In addition to helping companies hire and keep employees, sustainable business practices tend to save money and even contribute to companies’ bottom lines. Making products out of recycled materials typically costs less compared to raw materials. And companies with strong environmental and social responsibility programs perform better in the stock market.

In other words, Dell meeting its 2030 goals makes good business sense in addition to helping society. “We are going to lead, and we are going to drive this change,” Quintos said.

Of course Dell isn’t alone in its sustainability efforts and progress. This year Cisco ranked No. 2 in Barron’s annual 100 Most Sustainable Companies list. The company says it has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions 45% since 2007.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has long championed the circular economy, which aims to eliminate waste by using products as long as possible and then recovering materials at end of life for reuse in new products. Earlier this year HPE published its fourth annual sustainability report that highlighted accomplishments including reducing customers’ energy use as much as 60% using memory-driven computing and achieving an 89% refurbishment rate on the 4 million IT assets returned to HPE’s recycling centers.

And especially when it comes to hiring and retaining a diverse workforce and enabling transparency and data privacy, there’s a whole lot more companies can and should do. But as Dell and other companies realize, these things are quickly becoming a corporate imperative.

“I am very excited about the role that our company can play in driving progress,” Michael Dell said at the event. “And when we get this right, all of us will be standing at the center of the period of greatest progress in human history putting data to work to build a better world. It’s a generational opportunity that creates long term value for stakeholders in the process. And it’s the most exciting work that we could be doing. We’re thrilled to be a part of it.”

And that gives me hope.