Green to Sustainable

Mercer On The Move: Access (Denied) to the Region's Core

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:03:28 -0400

Mercer On The Move: Access (Denied) to the Region's Core:

Access to the region’s core (ARC) is now inaccessible. The ARC Tunnel is being brought to a complete stop. In a press release yesterday, the state has ordered to “…. begin an expeditious and orderly shutdown of the project.” For more details, visit GMTMA’s website.

Let me try…

We started off as a community who believed a good company is...

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:19:00 -0400

We started off as a community who believed a good company is distinguished from an average company if they use Computers over Typewriters. The discretion has now evolved into the fonts level precision!

A note to both concerned employees: A post-it note would have done the job, saved two papers and a twig of a tree, perhaps in Amazon. Fortune 500 companies are responsible citizens as well!

jessicanow:

This made me snarf the water I was drinking because I was laughing so hard… I had to share.

aayush:

jaldesai:

Don’t use Comic Sans font ever.

Shifting Corporate Culture

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:16:00 -0400

I attended an ‘unconference’ called Green Innovation in Business Network (GIBN): Solutions Lab on May 21, 2010. Organized by EDF, Dig In and Ashoka, and generously hosted by Bloomberg. People I met there include Dave Witzel and Beth Trask from EDF, Odin Zackman and Mara Guccione from Dig In, Stuart Yasgur from Ashoka, John Davies from GreenBiz, Michael Sater from Maurgood LLC and the list goes longer. They’re all amazing people who matter and make a difference in the real world.

Confession. I started writing this post a while back, but have remained lethally busy with things at office, at home and with my work-permit complexities that still threaten to jeopardize my career. Accept my sincere apologies for sharing the post late.

For all those unaware of the ‘unconference’ concept, the event usually is frame-bound but unlike conventional conferences, does not subscribe to a fixed agenda where communication is one-way. Here, individuals decide the agenda once the conference convenes and then spend the day discussing in a group, some actionable steps. Very important aspect to note here is, you are not expected to come with rocket-science solutions, rather you’ll be asked to share small actionable steps that when integrated will automatically evolve into rocket-science solutions.

Q: What discussion did I partake in?

A: Shifting Corporate Culture (My all time favorite, aka organizational change management)

Q: In my view, what is the Problem?

It’s been a few years that I have worked with Environmental industry in different sectors. I worked with corporations in India, worked with corporate clients from Europe, now in US I’m working with American corporations. I have a bachelor’s degree and an advanced degree concentrated in Environmental Science and Policy. After all this, just like others, what did I learn?

Sustainability is not a solely technical or operational issue which can be solved by engineering or management. It includes behavioral issues as well. Sustainability is a mega-trend. It is not only a lack of resources and motivation but also a deficiency of awareness and education. Corporate culture is no different from human nature, it is innate. The functional words for corporate culture are competency, efficiency and profits. Once the culture is shifted, competence may be replaced by evolution, efficiency by sufficiency and profits by value.

Where is the bottleneck?

The Top Management is committed to go sustainable and issues the orders, the lower management has no choice but to follow, elephant in the room is the middle management. Sustainability generally needs big picture thinking and micro level applications. Middle management usually remains overburdened with strategic planning for the normal business activities and adding the sustainability may look like an overwhelming task. This eventually could lead to achieving unexpectedly low results, if at all. It is necessary and expected that the Top, Middle and Lower management intersect and coincide at the same point when it comes to sustainability. In terms of a Venn diagram, a mutually exclusive and exhaustive event should occur.

Any suggested solutions?

At the GIBN Solutions Lab, the only thing the team did for hours is to try and identify coherent actions which when synergized could induce a manageable difference, if not measurable. (Well, I believe sometimes you can manage what you can’t measure). The group thought that an organization would need to set up a BHAG i.e. A Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal. An overreaching goal, a promising commitment which makes the message very clear. Once the goals are set, the coherent actions are brought into actions. This package would then help in smooth shifting of corporate culture.

Remember Michael Sater from first paragraph? Yes, the gentleman whose Posterous blog page is so interesting that you may not have returned to read this post. Michael came up with a great graphic that depicts these coherent actions integrated synergistically.

Here’s the graphic:

Primary functions:

Data: Count your chickens before they hatch. Know what has been going on and decide if you want to continue or maneuver in a different direction.

Diagnose: Identify the symptoms of failure or inefficiency in integrating sustainable behavior at your organization and then try to evolve from the present into the future.

Educate: Teach everyone in the organization, regardless of their place in an organizational chart. Everyone must buy into the sustainability goals. The Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals.

Supplementary Functions:

Dialogues: Get the sustainability buzz work out into the employees. Create green teams, make a community, initiate discussions, and listen with an open mind.

Programs: Start involvement programs, recognize the involvement, and incentivize the participation give tangible targets and conceivable goals.

Policy: This is my favorite part. Create policies that complement and catalyze the desired change. Policies also work as the carrot-stick mechanism, ergo preventing the end-of-pipeline disasters.

Complementary Function:

Internal Advocacy: Be the noise maker or bring in the noise maker. Give responsibility and make people accountable for their actions. Have them be the messengers and the examples. Reinforce the commitment of sustainability.

I’ve tried to be concise, still lavish with words. If you find this post a bit longer than it should be, trust me on this, this is just the nutshell version.

What is your take on shifting corporate culture?

Efficiency, Sufficiency and Sustainability

Sun, 09 May 2010 03:55:26 -0400

Jevons Paradox also referred to as “The law of unintended consequences” discusses the subtle failure of “efficiency approach” in achieving the goals set for reducing consumption. Most proponents who believe ‘Energy Efficiency’, or for that matter, “Efficiency” in any form is the ultimate source of reduction tend to overlook the aggregate consumption patterns. For most part, all quarters of society report that efficiency has not served the purpose of aggregate reduction in consumption. Fuel efficient cars, energy efficient appliances and more efficient power plants are known examples, where consumption inherently increased even after operational efficiency was integrated. In my view, efficiency is not a solution; it is just a stepping stone. The policy makers are either ignorant about this fact (highly unlikely), or they believe that further technological advances will make efficiency “more efficient” (highly likely) and will lead to faster movement towards sustainability.

What goes wrong can be briefly explained by the concept of “Means-Ends Fallacy”. Efficiency proponents confuse between means and objectives. Efficiency is a means to reach the objective of sustainability. They consider efficient systems to be sustainable systems, while that is not the real case. Efficiency gains may decrease individual consumption, but aggregate consumption generally increases, as suggested by Jevons Paradox. Furthermore, what goes wrong in application of efficiency is our limited knowledge of sufficiency. The sufficiency concept raises a very important question of ‘How much is too much?’ and ‘What are the limits of more?’ We lack a language of sufficiency that communicates itself clearly to the community and makes itself a public agenda. It is necessary to create a social, cultural and political space which will assist in fundamentally changing the approach toward sustainability.

Showcasing a few approaches that may bring this change would include blending renewable energy sources, replacing physical products with services; formulate better social norms of sustainable re-investment and localizing our lifestyle etc. Replacing physical products with services is one unique way in which you do not take away people’s right to enjoy the service, but still do no push them to get into the vicious cycle of buying and selling. Also, it is very necessary to formulate social norms that will encourage sustainable re-investment. If benefits accrued from sustainable investments are reinvested to enhance sustainability, then over a period of time, the domino effect will bring recurring positive results.

Take home messages:

Efficiency is not a solution, it is a stepping stone.
Efficient systems are necessarily not sustainable systems.

Making sustainability a 'Business-as-usual' case.

Sat, 01 May 2010 00:51:00 -0400

Most CEO’s take ‘Sustainability’ and ‘Efficiency’ as added responsibilities and extended governance. Doing things repeatedly eventually turns into a habit. Sustainability is no different. Practicing sustainability will eventually make it ”business-as-usual”. It is just another way of generating brand value, stakeholder interest and profits. Does that not sound like regular business goals? Yes, it does.

Sustainability is all about doing business in a different way. Perception of sustainability and efficiency as a added responsibility (read burden) takes out the enthusiasm of doing business in an innovative manner. Business old-style exerts externalities that cost the society in cash and kind, while embedding sustainability exerts externalities that generate societal advantages.

As far as the role of CRO is concerned, I always advise that a CRO/SO is just a facilitator, and at best, they can be liaisons between different departments. Expecting that they should solely spearhead a corporation’s sustainability efforts is not appreciatively right. Sustainability is a type of corporate culture and should be woven into the corporate fabric.

My one-liner advise to CEO’s: ”Sustainability is an individuals altruistic greed.”
Remain greedy, altruistically though!

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I so often thought of writing a sustainability blog, but then always remained skeptical about its sufficiency and my efficiency. Eventually my motivation surpassed my skepticism and here is my first post. The content here originally was posted as a comment on Vault’s CSR blog by Aman Singh Das (In Good Company).