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One of the panels discussed the topic of “Green Marketing in the Age of Transparency.“  Several innovateurs were represented, including Dara O Rourke from Goodguide.com (download the app if you haven’t already!), Wendy Cobdra at Earthsense, Chris Nelson of UL Environment, and Stephen Linaweaver of Green Order.  They said the fundamental challenge for companies who are attempting to integrate sustainability into their marketing plan (of which many can count themselves, now) is the consumer’s love-hate relationship with the companies that they rely on.

On the one hand, consumers want companies to step up and become sustainable.

On the other, they don’t believe that those organizations are doing what they say they are doing.

Further, while everyone knows what a sustainable company is NOT, no one has yet really agreed on what it IS.

This puts good intentioned organizations in a tough spot.  They are trying to do what is right, but at the best are blundering in what they say about their efforts, either sharing too much or raising expectations.  At the worst, they are confirming the suspicions of their customers, with incidences of fraud, exposes of poor environmental, labor, or quality practices, etc.  In an era of Enron, how DO we move forward?

To complicate matters – the “them” in this picture is “us.”  Many of the same people who work in these organizations are those people who distrust what the organizations do. Why that is, we can only speculate.  But it certainly makes for a complex picture.

Enter: the Authentically Sustainable Company.

If you read my last post on this topic, you will see I have noted a series of organizational realms – internally and externally, and at the individual and collective level.

In this era of rapid communication and what some may call “Radical Transparency,” companies who portray themselves must do so with integrity.  Here are some tips, both from the conference as well as my own thinking:

1. Define the Boundaries. Wendy Cobdra explained that many companies try to market themselves as a “sustainable company”, and then when something is leaked that doesn’t portray them in someone else’s brain as sustainable, they lose credibility.  If you are working on energy efficiency, then focus on that.  If your employees are satisfied and feel they are making a difference for their clients and their communities, let us know about that!
2. Strive for Integrity. Even with all of Wal-Mart’s hailed work around sustainability, the world is still deeply suspicious because of their labor practices (low-paying, low-benefits, etc.) and their tendency to squelch rather than enliven local commerce.  While they are still making truly astounding change, they will not make the kind of change that is needed.
3. Don’t sacrifice the good for the perfect. This is a reminder to all of us: a certain amount of compassion and encouragement is in order for all of us.  None of us has it right, yet, and as I have said in previous posts, inspiration is a fundamental avenue for change.

Now, having said all of that, we had a great conversation at the Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy recently about B-Corporations – which certainly encourage a holistic perspective on what  sustainability in businesses could be.  In his presentation, founding member Christopher Peck showed a slide that summed it up very succinctly:

One Planet.  One Experiment. No Backup.

Which leads me to ask, is greenwashing even the real problem, if we can’t figure out how to create “one planet businesses?”

Do you know of any “One Planet Businesses?”

One useful term to discuss is the idea of the Triple Top Line.

Particularly over the last ten years, as practitioners and companies have started to put sustainability into practice, additions to the definition have also been added. A couple of years ago, a colleague Ed Quevedo (professor over at the Green MBA, and long-time consultant in this work) first introduced me to the term “Triple Top Line”. The idea of the triple top line is that there are opportunities as well as savings to be had in sustainability; that instead of only looking for efficiencies, we can actually find new products, we can redesign processes that actually increase value, not just efficiency. Very intriguing from a strategic point of view – CEOs can begin to set business direction by looking for “Triple Top Line” ideas.

For example: At the recent (May 2008) Sustainable Enterprise Conference, Autodesk talked about their process of sustainability. Three years ago, they actually started with marketing and sales, sponsoring a green event in New York. That led to looking at their own operations, seeking new efficiencies along the lines of energy and water.

And then their Product Development department joined in the fun. You see, they have a product called AutoCad that the vast majority of designers in the building industry AND the landscape industry use to design our physical landscape. And now those smart, creative software creators are innovating to make it easier for the incredible number of designers that use their product to design in congruence with the natural landscape, to incorporate passive solar and green elements.

An excellent example of a Triple Top Line Opportunity

Not only is this little story an incredible example of finding the unique leverage point that that organization is positioned to use, but it is also an interesting example of how a company looked for the top line opportunities first. On their website, their marketing department has done an excellent job of highlighting all of the exciting designers who are using AutoCad to “Innovate in Green.”

Triple Top Line is very exciting – it moves beyond the idea of sustainable development, beyond Triple Bottom Line, it finds more than the operations folks in an organization listening; you start to find marketing & sales, CEOs, and product development paying attention. Plus, it is a very positive term – lets look for opportunities for growth, not just cost-savings.

However, Top Line advocates have the same challenge that Bottom Line advocates have – they still get fuzzy when they think about the “People Part.”

They used to go out on moonless nights with their classes, and had everyone wear a special hat that had a long tube hanging down, right between their noses. At the end of the long, skinny tube was a dap of phosphorus. The task of the class participants was to stare right at the phosphorus, and then to go on a night hike using their peripheral vision only.

“Why?” I asked him.

“Because,” he said enthusiastically, “they had to learn to see differently!”

And so it is with sustainability. We have to learn to see differently to be able to create sustainable organizations that move beyond “conserving resources,” or even, beyond simply looking for market opportunity! An organizational sustainability initiative is a vast opportunity – an opportunity to reconsider how we work together; how we think; how we feel the world around us.

It is an opportunity to be a designer, an investigator, a collaborator, a life-changer. The best solutions for making our organizations sustainable are going to be found by people who feel like their ideas are heard, who feel they can make a contribution to a cause that matters, who feel that they trust that their organizations can walk their walk.

It is an opportunity to leave a legacy that is even farther reaching than “saving the planet.” It is an opportunity for personal growth, for building an organization that matters.

In this journey, we have to leave behind the safe categories we have relied on in the past – she is the Greenie, he is the business-man, they are the bad guy, I am the good guy. As Al Gore has been famously saying, we don’t have time for that nonsense anymore.

Instead, we have to look for the pieces to the puzzle – the most interesting solutions could be with a competitor, in India or Mexico, with the janitor or secretary, or even (dare I say it?) with the boss.

If you really want to help your organization be sustainable – you have to move beyond environmentalism.

But, how, you say, with quizzical eye? Stay tuned!

But lets define terms here. The term “eco-efficiency” was first brought to popularity by The Natural Step for Business (originally coined by Carl Frankel in his book In Earth’s Company), when it talked about industry’s evolution towards sustainability. The Natural Step says that the natural evolution of business into sustainability over time goes through these four stages:

- Compliance (Regulations like those the EPA puts out to keep pollutants out of public space.

- Beyond Compliance (Companies begin to look for savings, begin to see sustainability as a part of their competitive edge.)

- Eco-Efficiency (Profit-driven approach; began in tandem with the Total Quality Management approach)

- Sustainable Development (Environmental Goals; enters mainstream organizational culture; Companies start to design with natural resources in mind.)

As you can see from this model, eco-efficiency is actually quite high in the evolution of industry towards sustainability. Eco-efficiency is really the technical side of sustainability; it is easier to put into place with some technological fixes – a new HVAC system, a carbon-footprint analysis, a lighting retrofit.

But the biggest reason that eco-efficiency is not enough – and possibly triple-bottom line thinking is not enough, is that it only one part of the business process. It looks at reducing costs and correcting mistakes as opposed to creating a vision of what could be. And, it only includes “people” as a by-product – there may be benefits to people, but it does not consciously include people as part of the solution, as opposed to simply a means to the solution.

Sustainable Development, on the other hand, is closer to the mark. It talks about environmental “goals”, sustainability becoming a part of the “culture”, and “designing” with natural resources in mind – all signposts for “things to do” along the way to making your organization sustainable.

One of the most inspiring ideas I have ever heard was the vision detailed in the first couple of pages in Natural Capital – of a factory spewing out water that was cleaner on its way out than on its way in.

Imagine that – an industrial factory valuing the clean water it produces as highly as the water it uses for its practices! Would that we find ways for all of our organizations to do what the boyscouts teach us – leave it better on the way out than on the way in.

Sustainable Development starts to get us there. But even that idea doesn’t include the whole system, and comes, truthfully, from a simple environmentalist perspective that ADDS environmental goals to the mix, as opposed to something more fundamentally related to the way the business conducts its business. Does simply adding salt to flour make the flour salt? Does adding environmental goals to a business make it sustainable?

Do we have to move beyond environmentalism in our quest for a sustainable organization?

]]> http://genevievetaylor.com/2008/06/20/why-eco-efficiency-is-not-enough/feed/ 0 genevievetaylor http://genevievetaylor.com/2008/06/05/hello-world/ http://genevievetaylor.com/2008/06/05/hello-world/#comments Thu, 05 Jun 2008 05:48:24 +0000 genevievetaylor ]]> Balancing the Three Legged Stool – What is sustainability?

The purpose of this blog is to explore the question – what is sustainable business, in regards to balancing and building the “triple bottom line” of “people, planet, and profit”.

This blog is meant for organizational change agents – champions inside organizations, whether you are a business, government, or non-profit, whether you are a CEO, an HR manager, or a new supervisor with a lot of big ideas, who want to help their organization become sustainable.

I believe that sustainability can be transformative; it can be used as a vehicle for changing the entire organization for the better. In fact, like teambuilding or visioning of any sort, it is hard to contain it once an organization authentically starts on this path.

In sustainable business, informed change agents are constantly looking for the best way to balance, support, and build three different components: people, planet, and profit (the Three Ps). The search for the “three-legged stool” of the Three Ps is elusive – many times, organizations will get one, or even two, but rarely all three. For those organizations who really want to “do it right”, who wholeheartedly believe that the definition of sustainability is to maintain the ability of future generations to meet their needs while meeting the needs of the current generation, getting one or two of the legs isn’t enough. They don’t want to be just profitable, just environmental, or just socially equitable. They want to be all three.

But nailing all three into place is not easy.

Next time, I will talk about how to get to all three.

]]> http://genevievetaylor.com/2008/06/05/hello-world/feed/ 0 genevievetaylor