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?”

Profit is fairly easily understood; the definition wikipedia uses for “normal profit” is

The return the entrepreneur can expect to earn or the profit that a business owner considers necessary to make running the business worth his/her while.

Questions about what the owner considers “necessary” arise, but we will leave those questions to other posts.

“Planet,” perhaps a little more challenging, is still graspable – if we imagine our natural resources as bank account, from which we draw the interest,  we can understand that our actions could (are) diving into the “reserves” of the planet; thus, we need to change our actions to minimize our planetary expenditures and perhaps to restore and build our planetary reserves again – building our planetary bottomline, and balancing that bottomline against our eonomic bottomline.

However, how do you build the reserves of the bottom line of “people”?  It is a nebulous question in many ways – what “people” are we referring to, first, and then, how do we “build” it, “balance” it, or do whatever else is needed in order to achieve sustainability in a company?  Finally, how does this relate to social responsibility, living wage, social equity, and all of the other ideas that get lumped together in this general category?

Defining People

The first step is to define what we mean by “people.”  One model that has been helpful to me: a matrix defining the organizational territory as being composed of Individuals and Collectives, who likewise each have Internal and External Landscapes.  First discussed by Ken Wilbur (who doubtless based his thinking on many others) and then connected to the “Enterprise” by Christopher Peck and John Stayton in a class about Sustainable Local Enterprise they used to teach for the Green MBA, the following matrix has helped me articulate well the organizational terrain.

developed by John Stayton, Christopher Peck based on Ken Wilbur's Work

As the model illustrates, there are four “Realms” in an organization: the Individual Internal, the Individual External, the Collective Internal, and the Collective External.  By defining “people” we have actually created a doorway into what I would call “Authentic Sustainability.”

I would posit that for a company to be authentically sustainable – it needs to have sustainability infused into each of these Realms.  And here is where the definition for the Triple Bottom Line doesn’t yield enough – we are left with the question unanswered of how can we infuse planet, profit, and people into each of these four areas?

To answer this question, I go back to Bill McDonough, author of Cradle to Cradle and Green Designer.  When defining sustainability, he takes as his operational quest the following:

How do we love all the children, of all species, for all time?

With this quote, McDonaugh points to the quest that is at the center of all authentic sustainability efforts: the quest for life.  To me, the nature of  sustainability in business is a three-fold quest:

1. a quest for to sustain and improve the well-being of the life of the organization
2. a quest to sustain the lives and well-being of the people and species (natural resources) internal to its organization – its employees, the natural resources needed for its products and services
3. a quest to sustain the lives and well-being of the people and species (natural resources) external to its organization – its customers, its suppliers and stakeholders, the environment its products, processes and services effect.

Ultimately, the path of the sustainable organization is one that is life-affirming. This means both good news and bad news for the sustainability champion.

The good news? There is a lot that we are already doing in our organizations that is inherently life-affirming.  Think in your own organization; when we see our employees as people, with aspirations and needs of their own (an effort that would rest in the internal individual quadrant), we are affirming life.  When we pay our employees what they deserve (external individual), and have honest conversations with them when we can’t, yet again we are affirming life.  The teambuilding efforts, the collaborative engagement dollars spent on developing an organizational vision, establishing teamwork between departments are also all life-affirming and key components to affirming the life of the organization and the people who work inside of it.  Practices for authentic sustainability are, in reality, good business practices that sustain the organization, the people it serves, and the environment it is a part of.

The bad news? Being a sustainable company isn’t cut and dry.  In fact, once you start this journey, it can impose standards that are challenging to meet – one reaction could be, Gee, you mean I have to be all that, too? Yes, in reality, you have to be that too.  Why?  Being accused of greenwashing could be damaging – most likely undoing your efforts.

Next post?  How striving for “authentic” sustainability will help you avoid greenwashing, AND create a business, a planet, and a staff that will be around for the long haul.

Over the last several months, we have had an abundance of blessings – my sweetheart and I have purchased a fixer-upper house, and have been in the throes of ripping out carpet, ripping down wall paper, painting, putting in new flooring, moving, and finally, hosting 17 people for Thanksgiving. Rewarding, and highly stressful (they say moving is amongst the most stressful events in a human beings’ life.) This along with the challenges all of us have faced over the last few months of anxiety over the elections, massive fluctuations in the market, and watching people lose their homes, their jobs, and at times, their communities. (Christopher, my sweetheart, is in the financial sector – you can imagine the stress that creates.)

So how, in all of this, does one maintain one’s own sanity, health, good temper – essentially, one’s personal sustainability?

This has been an important question for me (floating amongst all of the other important questions, like what paint to use, or, how will the market affect our clients?)

It has not been an easy one. In fact, as I sit here, writing for the first time in two months, it is clear to me how fast all of those good habits of meditation, writing, exercise, good food, and time with friends was thrown out the window.

Can we always do everything? No. So, how do we choose what is most important?

I lived on an organic fruit farm for about a year and a half, through two pruning seasons. And during that time, I learned how to prune grapes – they had about 20 varieties of heirloom table groups that were just stunning in their variety and flavor.

Pruning grapes turned out to be one of the most challenging and rewarding tasks I took on, and is a metaphor I refer to a lot when I am having to focus on what’s most important.

Imagine a grape vine, bare of leaves. Every vine has about 25 woody “shoots” or spurs, that are growing from the vine, looking like a crazy bush of muppet rastafarian hair. Your job is to take this vine and these shoots from 30 to around 10. So, how?

Grapes before they are pruned

The first step is to use simple processes of prioritization – is the shoot oriented correctly, is it big and healthy or small and puny, is it diseased, is it spaced well? After clipping those off down to the vine, that leaves you with about 16 big, healthy shoots, just waiting to burst forth with leaves and juicy grapes the next year. But wait – you still need to take 6 off!

And this is the hardest part of the process. Because, at this point it is pure judgment call. You don’t know if one will do better than the other, or will stay healthier longer. For some reason, that first year, it was agonizing for me – what if I chose the wrong one - and marred the plant, or worse, killed the plant by taking off too many? It took me forever to get through a row, and although my farm-mates encouraged me to just “make a decision, already!” I found that my concern slowed me to a snail’s pace.

I have the same habit in the rest of life – I am so in love with opportunities, that “clipping a shoot” literally feels like I am killing an opportunity? And the same line of questions runs through my brain – what if its the wrong one?

Grapes after they are pruned

The second year, though, I went out there, with the benefit of having seen the results of the first year’s pruning. The places where I had pruned more intensely were fine – in fact, they were vigorous and healthy. Guess what – I hadn’t killed the vine! It helped to see the logic of pruning, the results of my efforts, and how I could fine-tune the second time.

I found that not only was I faster at pruning, but that I was able to teach others, and feel confident doing so; I saw the plant in an entirely different way – more about cultivating grapes, than cutting off woody stems. I became (almost) as fast as the good folks who had been doing it for years.

The whole point of pruning is to be able to send more energy to the things that you know are most important. It is, literally, to cultivate the best possible opportunities to grow the best possible grapes, when they are still months and months away from growing.

These last few weeks, I have had to prune, at least temporarily, so that my finite time, energy and resources could go to the things that were truly most urgent AND important. The results? I sit in my warm, new home, relaxing this Thanksgiving weekend. My sweetheart and I are even more in love. And I am learning to be increasingly efficient AND effective with my time. Some of the pieces I have pruned from my life are not doing so well – but surprisingly, some of the other pieces I have pruned are doing much better without my attention; it has allowed other leaders to step up, and for me to recreate my role in those projects.

Pruning does not always result the way we wish it – but by keeping your eye on your job of cultivating what you want to achieve, as opposed to focusing on what throws itself at you, it becomes easier and easier to prune, year by year.

There comes a time in everyone’s life when one must become very, very clear on priorities, to get through a particularly challenging time. I believe our nation is in the midst of such a time – where we have to remember what is important, what will keep us going in the long term, and we have to choose where we want our finite resources to go. What an opportunity to cultivate clarity!

Winter-time, with its short, cold days is a time that lends itself to introspection. The next few posts I will do will be on managing time, cultivating clarity, and remembering what is truly most important. Much of this is based off of the training that I do in time management. May you find it useful.

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!