This week, I received the “Green Issues and Opportunities” Leadership Santa Rosa Award – along with 9 others in different categories. I felt truly honored; what a great event! There should be some nice photos coming out soon; I will be sure to post them. Below is the text to a press release that the Sustainable Enterprise Conference released; I really think I won the award because of our collaboration there. As and aside – the conference will be on May 11, at Sonoma Mountain Village, and again I will be MC as well as delivering a workshop “10 Ways to Build Your Dream Green Team” with my colleagues at CircadiaOne.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 5, 2012
Jan Kahdeman, Communications Director
mailto:jan@contactsec.com (707) 799-1646
Sustainable Enterprise Conference Co-Founder Genevieve Taylor
Honored at Santa Rosa Chamber’s Bob Blanchard Excellence in
Leadership Awards
Santa Rosa, California, April 5, 2012 – Genevieve Taylor, co-founder of Sonoma County’s Annual Sustainable Enterprise Conference and vice-president at Global Genesis, is a finalist in the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce’s Bob Blanchard excellence in leadership award. Taylor was chosen for her exemplary work in the category Green Issues and Opportunities.

“I am delighted to be selected as a finalist, and to be included in a group of people who are all making real contributions to Sonoma County,” said Taylor. “It’s been very rewarding to see the increase in interest and effort around environmental sustainability in Sonoma County, and I am pleased to see that Leadership Santa Rosa and the Santa Rosa Chamber are a part of that conversation.”

The Bob Blanchard award is an outgrowth of the Santa Rosa Chamber’s Leadership Santa Rosa program, the purpose of which is to identify, develop, and equip effective community leaders who will help create or support a spirit of cooperation for the resolution of future community challenges. The program provides a series of ten, full-day seminars with community leaders on a wide variety of business and
leadership topics.

Taylor is a graduate of the Leadership Santa Rosa Program, as well as of a similarly structured program that focuses specifically on environmental, economic and social sustainability, offered by the Santa Rosa non-profit Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy. As vice-president of consulting firm Global Genesis, she delivers training in leadership, communications, time management, conflict
resolution, and negotiations. In addition, she has been selected as this year’s Sustainable Enterprise Conference master of ceremonies.

In 2005, Taylor co-founded Sonoma County’s Sustainable Enterprise Conference along with Robert Girling, Ph.D., a professor in the School of Business and Economics at Sonoma State University.

“Robert believed we needed a forum for fostering the conversation about sustainability in Sonoma County,” said Taylor. “We gathered people from the business world, from Sonoma State, and from the Green MBA program at Dominican University to create a conference that offers enterprises practical tools for solid change. We focus on topics such as green business programs that are available in Sonoma County, green business venture capital, and how to track sustainability initiatives in local businesses. A host of changes are possible and necessary for improved sustainability, from small, obvious things like eliminating the use of plastic water bottles, to analyzing an entire supply chains to identify ways to make it more environmentally friendly and sustainable.”

Now in its 7th year, the day-long Sustainable Enterprise Conference is dedicated to helping North Bay businesses and organizations transition to economic, environmental, and social sustainability. This year’s program theme, Collaborating for a Sustainable Future, provides insights for organizations and individuals seeking the latest information on how innovation and sustainability will drive the economy while preserving the resources needed for an environmentally responsible and prosperous future. The conference will be held Friday, May 11 at Sonoma Mountain Village, Rohnert Park. For more information and to register, visit www.sustainableenterpriseconference.com/, or contact Oren Wool, event director, at (707) 636-4732, or oren@contactsec.com.

About the Sustainable Enterprise Conference
Produced by a group of Northern California business leaders, university faculty, non-profit leaders and entrepreneurs, the Sustainability Enterprise Conference aims to educate and work with North Bay enterprises and the local community to help integrate environmental responsibility, sustainable business practices, and economic and social equity issues to ensure a high quality of life for future generations.
The conference operates under the fiscal sponsorship of the Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy, a 501(c)(3) public charity based in Sonoma County that is dedicated to insuring a sustainable future for California’s North Coast.
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www.SustainableEnterpriseConference.com
Sustainable Enterprise Conference | 555 5th Street Suite #300A, Santa Rosa, CA 95401 | (707) 636-4732

In preparation for our upcoming CircadiaOne workshop at the Sustainable Enterprise Conference, I am doing a little reading on “Habit Change,” and this is a nice summary of some good pointers. I think it could be a little simpler, but it is still very useful.

It is useful to think first about the work of Ichak Adizes, who wrote The Corporate Life Cycle in 1988. He notes that similar to biological systems, organizations are “born,” they learn, they peak, then they (can) fade. He talks about the Business Function of Organizations, and how the needs of the organization change over time. He also talks about how by understanding where your organization is, you can figure out how to give it the “nutrients” (my words) it needs to re-energize.

The Corporate Lifecycle, by Ichak Adizes (1988)

This slide to the side summarizes his ideas. When an organization is in the early stages, it is merely focused on performing services. “Just do it!!” is the idea. As an organization matures, it becomes more and more necessary to focus on how the service is being provided. After that, the organization is looking to be one step ahead of the curve – how can we anticipate the competition. Many best practices have been established in the organization, but the organization must not rest on its laurels. Finally, the organization moves on to integration – whether through vertical or horizontal mergers, externally, or through looking to its people, and thinking about their long-term success.

It is easy to see this pattern in an organization I have been a part of for the last several years, the Sustainable Enterprise Conference. The process that it took to get the conference to be the success it is now very much mimics the path that Adizes notes.

2005: The conference started when Robert Girling, a friend and colleague, went to a large conference in Marin called Bioneers, and came back with the idea of having a conference in the North Bay. He invited a number of people to come brainstorm with him – community activists, Sonoma State & Green MBA professors, business people who were interested or working in sustainable business. I was in that organizing meeting, and ended up being the “Director” for the conference, organizing the efforts of the many volunteers over the course of the next several months. In April, 2006 we thought we would get 150 people – we were shocked when we “sold out” at 220, turning people away.

That year, there was a huge learning curve – and boy was it a rock & roll roller-coaster as we learned about sustainability, how to run and market a conference, how to work together, and clarified, over the course of time, what our true purpose was. In terms of the Adizes model, we implemented systems as we could – but really, the focus was on producing that one day. We had to prove the “business” of the conference was a success.

In 2007, the second year, I was director again. We decided to expand the conference to two days, and to increase our number of targeted guests. That year, I became much more organized; we structured the work differently; there were many more volunteers who had much more ownership. My job became more manageable as a result, although I found myself working much harder as volunteer coordinator than I had the first year. When I compare that year to the Adizes model, we were clearly in stage 2, Administer. Systems became much more important; we didn’t want to “reinvent the wheel”. We were much more focused on fine-tuning.

In 2008, I decided that it was time for people who had a different set of skills to take the director-ship. As a group, the Steering Committee had decided it didn’t want to rely on volunteers as much; it wanted professionals to take the helm on logistics, coordinating sponsors once we had made contact, and otherwise managing the flow of the conference. So, we hired two “co-directors” of the conference, Deborah Grace Kraft & Stacey Ward, and one marketing director, Ryn Longmaid, in addition to our steadfast webmaster Oren Wool & graphic artist Alana Jelinik. These people brought specialization in detail & event management, in marketing; and Oren & Alana were benefiting from having worked in their capacity in previous years. The team took the “Administer” stage of the Adizes model to a new level; writing policy, clarifying decision-making processes; establishing strong working relationships.

As we prepare for 2009, we are clearly in the Entrepreneurial stage, with forays into the Integrative Stage. We are attempting to figure out what is “cutting edge.” Particularly now that “sustainability” and “green” are mainstream words, the question is, how do we help our local enterprises continue to push and challenge their own edge.  We are also re-examining our organizational structure, something we do every year, formalizing different committees and roles that are greater than function, and speak to the purpose of the conference.  More on that later.

Where is your organization?

In the next article, we will talk about how knowing where your organization is can help you design systems that will help you work most effectively and efficiently.

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.”