While this is an invitation-only event, and numbers are limited due to space, we would like to allow for some people outside of the usual lists of sustainability “suspects”  to join us.  We believe this brings us fresh perspectives and helps cultivate the next generation of sustainability practitioners.

If you are interested in joining us, go to The Climate Group’s website here  for details on how to apply for an invitation. You can also leave a comment below too if you are interested in joining us!

For those who are unable to attend in-person due to travel expenses or other reasons should look out for plenty more engaging information on our web site and in our Better Future report later this month.

But what about when the pronouncements are more controversial?  I will never forget  the audible intake of breath at the BSR conference in San Francisco in 2010.   Aron Cramer was interviewing Zhang Yue, a prominent CEO from China running an energy efficiency business and displaying impeccable employee/human rights credentials. Taking everyone off guard he proclaimed that of course, he immediately fires anyone who has more than one child, because population growth is bad for sustainability.  How shocking to our Western sensibilities.

And the recent visit of Eric Schmidt of Google to North Korea. It does seem like a risky step for a CEO to step beyond government policy in the field of foreign relations and indeed, the US government was not happy.  But human rights activists seemed quietly supportive.  Most recently, John Mackey of Whole Foods criticised the government’s healthcare plans; this was in addition to earlier comments that climate change is “perfectly natural and not necessarily bad.”

So what are the boundaries of executive leadership in sustainability and corporate responsibility?  We want to see leadership, but business executives are not democratically elected so it is not their role to set social policy. Just because you are a good business person does it make you an expert on public policy?

What we should look for from our corporate executives is leadership on sustainability issues that are material to the business, pushing the envelope with regard to delivering long term success, even at the expense of the short term.

The most courageous executive is one who speaks up when the best interests of the business do not serve the best interests of society or the environment and takes action to move the business to a better place.

And, if sometimes we don’t agree with their position, that’s the way of the world.  We cannot have our cake and eat it.

I have written previously on this topic here

Delivering Net Good

Does anyone else remember the excitement of waiting for their first film to come back from the developers? I do. I was a serious photographer in my teens and nothing compares with the anticipation of that first film.

My 11 year old daughter is going through it now too – using my old Olympus OM10, waiting on the developer to do their magic and turn that little metal canister full of chemical covered film into a meaningful photo. And not knowing for sure how it will come out, compared to expectations.

I have been going through the same myself over the last few days, together with a number of colleagues. Only not over a camera film – but believe it or not, over our new carbon accounting model – net good.

Click here to read the whole post…

As I see it, sustainable behavior will be implemented through our institutions and infrastructure.  How they are incented comes down to the individuals who influence them.   Companies are influenced by investors and customers, government is influenced by voters, and the media is influenced by readers.  And, as I have commented on before in this post on stakeholder engagement these apparently different individuals are, in reality, all the same people wearing different hats at different times.

The key is to try and identify where the best points of pressure, or leverage, are.  I am not currently encouraged that the actions of individuals in their capacity as consumers, investors, or voters are sufficient to incent our institutions, companies included, to make sustainable decisions.  I suspect that even motivated individuals don’t feel they have sufficient impact as individuals for it to be worth their while and the degrees of separation between their short term decisions and the desired outcomes are too many to be understood. Of course, part of my role is to try and change this.

I think that the most concentrated point of influence is individuals in their capacity as employees.   Employees may feel like they are a small cog in a big wheel but, for most, they have way more impact as individuals in their capacity as employees than they do in their capacity as investors, voters or customers. For this reason, while customers and investors remain critically important, I think that employees are the key!

Today, as we mark Earth Day, I think it’s important to remember that doing something as simple as biking to work once in a while, or using a bike share program to get around when you’re exploring a city, makes a difference.  While we might look for grand gestures, I’m a firm believer that every little bit counts.

ICT services impact our every day lives from how we work, to how we travel to how we make purchasing decisions for our daily needs. In this video series, I examine all of these elements from inside executive offices, to transportation systems, inside grocery stores and even in my own home.

In this second episode, I explore the Washington D.C. Capital Bikeshare program and examine how sustainable travel can be user friendly and available to the community at large. The program makes available over 1100 bicycles across 110 stations to anyone in the D.C. Metro Area. Similar programs are run across the United States and in the UK.

You can watch the original video on our CSR Perspective YouTube channel.

But in contrast we need to consider observations I noticed by Emma Duncan of the Times.  In theUK, and I am sure there are similar patterns in other developed economies too, the cost of food for the consumer has decreased from 20% to 10% of household expenditure in the last couple of decades.  And, over the last 100 years the annual death rate from gastrointestinal disorders has plunged from 100 people per 100,000 to almost nil.

Just what is going on here? At the same time as we’re seeing massive improvements in health and nutrition, effected by the processes and efficiencies that large companies have instituted, we’re witnessing increasing concern over nutritional value and overall health and criticism of the very companies that have brought these improvements to bear.   I see a key dilemma that we need to take into account whatever sector we are in.

Efficiency and, therefore, efficient use of resources is well served by size and scale, but size and scale is also a challenge to sustainability.  As populations of developing nations achieve acceptable standards of living and increased consumption, large scale efficient processes will be critical to delivering even basic needs within existing resources.  But, as I have mentioned in previous posts, larger organisations have greater degrees of separation – greater gaps between the customer, the shareholder, the resource, the employee, and stakeholders are fickle in their priorities.  While there is a lot to be learned about resource efficiency from a large organisation, there is much to be learned about true and balanced stakeholder engagement from a small family business.

Technology has a large role to play in resolving this dilemma. Information communications technology gives us the potential to build platforms that create scale without sacrificing sensitivity to differences and without sacrificing a detailed understanding.

This dilemma is also something for us sustainability practitioners to address.   As our organisations grow, how do we maintain the level of stakeholder engagement that small and medium sized businesses naturally exhibit?

Surely there is a half way house.  Companies need both innovation and productivity. Furthermore, different roles require different amounts of each.   Seems to me there would be a way to have employees come into the office some of the time, on common days to allow for collaboration and innovation, but work from home on others to maintain productivity.

When I joined the workforce some 20 something years ago I was sent to training sessions to develop skills and techniques for running a meeting, delivering a presentation, interviewing, generating creativity and innovation.  I enjoyed them at the time and over the ensuing years increasingly appreciated the opportunity I had had as I put the techniques into practise.   But all of them, as would be expected at that time, were premised on a face to face interaction.   I don’t believe I have seen any sort of replacement training at the same level of intensity, on how to develop appropriate skills over audio, video and web based media.  We have all found our way best we can.

Have we unintentionally introduced a massive new system into the work environment without the corresponding level of cultural and skills support?  If so, we can be pretty sure that we are not getting out of it, nearly as much as we might.

Reducing environmental footprint is essential, but not enough, to bridge the chasm between a global population that is growing in size and affluence and available resources to meet their needs.

Businesses are at the nexus of that challenge as we depend on natural resources to create and deliver our products and services. We see this at BT and in the strategies of many of our customers and suppliers. But incremental change will not be sufficient to satisfy our existing commercial and production models. New models are needed and new models are driven by bold goals. These new models must deliver the triumvirate of business success and a thriving community living within the means of a sustainable environment. 

To read the entire piece click here to go the Good Monday Opinion page.

On Thursday the previous week I joined HP’s advisory board on corporate responsibility and sustainability, the HP External Global Citizenship Council.   I was honored to participate in a day and a half of stimulating discussions and insights.

Last week,   BT’s internal executive level Sustainable Business Leadership Team met in London.  I was able to experience moving from the advisory to the operational side of the table just a few days apart.   We commenced our BT meeting with an inspirational presentation from Gail Kleinworth CSO of Unilever.

Going from one meeting to the other, gave me the opportunity to stand on the edge of the Pacific Ocean and the north bank of the River Thames in London within just 18 hours of each-other.

On my way to the airport on Saturday afternoon I stopped off at Half Moon Bay in California. I arrived at Heathrow on Sunday and by early afternoon, about 18 hours later, was on the less naturally beautiful, but equally exciting, north bank of the Thames; it’s a small world, indeed.

I went to Half Moon Bay to see the location of the Mavericks, the big wave competition.  Enthusiasts eagerly await the event each year and track the storm cycle that leads to the surge for many days preceding the in the run up to the surfing competition.

The three companies with which I was involved this past week, HP, BT, and Unilever, have significant differences in their core business but much in common through their sustainability challenges and opportunities.  Not only do we have much to learn from each other and ways in which we can help each other, but also many ways we can help other companies and communities through our sheer size. In raw numbers, between the three companies, we have well over half a million employees and over $200 billion in revenue.

If you think about it, our combined efforts in sustainability are like the swells that build the unusually large waves at Mavericks.  I am confident that we have sufficient momentum to build a wave of action to bring all companies that value their sustainability and societal responsibilities together to do great work.

Inauguration speeches are a bit of a conundrum, really.  All at once they are meant to set a vision and inspire a nation, yet avoid partisanship, or anything that might be too controversial from the current political agenda.  The sameness of inaugural addresses even inspired a mashup of inaugural addresses from the last 50 years that was broadcast widely online in the days leading up to President Obama’s inauguration last week.

Whether Republican or Democrat the inaugural address follows a comforting formula noting the new beginning, but acknowledging the foundation of tradition; praising the quintessential American values of freedom, small government, and self-reliance, acknowledging the certainty of American leadership, and cementing the major accomplishments of the time.   Pointing these similarities out is in no way intended to diminish the meaningfulness of the speech; after all, tradition is the foundation of national identity.

Every once in a while, however, a speech stands out – Kennedy’s address in 1961 has become part of our quotable lexicon and Reagan’s 1981 speech is used by Republicans and Democrats  alike in their pursuit of office.  While I don’t think that President Obama’s 2013 inaugural address will be folded into our vernacular in quite the same way, for CSR practitioners, like me, we’ll remember the speech for its clear statement on the importance of addressing climate change.

Perhaps his strongest statement was this one:

“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But American cannot resist this transition. We must lead it…

We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries. We must claim its promise. That’s how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure, our forests and waterways, our crop lands and snow capped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.”

From the Energy Collective to the Huffington Post and Jeffery Hollander’s blog, the community was buzzing with what the statements will mean for the energy policy, particularly in light of the upcoming Keystone Pipeline decision, and for US businesses.  But despite all this enthusiasm there are some obvious pitfalls along the way.

I think Amy Davidsen, US Executive Director of The Climate Group summed up one of the common concerns about the ability of the administration to complete this task.  In her comments on the speech Ms. Davidsen noted that while “[c]limate change has been put back onto theUS public agenda…we must now keep it there.”

But what’s the secret to keeping the administration and the Congress focused on moving the climate control agenda forward when there are so many important issues on the agenda?  Perhaps it’s time for both individuals and corporations to take a phrase from that most quotable of speeches, Kennedy’s 1961 Inaugural address, and ask not what the government can do to bring about progress in climate change legislation, but ask ourselves what our employers and we and individuals can do to take practical action on the ground, so to speak.

After all, as we’ve demonstrated often at BT what’s good for the environment is usually good for long term business success.