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Sustainability Management Infrastructure: What It Is and Why You Should Care
As individuals, we want to do the right thing – but as businesses, we are challenged by the need to be profitable. The goal of sustainability is to accomplish both: to improve profitability today, while not compromising the environmental and social constraints of the future. As discussed in a previous post, Doing the right thing in business: Are you doing it right?, businesses must treat sustainability as a strategic opportunity, and move beyond eco-efficiency to achieve this greater goal.
Here’s how you can get started…
How Green Is My Product?
Or: How I stopped worrying about greenwashing and learned to love EPDs
You have a product and you want to tell the world how great it is. But what if you want to make claims that it’s better than the competition? How can you do so without being slammed for greenwashing? Even in these early days of green marketing, already more than one company has fallen into that trap, resulting in considerable backlash.
Consider Cotton USA, with their claim that industrial cotton production is sustainable – even though it is an intensely petroleum and chemically-driven monoculture. Chevron’s “Will You Join Us” campaign is considered to be another big violator – the tagline itself rings patently false to anyone semi-aware of any oil company’s carbon credentials. So, how can you launch a sustainability marketing campaign and avoid the pitfalls of a greenwashing backlash?
Executive Sponsorship: Why It Matters and What It Takes
Why should sustainability change agents care about executive sponsorship? Because as sustainable business matures, those of us working in sustainability will find that after eco-efficiency, the next great step will come by leveraging sustainability on a strategic level to truly transform our businesses. Just like the Internet before it, sustainability will grow beyond its roots to become much broader, mission-driven, and transformative. And at that point, sustainability change agents won’t just be dealing with light bulbs or solar panels, but driving true strategic change. In numerous benchmarking studies on the critical success factors to implementing successful strategic change, active and visible executive sponsorship heads the list.
With sustainability, the need for strong executive sponsorship is enormous. In any large organization, some people at every level of the organization will be unconvinced that sustainability is affordable, or view such efforts as simply “greenwashing.” A well-placed, articulate and influential sponsor has the unique ability to both motivate and compel these people to support your efforts, especially as you transition from the operational to strategic realm. The executive sponsor leading the effort needs to be a passionate advocate, believing that sustainability is an imperative – an imperative based on a powerful business case. The sooner you can find a strong executive sponsor, the better positioned you will be for taking sustainability to a strategic level.
Management Motivation 101: Benchmarking
Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.” There’s a lot of truth in that statement, particularly as it relates to sustainability: unless you have a good idea of what a sustainable version of your organization might look like, you may have some trouble getting there. But the problem cuts both ways. What if you don’t know how you stack up regarding your sustainability efforts? So a variant on that statement could be, “If you don’t know where you’re starting from, you might not find the right path on the road to sustainability.”
In 20+ years of working with customers, I have noticed that my clients frequently want to jump straight to the “solution” or “execution” phase. It’s not hard to understand why: these are the parts that get featured in media and case studies as the stroke of genius that solved an intractable problem. Why waste time in doing the strategy, planning and consensus-building exercises, when jumping to the end is so much more fun?
Doing the Right Thing in Business: Are You Doing it Right?
There is a mounting consensus that while business has created serious environmental problems, developing sustainable practices to address these issues can result in bottom line benefits. So why hasn’t sustainable business taken off like those metal Klean Kanteen water bottles?
The reason may surprise you: although most businesses acknowledge the efficiency benefits that sustainability can create, few companies are treating sustainability as a strategic opportunity. The majority of existing sustainability efforts are still ad hoc (often a reaction to external compliance pressures), poorly funded, and tactical in scope – so they rarely impact the core strategy and positioning of the business. In order to really create a sustainable future – and to reap the benefits of sustainable competitive advantage – companies must move beyond efficiencies to a more transformative implementation of sustainability. This is a challenging task, so it’s not surprising that few companies have gotten it right. The upside is that doing it well can lead to a real opportunity for competitive differentiation – one that may define winners and losers for decades to come.
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