Sustainability issues can be overwhelming, depressing, and almost traumatizing. At times we may feel powerless to make a difference. In The Cult of Impotence: Selling the Myth of Powerlessness in the Global Economy, author Linda McQuaig provocatively suggests that helplessness is exactly what some large institutions want us to feel, so that they can get away with
solutions that are more in their interests than ours. She encourages us to take more personal responsibility for global sustainability challenges. The following three videos strongly support our capitalizing on our ripple effect.
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Our current business models, energy solutions, and transportation approaches are unsustainable. If we are to become a sustainable society, they must be changed. Change requires doing things differently—creatively inventing innovative ways to do things differently from how we are doing them today. Innovation gives us hope.
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Employee volunteers are an important dimension of any company’s philanthropic efforts. When employees are engaged in a company’s social and environmental initiatives, people see that the company is more than a bank throwing money at random causes in an effort to buff up its image.
They see the company as made up of people who care about tough social and environmental issues. Its employees bring their talent, time, and energy to causes that they personally care about and which align with their company’s mission. Who would have thought that a surprise co-benefit of the company’s support for these projects is the volunteers’ higher level of engagement and productivity in the workplace?
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“People buy from people they trust.” That was a slogan we used in sales training at IBM. We used it to reinforce the human element of a customer-supplier transaction. No trust, no sale. There’s a similar dynamic in the relationship between employees and their companies.
If employees’ values resonate with their company’s values, and if they trust that their company genuinely cares about the same things they care about, then they are more energized and productive. A company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts signal what it cares about. Their co-benefit is that they seem to increase employee engagement.
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Wouldn’t it be great if we could show that companies which embrace corporate social responsibility (CSR) reap financial rewards? Sustainability champions armed with this information would be welcomed by business leaders seeking new ways to get the most from their companies’ resources and efforts. Fortunately, the links between CSR efforts, employee engagement, and business results are becoming clearer.
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HBR reprinted that article in its July-August 2008 issue in its “Best of HBR” series. By then, I was eight years into my next career as an author and speaker on the business relevance of sustainability-based strategies. I’m still impressed by how the service-profit chain provides a valuable web of interrelated business goals which sustainability-related strategies can help achieve better and faster. I am convinced that the credibility and effectiveness of sustainability champions is improved if we show how our suggested approaches contribute to the success of one or more links in the business value chain. This week, we’ll look at a few versions of the value chain, and conclude with a touchstone generic business version to add to sustainability champions’ toolkits.
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In my bibliography at the end of The Sustainability Champion’s Guidebook, I list “20 Good Books on Transforming to a Sustainable Enterprise.” Happily, that list of resources for agents of transformation keeps growing. Here are three more excellent, free, downloadable resources that came out in the last year which I would welcome to my previous list of 20:
1. Planning for Sustainability, from The Natural Step
2. Making Your Impact at Work, from Net Impact
3. Greening your Business, from the RBC Royal Bank
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There’s nothing wrong with consumption of basic goods and services. It’s when consumption takes on a life of its own that we risk overshooting the carrying capacity of the planet, as illustrated in Our Ecological Footprint, by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees. We don’t really “consume” most goods. We just use them and throw them away. The resulting build-up of hazardous and non-hazardous waste is not sustainable. That’s why green packaging, green supply chains, and green products are receiving so much attention.
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Is it really possible for a company to become a sustainable enterprise? Yes, it is. But, it requires a significant transformation. No company will undertake such a significant metamorphosis unless it increases its value. In fact, each step must benefit the company or it will be difficult to convince shareholders and other important stakeholders that it should go further on the sustainability journey. The four stepping-stones from an unsustainable company to a sustainable business model are designed to ensure that each step produces real business benefits.
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Sooner or later, there is a tough message that sustainability champions need to deliver to harried business leaders—the business game they are playing can’t continue. It’s been fun, but if they keep playing the game the way they are, everyone will lose. The rules need to be updated— quickly. That contention is probably not the best conversation-opener with a senior business leader. But, at some point along the line, sustainability champions should be ready to gently help them see that their current model of doing business is not sustainable.
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