Bob’s keynote presentations are usually 45-60 minutes, with these titles and descriptions:
A Sustainability Business Ca$e That Your CFO Will Love
Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are responsible for the financial wellbeing of their organizations. They probably acknowledge that environmental and social concerns deserve attention, but not at the expense of the current and long-term financial health of their companies or institutions. Surprisingly, many organizations are discovering that they can enhance their financial situation by performing better on their environmental and social goals. Based on Bob’s new free, open-source Sustainability ROI Workbook, this presentation shows how sustainability professionals can frame the business case for sustainability initiatives in the CFO’s familiar return on investment (ROI) and cost-benefit analysis language. Bob uses business and leadership experience from his 34-year career at IBM Canada to help sustainability champions ensure that the direct and indirect measurable benefits for any category of sustainability initiative provide compelling justifications for taking action.
Leading the Change to a Sustainability Culture, from the Middle
An expert on leadership, culture change, and organizational development, Bob distills lessons learned about cultural transformation that are described in his book, The Sustainability Champion’s Guidebook. He provides practical guidance on how to embed sustainability into corporate culture, even if you are not the CEO. He outlines a seven-step sustainability change process, including how to frame the business case for the culture change; seven leadership practices to use throughout the change process; seven paradoxes that enable successful change strategies; and seven derailers to avoid. By connecting the dots between timeless leadership practices and sustainability strategies, Bob shows how sustainability champions at any level in a company can lead a transformation to a smarter and more sustainable enterprise that will thrive in the new economy.
Objection Handling Clinic for Sustainability Champions
Suppose you find yourself on an elevator with a senior executive and courageously decide this is your opportunity to convince him to integrate sustainability into his core business strategies. How would you open the conversation? When he throws objections at you, how will you respond? Using proven techniques described in his book, The Next Sustainability Wave, Bob will prepare you for an “elevator speech” sales call on a skeptical senior executive so that when the elevator doors open you have converted his skepticism to excited curiosity and he invites you to continue the conversation in his office. By the end of this 2-hour workshop, sustainability champions will be able to describe at least three likely objections to sustainability initiatives from senior managers who do not yet “get it” on sustainability, and describe several effective ways to confidently and graciously handle each objection. See this “Handling Objections” guidebook for a report on the output from one of these workshops.
Future-Fit Business Benchmark
How would we recognize a sustainable future-fit company if we saw one? When companies work on improving their environmental and social performance, how much is enough? These question is more relevant to stakeholders today than it was five years ago. Accountability for supply chain conditions, resource scarcities, ecosystem destruction, climate destabilization, and new levels of transparency forced by social media are introducing new risks and opportunities into the game of business. Would a truly sustainable enterprise be better positioned to thrive on a more climate-disrupted, resource-constrained, water-constrained, and socially-unstable planet? Yes. Bob highlights how a new, free, open-source benchmark for a company’s required environmental and social performance can be a breakthrough resource for companies, investors, consultants, and standards organizations. He will outline the science-based environmental and social goals in the Future-Fit Business Benchmark; why it is needed now; how it relates to other sustainability reporting and ranking frameworks like GRI and the UN SDGs; the target audiences for its use; the business benefits of achieving its goals; and the Future-Fit Foundation’s strategy for deploying the benchmark in the business community so that companies can clearly see the goal line for their journey toward greater bottom-line profitability and resilience―that is, when they will be fit for the future.
Conference organizers are encouraged to tune the above generic titles and descriptions to their audiences, or create composites of them that better suit their event’s theme and objectives.
