Archive for the ‘Business & Economics’ Category
New discussion course for business sustainability
Sustainability is a huge topic. And many feel it lacks a clear definition. No wonder so many businesses that want to do the right thing don’t know how or where to start down the sustainability path.
Enter the nonprofit Northwest Earth Institute, based in Portland, Ore. NWEI has answered the call of businesses and other organizations looking for a way to start — or perhaps kick start — sustainability initiatives. NWEI’s response is a new discussion course designed specifically for the workplace, called “Sustainable Systems at Work.”
In the interest of full disclosure, I am on the NWEI board. As someone who’s participated in previous NWEI discussion courses, I can vouch for the power and inspiration in the model of peer group learning used by NWEI.
Each of NWEI’s courses takes a grass roots approach to sustainability, consistent with the Institute’s mission of “Inspiring people to take responsibility for Earth.” The previous seven courses offered by NWEI are designed to inform and inspire people in support of individual behavior change. The new workplace course is tailored to empower groups of employees at all levels to create or support sustainability projects or programs within their business. This bottoms-up approach creates employee champions for sustainability, as well as employee buy-in for environmental or social initiatives already in place.
Over a course of five sessions (60-90 minutes each, typically one session per week), employee groups will:
- evaluate the current economic model and consider the case for change
- examine the concept of sustainability from an organizational perspective
- evaluate principles and frameworks for guiding a vision
- identify tools and strategies for implementing a framework
- develop an action plan to advance organizational change
The course book, produced in cooperation with The Natural Step Network, contains articles and excerpts from experts and authors on business and workplace sustainability. The readings and companion discussion questions and exercises are designed to move employees quickly from learning and conversation into action. Mike Mercer, executive director of NWEI, says it’s all about engaging employees from the ground up.
Most organizations are launching sustainability initiatives from the top down, which they should. However, for culture and practices to change within an organization, employee commitment is a must. We believe innovation at its best occurs at all levels, and is driven by shifts in thinking. Our programs drive just that.
So if your business or some business you know is looking for a door into sustainability or the key to unlocking employee passion for sustainable change, get in touch with NWEI. They can help.
Marketing in a world of eco-intelligent consumers
Many marketers don’t feel obligated to know or otherwise take responsibility for the entire environmental and social story of the products they help develop, promote and sell. If they’re not careful, their customers may know the full story before they do, leaving them with a potential sales and reputation mess to clean up.
Daniel Goleman, author of the popular book “Emotional Intelligence,” explains the growing empowerment of eco- or social-minded shoppers in his new book “Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Impact of What We Buy Can Change Everything.” Goleman says consumers face an information gap that prevents them from easily knowing and comparing the personal, social and environmental health impacts of individual products they are considering for purchase. That gap, however, is closing, thanks to the emergence of new mobile and point-of-purchase information technology that makes it easier to access the accumulating ecological and social data and ratings of individual products.
The hope and the promise Goleman sees for these new forms of IT is “radical transparency.”
Ecological transparency becomes radical when its analysis encompasses the entire life cycle of a product and the full range of its consequences at every stage, and presents that information to a buyer in ways that demand little effort…Radical transparency means tracking every substantial impact of an item from manufacturing to disposal—not just its carbon footprint and other environmental costs but its biological risks, as well as its consequences for those who labored to make it—and summarizing those impacts for shoppers as they are deciding what to purchase.
Goleman credits the company GoodGuide for its pioneering efforts to equip the shopping public with “comprehensive and rigorous information at the point of purchase.” GoodGuide’s technology platform is still in beta form, but it shows potential for dramatically tilting the information playing field in the direction of the consumer. According to Goleman:
GoodGuide surfaces a product’s backstory. It can calculate the specific environmental impacts during manufacture, transport, use, and disposal. It can perform this calculation down to a single chemical among a batch of ingredients. On a macro level, it can rate how well a given company stacks up against others in its field on environmental, health, or social performance, as well as determine which brand or company has been getting better over time. GoodGuide can evaluate a company’s policies, its disclosure of key information on products, and ultimately a company’s impacts on consumers, workers, communities, and the environment.
And now GoodGuide offers a free iPhone app that provides mobile access to data on more than 70,000 products, according to its website. Goleman says GoodGuide has harnessed decades of industrial ecology research to provide precise metrics of various processes and products. Perhaps most significantly from a marketing standpoint, “GoodGuide cuts through greenwashing to the underlying facts,” Goleman says.
Although GoodGuide remains at beta stage, Goleman says the tool is nonetheless “a concrete example of how radical transparency might work” in the aisles of shoppers’ favorite stores. It may be a Microsoft or a Google that ultimately provides the transparency system that is most widely accepted. In any case, Goleman sounds confident it won’t be long before consumers have fast, convenient access to information that helps them align their purchases with their values at the place and time they’re ready to buy. I share his confidence.
For marketers, the takeaway is this: Your customers will eventually have all the credible facts they need to decide whether your company or product satisfies their health and sustainability values and how you compare to your competitors. At that point, you’ll have little choice but to ensure the stories you tell about your company and products square with the facts your customers will have at their fingertips. Do you know your products’ “environmental impacts during manufacture, transport, use, and disposal” down to a single chemical used in its ingredients? And how about the labor and trade conditions up and down your supply chain? It’s only a matter of time before not knowing or not caring to know that information will come back to bite the offending company either in lost sales or in damaged image.
The “radical transparency” Goleman describes won’t appear overnight and it may never be fully realized in the market nor embraced by the consumer, but the information trends are clearly working in favor of the customer, whether a business or an individual. One of the trend drivers is demographics. In an interview last month with public television’s Bill Moyers, Goleman said he believes the younger generations have the greatest motivation to preserve the world and their ever-expanding use of social media will accelerate the sharing of consumer knowledge. This, he says, will create a shift “that will make it not only feasible for companies, but actually essential for companies to do the right thing.”
Smart marketers will get ahead of the trend and make radical transparency their competitive advantage.
Update: As I was about to publish this post I came across Joel Makower’s review on June 17 of Goleman’s book. He isn’t nearly as optimistic as Goleman about the transformative potential of radical transparency, for either consumers or producers. “I can’t argue with the premise, but my 20 years of watching the green marketplace leaves me, well, unsold,” Makower writes. Goleman responds to Makower here. He says, “I don’t believe the last 20 years offer apt data points for projecting the next 20. It’s the future I’m talking about, not the past.” I’d suggest you read the book and decide for yourself.
Update: Daniel Goleman references my post in a piece he wrote for Harvard Business here.
The brand truth: ‘You are what you do’
Last night, in a rugged NBA playoff game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Denver Nuggets, LA’s Kobe Bryant was sent sprawling to the floor after being tripped by Denver’s Dahntay Jones. After seeing the TV replay, the ABC announcers all believed Jones intentionally tripped Bryant, although the referees missed the obvious foul. Play-by-play announcer Mike Breen, in an apparent defense of Jones, said the Denver player was not considered “a dirty player” in the NBA. To which analyst Jeff Van Gundy responded, “You are what you do.”
In other words, it doesn’t matter whether Jones is considered a clean or dirty player, because that was a dirty play. And if he continues to make plays like that (in an earlier game Jones pushed Bryant in the back as Bryant went in for a layup), he’ll earn an undesirable reputation as a dirty player.
Maybe only an NBA fan and branding consultant like me would offer Van Gundy’s words as a caution to those who oversee their firm’s brand. All of our carefully researched and cultivated efforts to develop a certain image among our stakeholders are only as effective as the collective behavior of our organization. That’s why I believe managing your business’ brand or reputation is not simply an exercise in marketing. Who you say your business is in your marketing counts for far less than what you do as a business.
Logos and slogans do not define your brand. Actions do. When the spotlight is bright and the pressure to perform is great, how do the executives and employees of your organization behave? That’s where you’ll find the truth of your brand.