0
0
Sustainability is now sweeping through profit and non-profit businesses throughout the world. This course clearly shows you how to harness the power of sustainability to give your company a huge competitive edge – attracting and retaining the best employees, the best customers, and the best suppliers, while reducing financial risk and lowering the cost of capital. Learn how sustainability creates a new and eye-opening understanding of waste and prioritizes the many waste–reduction opportunities. Gain a practical, real-world grasp of the “triple bottom line” which is the basis for decision-making in a sustainable company. See how sustainable thinking and related tools and techniques can be used to transform your operations.
Objectives:
Prerequisite: Management responsibility in finance, operations, or planning
733060
Companies that focus on sustainability have employees that act more like co-owners, like entrepreneurs, and less like typical “tell me what to do and I’ll do it” employees. The transformation of employee attitudes allows companies, and even requires them, to operate in a substantially different manner from traditional companies.
The following are attributes of the LAMP 60 companies, companies that mimic life:
• They are highly networked to facilitate feedback and information exchanges internally and externally. Many of these networks are informal, self-organizing consortia of employees, suppliers, and customers. When you layer these networks over one another and the firm’s chain of command, you get a structure that looks much like a double helix.
• They manage by means (MBM), understanding that people and relationships are the primary means by which they build network capacity and create value. They strengthen and empower employees by practicing servant leadership. They also give employees decision-making authority in their areas of competence and hold them accountable for results.
• They optimize their use of physical resources by “closing the loop” so the waste of one process becomes food for another. In so doing, they aim for factor efficiencies by producing more value for customers with less input of energy and materials. With similar intent, they conserve financial resources. Their guiding principle is “waste not, want not.”
• They are exceptionally open in the ways they share information with employees and in their desire for stakeholder feedback. They know such openness builds trust, learning capacity, and adaptability.
• They nurture the larger living systems of which they are a part (nature, society, markets) because they understand the inherent connection of all life.15
Bragdon’s research clearly shows that companies that try to bolt sustainability onto a traditional hierarchical, command-and-control, organizational model will fail to achieve most of the potential benefits of sustainability. To be successful in sustainability, a company must make two fundamental changes:
1. Its goals – From profits and money, to the triple bottom line, and
2. Its culture – From hierarchical command-and-control to management by means.
Sustainability: Huge Movement
Paul Hawken estimates that more than 1,000,000 organizations worldwide (and perhaps even 2,000,000!) are actively doing something to implement sustainability! It is deeper, wider, and moving faster than previous business movements or social movements. However, it is a grassroots movement, with no single center. There is no single agency or organization, either in the U.S. or worldwide, that is the clearinghouse or coordinator of the movement. It more closely resembles a herd of cats traveling from New York to California.
Because of this, organizations underestimate the power and potential of sustainability. Once a person realizes that it involves people, planet, and profit, one becomes aware of the number of news stories that include sustainability, although most of them do not actually use the word itself. One excellent example is an article in Fast Company about Timberland.16 In the article, CEO Jeff Schwartz outlines the company’s goals of helping its workers and their communities and improving the environment. He believes that this is the best way to run his company, because doing so attracts and retains the best talent. Timberland’s profits and profit growth exceed those of its competitors. However, the word “sustainability” is never mentioned.
Goal: A Living Business™
Sustainability Partners International17 has created the concept of a Living Business™. A Living Business™ has several attributes. No company is yet accomplishing all of these; however, each of these is practical, and several companies are achieving individual goals below:
15 Bragdon, op. cit., p. 4 16 Reingold, Jennifer, “Walking the Walk,” Fast Company, November 2005 17 www.sustainabilitypartnersintl.com1. Organic – A Living Business™ is organic by design – it flexes with its environment. It is intentionally non-hierarchical, resembling interwoven loops in a chain mail system. Each loop is defined by the information and authority and responsibility that is shared within it, and then shared with other attached loops. LAMP 60 companies are an excellent example.
2. Planet/Environment – A Living Business™ is gentle on the planet, with the ultimate goal of restoring it, not just being planet-neutral. This can manifest itself is several ways, including
3. People – One of the fundamentals goals of a Living Business™ is to serve its people and the communities in which it operates.a. Energy – A Living Business™ produces more energy than it uses. RockCote in Australia has a building that generates more power than it uses.
b. Waste – A Living Business™ uses more waste than it produces. The ultimate goal would be to have 100% of its material input streams be waste products from other companies, while creating no waste itself. One industry whose companies use more waste than they produce is the recycled paper industry. Those companies use recycled paper as their input stream, producing office paper and cardboard.
c. Toxins – A Living Business™ produces no toxins. If it brings them in, its processes permanently neutralize the toxins.
d. EPA Poster Child – It is held in high regard by the EPA and other regulatory agencies. They frequently give tours of its sites, holding it up as an example of what companies can accomplish.
733060
Customer Service
Customer Service
Customer Service
Back to Browsing Products
