Ask Customers to Use Less of Your Product: The Big Heresy
Leading companies are helping customers use less of their product, to reduce environmental impacts, but also to hold on to customers and build deeper relationships.
Leading companies are helping customers use less of their product, to reduce environmental impacts, but also to hold on to customers and build deeper relationships.
I attended a Executive Sustainability Summit last week at Xerox’s request and I’m writing a few blogs about what I saw and heard. This first one is up on Xerox’s site and comments on a framework for building a successful sustainability program.
Every week, 140 million people — about the population of England and Germany combined — shop in a Wal-Mart store. Soon, all of these people will be eating healthier, and the environmental impact of their food will be lessened.
I visited Beijing a couple weeks ago to speak to a group of Chinese corporate executives. They were brought together by a major environmental NGO to discuss climate change. The meeting itself was fascinating, but I was really struck by a general impression in China that the country is taking green business very seriously.
Obviously some things have changed in Washington and around the country in the last 24 hours. But what will this shift in power mean for the green business movement and for the sustainability agenda in general? It may not change as much as you think, and I see a number of reasons to maintain hope.
The world faces some big shocks in the realms of sustainability and climate change, and the ways of thinking about the future described in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, The Black Swan, will come in handy. But two competing black swans — climate change itself or worldwide action to pursue sustainability — both of which seem unlikely, are competing. Let’s hope the second one wins.
One of the hottest concepts in strategy and management today is the idea of open innovation. Gone are the highly secluded R&D departments funded by a single company…In its place, in theory, are hubs of collaboration capturing ideas from customers, academia, or some guys in a garage somewhere.
The 2010 Fortune 500 list just came out and I’m completely blown away by Wal-Mart’s size. We all know that the retail giant is the
[From my column on Harvard Business Online] At a recent executive education program on sustainability, I spoke about the many tactical ways to reduce environmental
‘Is the World Better Off Because Your Company Is In It?’: Examining Corporate Climate Responsibility