Entrepreneurs are finding novel solutions to big environmental and social problems. The semi-finalists at the recent Sustainable Brands Innovation Open were inspirational.
An odd year for green business, but a lot happened…
The defeat of Prop 37 in California is a blip on the road to transparency…
This year’s biggest sustainability themes and stories…
Managing sustainability challenges will require deeply disruptive innovation. How do we get there?
By wielding a tool more powerful than legal action, protests, or even partnership, a relative upstart — the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) — has rapidly become the NGO to watch. CDP and its backers are basically demanding transparency– that’s the powerful idea that makes the NGO so strong.
While the “greening of the supply chain” has been in the works for decades, the movement has really taken off in 2010. In the last few months, a number of corporate giants have announced new initiatives that pressure suppliers to do much more to measure and manage their environmental impacts. The big guns asking the questions include Pepsi, P&G (more in a future post), and IBM.
Transparency is one of the driving forces keeping the green and sustainability waves moving (it’s a theme I touch on in my new book, Green Recovery, coming out this summer, so I’ll return to this topic over the coming months). I believe that we’re rapidly entering an era of radical openness, driven both by regulation — see the EPAs recent announcement that it plans to “ask” 13,000 facilities in the United States to share data on carbon emissions — and the rising demands of employees and customers, particularly the younger ones. The new level of transparency will make any of us old enough to remember a world before MTV uncomfortable. But the Facebook and MySpace generation will have no problem with it — in fact, they’ll be expecting it.
The New Year is always a time for taking stock, looking both back and forward. How did your company handle the shifting sands for business in 2007, the greening of society? Companies across many industry groups were scrambling and strategizing about how to best manage the environmental impacts of everything they do. Green issues were huge in ’07 (see my upcoming strategy e-letter on the crushing flow of media to green issues in 2007 here in a few days),
2007 was just the beginning. It was not a fad — or a bad dream for some — but a fundamental shift in how we all do business…But the tipping point year is over now and the game is on. So what environmentally-driven challenges and questions will your business face in 2008 and how will you handle them?
The bizarre story of Whole Foods’ CEO John Mackey is very educational. In case you missed it (which would be hard), Mackey was using the
‘Is the World Better Off Because Your Company Is In It?’: Examining Corporate Climate Responsibility
