Green jobs. Green careers. What do these terms really mean, and where are the green jobs? I Googled the terms and turned up all kinds of interesting things—links to job websites, articles on the ARRA stimulus package, training programs, and job postings in renewable energy, cleantech, and sustainability. 

We thought it would be interesting to explore this issue and glean insights from professionals who are in such jobs, or have made the transition. Our sponsorship of the BMA Clean and Green Roundtable provided the perfect vehicle for this. In our first session, Kate Gerwe of People Power joined us and shared her “green journey” from Yahoo to Lucid Design Group to her current role. For the June roundtable, we’ve invited Scott Bolick, VP of Sustainability for SAP, to give us some insight on the role of sustainability in a very large company. He’ll talk about SAP’s approach to sustainability, the role of the sustainability executive and team, and how their work integrates with marketing. If you’d like to attend this event, details are here.  It will be a lively and interactive discussion!

In the roundtable sessions slated for August and October,  we will build on this foundation by further exploring  how sustainability and clean technologies fit into classic marketing practices—touching on branding, communications, and bringing clean tech products to market. Stay tuned for topics and details of the upcoming events, and please join us on June 15 at Scott’s Seafood restaurant in Palo Alto for this month’s BMA Clean and Green Roundtable, “The New Role of Sustainability Managers and Their Relationship to Marketing”.

At the State of Green Businesss Forum today, I was inspired by the enthusiasm and accomplishments of Alexis Ringwald, currently of Serious Materials, but also a real business citizen of the world.  There were two excellent riffs on the themes of recycling and reuse, by Lisa Gansky and Rupesh Shah, and more from Rupesh on the momentum and spirit built at Intuit by putting reuse into practice, through the “Freecycling at Work” program.  A new format of short, sharp, stimulating presentations kept my attention, and interactive workshops in the afternoon moved people around and fostered a new level of discussion, and real conversation about issues.  My specific interest, sustainability reporting, got a lot of airtime, and it feels like many of the participants are putting significant thought behind how to communicate about their sustainability issues, and how to do it well, whether to an internal or external audience. The day left me feeling that things are happening….at a pace that isn’t easily predicted, but represents progress in sustainable business.   Materials and some videos will be available on www.greenbiz.com in a few days.

Tags: csr report, greenbiz, Intuit, mesh, sustainability, sustainabilty reporting

On October 28, 2010, we collaborated with the Whitman Strategy Group to present a webinar about the benefits of proactively engaging with environmental regulators.  The speaker was Governor Christine Todd Whitman, president of the Whitman Strategy Group. Gov. Whitman served as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from 2001-2003 and was a two-term governor of New Jersey.

Included in this presentation is a discussion of Gov. Whitman’s five rules of engagement:

1. If you ignore them, they won’t go away.
2. Don’t just focus on the legislative process.
3. Start building positive relationships with regulators.
4. Consider the issue from the regulator’s perspective.
5. Take advantage of resources that agencies offer.

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Click the slide below to view and listen in to the webinar, including answers to questions posed by audience members.

Tags: corporate sustainability, environmental reporting, environmental sustainability, LinkedIn, Sustainability Communications

Sabre Holdings recently commissioned a report (published in July 2010), on employee “green teams” in an attempt to understand what makes these teams effective.  A lot has been written about best practices in this area but this report (“Generating Sustainable Value:  Moving Beyond Green Teams to Transformation Collaboratives“) provides an excellent summary of the four key factors:

1. strong executive support
2. “a centralized leader that is the conduit for communicating corporate goals to the Green Team and taking the Green Team’s idea back into the corporation” – well said
3. “high diversity among team members” – across organizational silos and geographies
4. “systems for creating, measuring and tracking initiatives” – i.e. classic good process!

Check out the full report on the Sabre Holdings website.

Tags: corporate sustainability, green teams, LinkedIn, measuring results of green business strategy

This morning, P&G announced its broad-sweeping long-term vision for sustainability.  It’s refreshing to see a large, public company follow the lead of industry pioneers like privately held Interface and attempt to take a very long-term view.  CEO, Bob McDonald, outlined the company’s vision to ultimately get to 100% renewable energy, zero waste, 100% recycled materials for packaging and products designed for the environment.  He acknowledged that achieving such lofty goals might require 30-40 years.

McDonald started his remarks with the statement:

• “We don’t make a profit so that we can improve lives; we make a profit because we improve lives.  That is our purpose.”

Len Sauers, P&G’s VP of Global Sustainability unveiled the following specific 10-year goals.  More details will be available later today at pg.com/sustainability.

Tags: businesses going green, corporate sustainability, environmental reporting, environmental sustainability, LinkedIn, Sustainability Communications, Sustainable Business

There’s been quite a brouhaha about Halliburton’s inclusion in the DJSI, including RP Siegel’s story in Triple Pundit. This is a great example of why companies and their stakeholders should understand what these ratings systems really mean before taking them at face value. Sustainability doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. SAM rates companies for the DJSI and uses publicly available information as well as a questionnaire. The weighting of environmental and social factors is shown here. You can see that environmental factors get 3% of the weight (and then some for specific industry weightings). Social factors get ~22% of the weight (plus some depending on industry factors). SAM doesn’t make its questionnaires widely available but the 2009 sample questionnaire had 46 questions on it and only about 5 of those had to do with environmental or social responsibility. What they’re assessing is the sustainability of the business itself which has more to do with financial and governance factors than with environmental and social factors – at least as Dow Jones and SAM seem to see it.

So, companies take note:  If you want to claim your inclusion in a sustainability index as an accolade, consider what it really means to be included.  Yes, it’s good.  But by itself, it’s not a green or CSR credential.

Tags: corporate sustainability, greenwashing, socially responsible investing, Sustainability Communications

Failure to Quantify Performance

If you want your sustainability communications to be credible, quantify as much as possible.  This means you should try to quantify your targets as well as your performance.  How much was emitted, consumed or sent to landfill?  How much was recycled or restored?  How do you expect this to change in the future?  What are the historical trends in these measures – positive and negative?
To many of us, this kind of information seems an obvious requirement.  Yet a surprising portion of companies fail to include this information in their sustainability reporting.  What are the consequences?

• A failure to communicate clearly defined, quantitative goals and performance can open your company to ridicule and accusations of greenwashing.  And it’s not just a matter of attaching numbers to specific claims.  It’s also a matter of attaching numbers to the right issues.   Companies that lead in this area, consider the materiality of what they are tracking – both what is important to their stakeholders and the impacts on/by their company.  (For example, see page 14 of Intel’s 2009 CSR report.)

• Not quantifying your disclosures will hurt your company’s ratings in all of the public ranking and rating systems. The Newsweek Green Rankings, the Carbon Disclosure Leadership Index, the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices, to name a few, examine your company’s quantitative statements when they rate your sustainability.

Avoid this blunder!  Attach specific measures to your sustainability performance and goals.

Tags: corporate sustainability, environmental reporting, LinkedIn, Sustainable Business