All Posts Tagged With: "environment"
Another Sign That Green Is Mainstream
The 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) just ended. Huffington Post did one of its quick polls of the coolest new gadgets at the show. See a photo, read a one-sentence description, and rank it 1 (fine) to 10 (fantastic!). Number One may surprise you.
It wasn’t Samsung’s laptop with a semitransparent screen, which got a 5.3 rating.
Two slate tablets by Que and HP didn’t even rate as high as the Samsung laptop.
My favorite, a mini-helicopter with a video camera that you control with your iPhone, only came in at 5.3.
Two new TV products scored a little higher at 6.1: 3-D TV and mobile DTV that you can play on your smart phone. Very cool, but well below the #1-rated gizmo, which is: Horizon’s HydroFill, which converts water into hydrogen and stores it in a fuel cell that can power your gadgets. It rated 9 out of 10.
As if to prove such a ranking wasn’t a fluke, #3 went to portable solar panels that fit on a backpack or lunchbox. (8 out of 10)
You have to see the photos, which you can view and rate here, to understand how much cooler almost every other gadget is than these two. The solar panel on the backpack looks absolutely nerdy, which leads to this conclusion: They’re getting the votes because they’re green.
Polls like this confirm that the desire to “go green” has reached a tipping point. Organizations used to be able to tout the paper they saved or the containers they recycled as…
11Jan2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedA New Bottom Line for Schools – and the Rest of Us
Business thinking has corrupted our schools, according to Anthony Cody, a teacher and teacher-coach in Oakland, California. In an article posted December 3rd on Teacher magazine, Cody notes that business people saw a shocking flaw in our education system: “There was no bottom line. Unlike a business, schools had no balance sheet at the end of the year—no ‘metrics,’ no way to directly compare one school to another. No way to tell which school was a good return on our investment, and which was wasting the public’s money.”
To fix the flaw, a profit-minded accountability movement pushed for clear standards and tests to measure performance on those standards, and No Child Left Behind emerged.
It will not work. “As a culture and a species,” Cody writes, “we have too many problems that cannot be solved by a one-dimensional view of profit and loss.”
The truth is, focusing solely on revenue and profitability as the single bottom line for business doesn’t work, either. It’s why the balanced scorecard was born. It’s why the triple bottom line—giving environmental and social considerations equal weight to financial ones—has gained traction. And it’s a big reason we’re in the mess we’re in today with global warming and a broken healthcare system and greedy financial institutions and income that, for most Americans, hasn’t gotten much better in years. When all that matters is profit, nothing else matters.
Business thinking has corrupted education. It’s corrupted healthcare. It’s even corrupted business. New thinking is needed. “We must not trade our judgment and our…
3Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedMisleading Data
A recent article in BusinessWeek misuses data to make its point. “The Dividends from Green Offices” (Christopher Palmeri, December 7, 2009) describes a survey of 2,000 tenants in 154 buildings in the U.S. with Energy Star labels or LEED certification. According to the article, “The survey found that employees took an average 2.9 fewer sick days each year in their environmentally sound offices than in their previous, nongreen workplaces…Some 55% of tenants also reported a rise in employee productivity in their green digs.” The article notes that “most tenants also expressed a belief that their healthier environments helped them retain their staffs and burnish their image with clients.”
Maybe I’m a skeptic, but I’m guessing that the economy may have had an impact on sick days and productivity. There may have been changes in sick leave policies. Or process improvements. Which is more likely, that fewer sick days and higher productivity result from better ventilation and more natural light or from worries about losing your job and having to do more work with fewer people?
And “most tenants expressed a belief”? Where’s the data to support that claim?
There are three statements in the article that seem more solid:
- “Sending tenants individual utility bills caused them to consume 21% less electricity on average.”
- “Green buildings were able to command higher rents” (about 10% higher).
- “Vacancy rates were lower—about 16.6%, vs. 17.2%” (although, again, this could be due to a number of factors).
None of these three statements would necessarily encourage businesses to rent space in a “green” building. However, if…
1Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedNew Study of Corporate Citizenship
A new study by the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship found that two-thirds of company leaders believe ethical and values-based leadership in the executive office is an important factor in difficult economic times. Leaders also cited effective corporate governance practices (61%) and more effective industry self-regulatory policies and initiatives (58%) as important factors.
All three of these factors are addressed in the second half of the Leadership Category in the Baldrige Criteria. Companies that want to improve in these areas can ask and answer the questions in Item 1.2 (here) and read how Baldrige Award winners respond (award application summaries here).
The study shows that more companies are doing more than just talking about corporate citizenship. Forty percent of the respondents assign a team or individual to work on corporate citizenship issues, up from 26% in 2007. More companies are setting policies for corporate citizenship and integrating it with their business planning processes.
The study also found that more large companies are “establishing corporate citizenship management policies and practices to ensure citizenship is integrated into the core business.”
As the study concludes: “Increasingly, customers, employees, business partners, and government demand that corporations take an active role in social, environmental, and community concerns. That’s why strategic corporate citizenship is more than good business—it’s a business essential.”
You can read a summary of the survey here.
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Social Responsibility and Global Climate Change
Yesterday I posted an article about the triple bottom line, one focus of which is environmental. Climate Counts has developed a methodology to help measure a company’s commitment to fighting global warming, which is a key part of any organization’s social responsibility. In fact, one Baldrige Criteria question asks specifically about it: “How do you consider the well-being of environmental, social, and economic systems to which your organization does or may contribute?”
Climate Counts uses a 100-point scale and 22 criteria (pdf) to determine if companies have measured their climate footprint, reduced their impact on global warming, supported (or suggest intent to block) progressive climate legislation, and publicly disclosed their climate actions clearly and comprehensively. The scores determine if a company is stuck (0-12 points), starting (13-49 points), or striding (50 points or higher).
Not all sectors are covered, nor are all companies in a sector, but each sector is worth reviewing. For example, in the “Home and Office Furniture” sector, the following companies were ranked with their current scores:
- Steelcase 53
- Herman Miller 46
- Masco 39
- La-Z-Boy 16
- Sealy 16
- Leggett and Platt, Inc. 15
- HNI Corp. 13
- Fortune Brands 4
- Simmons 4
- Tempur-Pedic 1
- Select Comfort 1
- Serta 1
- Furniture Brands International 0
- Spring Air 0
You can download the full scorecard or a pocket guide to carry with you. As Climate Count notes, “Business has the power to change the world—and you have the power to change business.”
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Purpose-Inspired Growth, Part 2
In 1970, Milton Friedman wrote “that a corporation’s only moral responsibility was to increase shareholder profits.” The article that quotes him suggests that a majority of people disagree with his opinion (“The Responsibility Revolution” by Richard Stengel, Time, September 21, 2009), and that “purpose-inspired growth,” which the Baldrige Criteria encourages with questions about social responsibilities, is fast gaining momentum.
According to the article, six in ten Americans have bought organic products so far in 2009. Of a thousand people polled, 82% have consciously supported local or neighborhood businesses this year and nearly 40% bought a product in 2009 “because they liked the social or political values of the company that produced it.” Socially responsible investment mutual funds “now manage about 11% of all the money invested in U.S. financial markets.” A 2007 survey by Goldman Sachs revealed that “companies with a strong emphasis on sustainability outperformed the market, often by a large margin.”
Even Wal-Mart, the bane of local and neighborhood businesses, is fiddling with social responsibility: “It is developing a sustainability index that will one day show consumers at a glance how green its products are.”
Cynics would argue that Wal-Mart is only boarding the environmental bandwagon to make money. Geoffrey Heal, a Columbia Business School professor says: So what? “I don’t care whether companies change for the love of the environment or because of their financial interest,” he says. “The most sustainable solution is to have companies responding to financial incentives rather than their own feelings.”
Friedman may have been right about a…
21Sep2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
