Obama and the Vision Thing

There's long been a fundamental problem with the green world — the myriad companies, activists, evangelists, politicians, clergy, thought leaders, and others who, each in their own way, have prodded us to address our planet's environmental ills. And it explains why, after four decades of the modern environmental movement, only a relative handful of companies and citizens have joined in, while many more have dragged their heels to slow, or even reverse, environmental progress.

The problem is this: No one has created a vision of what happens if we get things right.

That seems odd, when you think about it. We have a crystal clear picture of the consequences of getting things wrong (thank you very much, Al Gore). We know well the potential devastation of unmitigated environmental problems: the droughts, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, resource wars, famine, and pestilence. We know about epidemics of childhood asthma in inner cities, toxic rivers in impoverished lands, and depleted fisheries that may never fully recover. We see for ourselves the rampant development in formerly verdant landscapes. There are vivid pictures of denuded forests, strip-mined mountains, and strip-malled farmland. We read about these things, hear Hollywood stars fret over them, and may even experience them firsthand.

Point is, we know what business as usual looks like.

But what about success? What happens if we get things right? What does that look like?

This, as much as anything, is a vision I'm hoping President Obama can portray to America and the world. Yes, there is a list of necessary policy prescriptions as long as my arm (and, fortunately, a corps of green policy geeks much savvier than I who know how to get them enacted). But without the vision thing, even the best policies can only go so far.

This is no small matter. For decades, environmental leaders in business, activism, and government have expressed frustration that the public isn't behind them, except in disappointingly small numbers, despite a litany of increasingly dire environmental problems. These same leaders express bewilderment at the painfully slow uptake of green products and personal habits, from buying organics to recycling to energy conservation. Even when people understand the issues and consequences of everyday actions — the direct relationship between inefficient light bulbs and the threat of global climate change, for example — they usually fail to act.

We've long known that fear is a limited motivator. Think of how persuasion has changed. A generation ago, we were told by advertisers to worry about ring around the collar, iron-poor blood, waxy yellow buildup, and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Madison Avenue believed that driving fear into the hearts and minds of the public would unleash a wealth of sales and profits. No longer. Today, profits come from imbuing visions of sexual appeal, personal freedom, and a life without worry. Those positive images are the ones that inspire people to take action and, for better or worse, make choices in the marketplace.

What is the positive image of "green" that will inspire a nation — indeed, the world — to transform itself in the way that Obama and others are hoping: that create jobs, build economic opportunities, engender energy independence, attack climate change, improve public health, reduce environmental degradation, and ensure national security?

Ask yourself: What does a world look like where former autoworkers and steelmakers are employed in well-paid jobs to manufacture turbines and solar panels, and where mechanics, electricians, truck drivers, and plumbers are working fervently to build the smarter, upgraded electricity grid needed to distribute all this home-grown energy? Where a new generation of smart buildings and electric vehicles are operating in concert on cheaper, less-polluting energy, and a new generation of technicians is needed to build and maintain them and infrastructure necessary to power them? Where every home, office, factory, and store is retrofitted or rebuilt to be as energy efficient as possible, made so by armies of newly trained workers from local communities? Where entrepreneurial companies are mining landfills in order to turn waste back into raw materials at a fraction of the cost and environmental impacts of mining or manufacturing new ones? Where food is grown and distributed regionally, reducing transportation emissions and ensuring food security, creating a wealth of jobs for local farmers, food processors, distributors, and others?

I could go on, but you get the point. It's a pretty compelling story. Who's telling it?

Van Jones is. The author of The Green-Collar Economy and one of my personal heroes, Jones may be the only one who has learned how to inspire people with the vision thing. And not just any people: Jones is providing hope to legions of the economic underclass who have largely been left out of the environmental movement to date. He's telling ghetto kids to "Put down a handgun and pick up a caulking gun," and that, "Somebody's going to make a million dollars figuring out a way to get solar panels made and deployed in our 'hoods. I think it should be you." (Elizabeth Kolbert has a terrific profile of Jones in the January 12 issue of New Yorker.) Another Jones classic line, about Obama: "It's not that we have a President who's black; it's that for the first time we have a President who's green."

Jones has the ear of Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and others, but beyond Jones, not many others have his vision or voice. Precious few others can spin a positive, exciting story about a world in which thinking and acting green becomes a pathway through the thicket of so many seemingly intractable economic, political, and social problems. And that lack of voices, itself, is a problem.

Can Obama incite and excite the populace by painting an enticing picture of a greener world? Of course: Yes, he can. But will he? Amid the many pressures he'll have — to cure an ailing economy, world strife, and, God knows, the common cold — will he be willing and able to place his political currency in the green vision thing? If he can, it could be one of the more profound exercises in the audacity of hope.

And what about the rest of us? What's the uplifting story each of us is willing and able to tell? How much of your own personal and professional currency are you willing to expend to help not merely portray this good, green vision but also to ensure it becomes reality?

Without that vision, the notion of a greener economy is destined to be seen as a "nice to do," not a "need to do." It will be easily countered by the incumbent interests who hope to continue to profit from the existing model, and who will warn that this is no time to tinker with radical, untested ideas about how our world works. And our political leaders will follow the money, and the votes, watering down the green ideal until it becomes yet another tepid policy soup.

We've seen vividly what happens when presidents squander opportunities. After 9/11, President Bush could have inspired Americans to demand energy independence as a means of avoiding future terrorist attacks, enacting a wealth of policy directives to promote more efficient buildings and vehicles and develop oil alternatives. He could have inspired us with a hopeful vision born of the tragedy we'd just endured. We would have swallowed hard to pay a dollar extra tax on gas, maybe more, knowing it was going to a worthy cause. But he told us to go shopping and left it at that. Eight long years later, we'll have another chance.

To quote Van Jones one more time: "Barack Obama helped us take America back. Now we have to help him take America forward."

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The State of Green . . . and Clean

Two upcoming events I've helped to organize are coming up, each offering up the state of the art of their respective topics. In chronological order:

The Clean-Tech Investor Summit, Jan. 21-22, in Palm Springs, California, brings together about 500 investment professionals, from investment banks to venture funds to corporate venture groups, with thought leaders and business executives in the clean-technology realm. The conference is co-produced by Clean Edge, of which I am co-founder. This year's keynotes include oil and wind magnate T. Boone Pickens and biomimicry guru Janine Benyus. I'll be moderating a session on the electric car infrastructure, with panelists from GM as well as from start-ups, including Better Place, the wunderkind company building EV systems from Israel to Australia.

Bonus #1, to get a $400 break off the fee, use my personal discount code MAKOWER when registering.

Bonus #2, all attendees will receive an autographed copy of my new book, compliments of the cleantech executive search firm Hobbs & Towne.

State of Green Business Forum, Feb. 2, in San Francisco, brings to life our annual State of Green Business 2009 report, which my colleages at GreenBiz.com and I will be launching that morning. Speakers and panels will focus on the trends and key indicators tracked by the report, including the growth of green jobs, the rise of building energy efficiency, water as the "new carbon," and innovation as a green strategy. Speakers (soon to be announced) will include sustainability professionals at a range of leading companies, including Autodesk, IDEO, IBM, Intel, Levi's, and PG&E — as well as the Ella Baker Center, Environmental Defense Fund, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and the Pacific Institute. And more to come.

Seating is limited. There's a 20% discount off the $149 reg fee through this week.

Hope to see you at both!

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Behind IBM's Quest for a 'Smarter Planet'

Over the past few weeks, a series of fascinating full-page ads from IBM Corp. got the better of me. The company launched a series of "Smarter Planet" ads in November, running Mondays in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other publications. They portrayed an image of IBM as a purveyor of solutions to the planet's environmental ills. I wanted to find out what was behind them.

I've long been fascinated with corporate image ads. In a post more than four years ago, I pondered what was behind the surge, as I saw it then, of ads portraying a company's green image. "Are such ads the best way to effect one's image?" I wrote at the time, answering my own question:

It's debatable at best. With consumer trust of big business remaining at cynical levels (though rising in recent months to near pre-Enron scandal levels), it's unlikely that company-sponsored environmental claims are likely to sway many purchases.

The ads kept coming over the years, from oil companies (Chevron, BP, Shell, and Exxon all seem to have some campaign going at any given moment), chemical companies (Dow, for example), and from entire industries: forestry, mining, plastics, coal, nuclear, and others.

IBM's recent campaign goes well beyond mere image — and beyond green — to envision a "smarter" world in which problems as wide-ranging as health care costs, energy and resource shortages, government inefficiency, threatened waterways, climate change, and traffic congestion can be addressed by a blend of systems thinking, technological innovation, and computing power. It's an intriguing campaign aimed at helping redefine IBM from its roots as a computer maker to its more recent incarnation as a self-described "global services company."

"Smarter Planet" isn't IBM's first foray into the green scene. In 2007, the company launched a program called Big Green Innovations to mine the company's vast wealth of expertise and technology to create products and services to help address customers' and society's environmental challenges. Big Green, a play on the company's longtime nickname, Big Blue, takes aim at everything from creating carbon dashboards to help lower companies' carbon emissions, to designing energy efficient data centers and more powerful solar cells. But it seemed more of an inward-looking effort, an attempt to collaborate with existing clients, and not a means of communicating with the marketplace. (You can listen to a 2007 interview I did on the topic with Sharon Nunes, who heads the Big Green Innovations program, and Wayne Balta, IBM's VP of Corporate Environmental Affairs.)

Recently, I talked to Rich Lechner, IBM's VP of Energy & Environment, and John Kennedy, its VP of Integrated Marketing Communications, to learn more about the "Smarter Planet" series — what was behind the ads and what the company hopes to accomplish from them. (Click here for a transcript of the full interview.) Kennedy began the explanation:

"Globalization has many benefits, but also some tradeoffs because many of the systems that the world operates in today  — and by systems, we mean systems in every sense of the word, from systems in companies, to manmade systems and natural systems — needed to become smarter, to handle and take advantage of the greater connectedness in the world.

"So it started off with those observations. And the more we worked on this, we began to realize that not only was this a dynamic that was very compelling, but as well, we felt that it was a good opportunity for IBM. This is a company that covers multiple industries, has a depth of research — has through our entire history taken on some of the toughest problems in the world in a way to help the world work better, to help our clients' companies work better, and help governments and universities work better. So we felt like it was a very natural platform for us."

Lechner described the many environmental challenges that, he says, could be solved by "smarter" systems:

"In a world in which water, energy, power are severely constrained, you don't have to look far to see, for example, that only 30 percent of the potential electricity that's available at the energy source actually reaches the doorstep of the consumer. Or that significant amounts of traffic congestion are caused just by people circling, looking for empty parking spaces, wasting fuel. You can look at our distribution systems around the world and see that more than 20 percent of all the shipping containers and more than 25 percent of the trucks moving around on a global basis are empty. You look at the way that food is distributed and understand that the average carrot in the United States — the lowly carrot — has traveled 1,600 miles to get to your dinner table, and you say clearly something could be done to improve the efficiency of our food distribution system. And water: We're projecting that over a billion people won't have access to safe drinking water in just ten years time, and yet today, just five food and beverage companies consume enough water on an annual basis to serve the daily needs of everyone on the planet.

"We looked around and we said there's plenty of room for improvement and our expertise in IT [information technology] coupled with our deep industry knowledge and our ability to look at and re-engineer processes gave us a unique vantage point to comment on the need to exploit this growing intelligence and where the first opportunities for exploitation might exist."

The vision for "Smarter Planet" was laid out in a November 17, 2008, speech by IBM chairman and CEO Samuel J. Palmisano. "The world will continue to become smaller, flatter ... and smarter," he said. "We are moving into the age of the globally integrated and intelligent economy, society and planet. The question is, what will we do with that?"

The "Smarter Planet" ads — what Kennedy calls an "op-ad" campaign — are Palmisano's answer. They are designed "to get a reader to think about the world from a systems point of view, and along the way, describe these opportunities for systems," says Kennedy. Each week's ads cover a different topic: energy, traffic, food, infrastructure, retail, banking, and more. The schedule posted on the IBM website has ads slated weekly through early March.

The ads aren't intended to be overtly commercial, says Kennedy. "They are more agenda-setting, educating the reader about the world becoming smarter, and then in the end we talk a little bit about what IBM is doing today to help make a difference in these areas. So that is sort of an intentional phase we're in now and we're trying to do this in a thoughtful way. It's more of a short essay, and we try to convey this in that kind of a tone."

I asked Kennedy and Lechner how the ads work — that is, how they are supposed to create new business opportunities for IBM. Kennedy explained:

"There are two ways. First of all, in practical terms, over time we will talk about how 'smarter' is a way to think about transformation, and a way that industries can be transformed, and the way that companies in those industries can be transformed. So there are opportunities for banks to become smarter, retail firms to become smarter, healthcare to become smarter, government to become smarter. What you've seen initially are about larger issues because they resonate well. They are ones that the general population are familiar with.

"The reason why this is so timely, we believe, from a business standpoint, is we're in a time of great change in the world and we're in a time in our history where change is being discussed everywhere from the kitchen table all the way to the boardroom table. As a result, the leaders of many of our clients and leaders around the world are focused on transformation and see this as an opportunity to drive a great amount of transformation, and therefore it's a great opportunity to address ways that they can make their companies become more competitive as we come through this time of great change. That's the way we see the commercial opportunity."

So, the ads are all about starting a conversation with current and would-be customers about transforming themselves and the systems in which they operate during an opportune moment in history. I'll admit, I'm unclear how all this works at the ground level — that is, how readers will connect the dots between a series of "op-ads" and a big, fat contract with IBM. But Kennedy assured me that there's a method to their messaging:

"We think this is a business-building platform. We know our clients are looking at this time as a time to drive transformation and change, and the prospect of making their industry smarter, we believe, couldn't come at a better time. That's for our current clients and as well for future clients, to see us as a company that can help them in these areas. So absolutely we wouldn't be doing it if we didn't think it were a way to drive business and client engagement."

Adds Lechner:

"This is really a significant initiative, as significant as when we launched e-business a decade ago. And when the rest of the world was talking about the Internet, browser wars, and spinning logos, we came out and said, 'You know what? There's something more here. This is going to fundamentally change the way the world of business works, the ways that societies interact.' And it turns out we were right."

"It really is an agenda," says Kennedy. "It is a view of how the world works. It's a view of how the world can be improved and the systems that could be improved. We do talk about the role that we believe IBM can play, but one of the important points is that making the world smarter is not something IBM can do alone. This will require partnerships with many different types of companies, companies we have a partnership with, an ecosystem of partners you might not naturally associate with IT per se."

Can a series of ads really start a conversation with customers that will lead to profitable engagements, unprecedented partnerships, and systemic transformations that improve all of our lives? I'll reserve the right to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism. But you've got to like IBM's bold, clear vision, and its recognition that this is a moment in time where the need for dramatic societal change transcends political campaigns and corporate slogans to demand new tools and fresh thinking on the part of leading businesses.

Here's hoping it works.

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