What Color is the Triple Bottom Line?

I recently posted a query on Twitter and Facebook asking a simple but vexing question: "Someone committed to the environment is called an environmentalist. What do you call someone committed to sustainability?"

The answers I got were largely snarky, smug, and, ultimately, unsatisfactory. (I probably should have added a single-worded addendum: "Seriously.") Suggestions included "A good ancestor," "Idealist," "Human," "Thinker," "Educated," "Brilliant," and the like. A few folks gamely stepped up to the challenge: "Regenerative designer," "Sustainer," and "Triple bottom liner" were among their suggestions.

Someone pointed to a blog called The Sustainabilitist, which seemed to be trying to coin a meme along those lines.

As I said, all of this left a lot to be desired.

This is no mere idle noodling. Names matter. They create definitions, frameworks, images, and reference points, and are essential to the birth of movements, eras, and culture change. Can you name a significant movement, era, or cultural shift that didn't have a good name or descriptor? The media and blogosphere are famous for branding just about everything — witness the "gate" suffix appended to nearly every scandal, no matter how clumsily, since Watergate in the 1970s. Without a name, ideas rarely catch on.

Since the 1970s, we've referred to "the environmental movement" and "environmentalists." These days, the attention is shifting toward the broader arena of sustainability, which includes environmental concerns as well as social and economic ones. And while for some sustainability is used synonymously with environment, that misperception is slowly fading as activists, business leaders, thought leaders, and others help to shape the conversation away from conflating the "S"-word with the "E"-word.

"Sustainability" is, most people agree, a challenging term. Most people find it hard to define, frequently reverting to the clumsy definition of "sustainable development" set forth by the Brundtland Commission, convened by the United Nations in 1983. The commission's 1987 report, Our Common Future, made this now well-known declaration:

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:

• the concept of "needs," in particular the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and
• the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs.

That definition isn't bad, but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. And it is only mildly helpful today, when references to sustainability (as opposed to "sustainable development") extend well beyond the "needs of the world's poor" to include (among other things) the actions and outcomes of companies, products, processes, and social systems in both developing and developed economies.

Some have boldly try to update Brundtland's definition of the sustainability (some can be found here), but none of these definitions has become widely used. (For what it's worth, I often describe sustainability as "An intergenerational Golden Rule.")

And no one has yet come up with a better word to describe attention paid to environmental, social, and economic matters. So, assuming we're stuck with the word, how do we talk about people committed to sustainability? I'd still like to know.

What about green? I regularly hear pronouncements to the effect that "Green is passé," or that "Consumers have green fatigue."

Perhaps, but that's not the whole story.

Green may be losing its mojo in the consumer marketplace, what with consumer distrust of corporate green marketing and most companies' timid, tepid marketing efforts that have turned consumers off (or never turned them on). But in the business world, green seems alive and well. There's green building of course, as mainstream an industry as any. And the field of green business seems anything but tired or passé. Indeed, it is growing rapidly, far more so than most people realize. And while some companies refer to their efforts as "citizenship," "responsibility," or, yes, "sustainability," I've yet to see any executives shudder when someone refers to their company or activities using green as an adjective to modify their activities or products. Many use it themselves.

The conversation about green versus sustainability is one that takes place regularly within the walls of my own company — which, after all, produces GreenBiz.com, the State of Green Business report, the Green Confidence Index, and many other things using the "G"-word. We debate whether that word is too limiting for our ever-growing constellation of products and services (including a forthcoming sustainability standard for business, the majority of whose attributes are non-environmental). Should we be branding ourselves more around sustainable business?

Or maybe, as I've suggested, the definition of "green" should be broadened to include nonenvironmental matters. That's been the case in politics, in both the U.S. and Europe, where "green" includes labor issues, social justice, health care, immigration, financial reform, and a host of other issues, including environmental ones. Could the same happen in business and the consumer marketplace? Could green come to mean a broader set of issues?

Creating and defining memes is hard stuff. A couple years ago, my friend and colleague Adam Werbach, now head of sustainability at Saatchi & Saatchi, made a run at shifting the color palette, with a speech and subsequent writing about "The Birth of Blue" — the emergence of a "post-green, consumer-led movement that aggregates the power of both marketers and consumers as catalysts for social change."

It was a noble attempt to broaden the conversation beyond the environment to include the social aspects of social change — that is, what many people refer to as "sustainability." But I haven't heard many people talking lately about blue.

That leaves me where I started: What should we call those who believe in the importance of addressing the full spectrum of environmental and social issues in transforming companies, consumers, and markets? Are we "sustainabilists," "sustainers," or something else?

And I repeat my original question: "What do you call someone committed to sustainability?" I'd really like your thoughts. Seriously.

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Walmart and the Sustainability Index: One Year Later

It’s been exactly a year since Walmart’s historic launch of a Sustainability Index and other measures to assess suppliers and products and, remarkably, the sun still rises in the East and sets in the West.

As I stated in my analysis that day — July 16, 2009 — “there is both more and less going on here than meets the eye.” One year later, I’m sticking to that story.

A brief review: Last summer, Walmart announced that it would assess its suppliers on environmental and social criteria. It announced a Sustainable Product Index to “establish a single source of data for evaluating the sustainability of products,” the company said.

Walmart said it would introduce the initiative in three phases, beginning with a survey of its more than 100,000 suppliers around the world. The survey includes 15 questions that “serve as a tool for Walmart’s suppliers to evaluate their own sustainability efforts.”

Second, Walmart helped launch the Sustainability Consortium, a group of universities “that will collaborate with suppliers, retailers, NGOs and government to develop a global database of information on the lifecycle of products — from raw materials to disposal.” Walmart provided the initial funding and invited others to join in.

Finally, Walmart said it hopes to translate the Consortium’s data into a simple rating for consumers about the sustainability of products — the ultimate dream of green-minded shoppers.

It was, as my colleague Marc Gunther described it at the time, “an ambitious, comprehensive, and fiendishly complex plan to measure the sustainability of every product it sells.”

So, where are we today?

Green Dreams Die Hard

Walmart’s sustainability dreams don’t appear to have diminished, though I’m pretty sure the company has been humbled by the fiendish complexity of it all. Having watched this unfold and having spoken with those inside Walmart, the Consortium, and several of its major suppliers, it seems clear that the reality of a comprehensive and simple rating of products and companies remains elusive.

But that’s not the sum total of the story.

First, the good news. Walmart has fundamentally changed the conversation about products and sustainability in general, and about the environmental impacts of supply chains in particular. It has shifted the notion of green consumerism from the margins to the mainstream — from a relatively elite group of upscale shoppers to the mass market that Walmart serves. The mission of the Consortium — to “work collaboratively to build a scientific foundation that drives innovation to improve consumer product sustainability through all stages of a product's life cycle” — has revived the science of life-cycle analysis, or LCA, the process of assessing and measuring products’ cradle-to-grave impacts. LCA, which has been around for nearly half a century, has enjoyed a renaissance that can be traced to the launch of the Consortium, which views LCA and its variants as principal tools of its trade.

Similarly, Walmart’s move has enlivened the conversation around supply-chain environmental management, the practice of pressing manufacturers to reduce the waste, toxicity, and resource intensity of their products — in effect, to ship fewer environmental problems to their customers. There’s not a single business conference, green or otherwise, I’ve attended or spoken at over the past year in which Walmart hasn’t been a topic of conversation, whether on stage or in the hallways. Walmart is by no means the first or only company to press suppliers to reduce their environmental impacts, but its aggressive, highly visible efforts have gotten the attention of companies and sectors that thought they might somehow be unaffected.

But, as I said, the complexity of assessing companies and products has befuddled Walmart and the Consortium, and has engendered resistance and pushback by some leading suppliers, even a few of the roughly 50 members that have joined the Consortium. Simply put, the reality isn’t living up to the launch-day hype.

The Fate of the Fifteen Questions

Let’s start with assessing companies. The 15 questions that comprise Walmart’s Supplier Sustainability Assessment Tool were superficial at best, voluntary in nature, and the answers are largely yes-or-no, self-reported, and unverified. (“Responses to this questionnaire will be accepted in good faith, relying on the integrity of the supplier,” the company stated in an FAQ [download - PDF]. “Violation of that good faith will be considered very serious by Walmart.”)

What, exactly, is happening to the submitted answers? Not much, so far as I can tell. Walmart says it is using the answers to better understand suppliers, but it is not creating ratings, rankings, or other comparative measures, even for internal use. To my knowledge, not a single supplier has been dropped because of its answers, or lack thereof, to the questionnaire. There is no evidence that supplier responses have led any of Walmart’s buyers to alter their purchasing practices. Whatever Walmart is doing with the information submitted by suppliers, it is doing privately. For all of Walmart’s stated intentions about “helping create a more transparent supply chain,” any assessment of company performance it has done to date has been inside a black box.

The product-level scrutiny has been equally slow-going. Predictably, there’s a certain amount of jockeying going on by members to ensure their interests are being addressed — for example, that the metrics used to judge products favor their companies. There’s a sense of frustration among some members that the Consortium, run by academics from the University of Arkansas and Arizona State University, lacks the management skills to herd all of the corporate cats.

To be sure, the Consortium began its life with seemingly unfathomable marching orders: to create a means for determining which of the hundreds of thousands of products Walmart and other retailers sell are green — or at least greener. Since Walmart sells just about every conceivable product short of replacement human organs and body parts (so far as I know), this is a man-on-the-moon-caliber undertaking.

The Consortium's Ambitions

This is not to say that the Consortium isn’t engaged (though I truly wish its online news page contained more than superficial press releases announcing the companies that have joined). The group has an ambitious agenda, and has created a series of working groups that aim to create a common set of Sustainability Measurement and Reporting Standards for various sectors and product categories. It also plans to develop an online “Sustainability Information Hub” containing a library of such standards, as well as “baseline models, sustainability performance drivers, database resources, use phase and end-of-life scenarios” and other information supporting the Consortium’s activities. And it is developing an “IT backbone” — online tools that will let companies create “a federated set of data pools and standards used to securely exchange static company specific product information between organizations in supply chains.” Some of these are slated to roll out this fall. All of these are intended to build much-needed capacity.

On its website, the Consortium states that its purpose is to convene key stakeholders, research products’ life-cycle impacts, identify “key improvement opportunities,” identify gaps in data about products’ impacts, and model and promote “new technologies and consumer behavior.”

Note the absence of anything here about a Sustainability Index. The Consortium clearly states: “We are not developing an index,” adding: “While the outputs of our efforts could be used by others to develop an index, it is not the intent of the Consortium to develop one.”

So, where is the Sustainability Index? It doesn’t seem to be on anyone's agenda. So much for the breathless hype last summer about how Walmart would transform the marketplace. As one blogger put it at the time:

The program could, essentially, force ungreen products off the market before a label even has a chance to discourage a consumer from buying it — if Wal-Mart continues to be inclined to support products with lower environmental impacts.

That's not in the works — or, if it is, no one is talking about it.

Finally, it’s important to point out that the word “sustainability” in Walmart’s and the Consortium’s work is a misnomer, in that this remains largely an environmental exercise, with little heed paid to sustainability’s social aspects. True, both organizations give lip service to things like employee working conditions, human rights, and community impacts, but little of this is being manifest in these organizations’ work. It's pretty much a green thing.

I’ll conclude where I started a year ago: This is both more and less than meets the eye. Walmart continues to deserve credit for its commitment and audacious goals, and for the ripples it has created. And, to be fair, no one expected miracles in just twelve months.

But Walmart and its suppliers and partners have unwittingly demonstrated how hard all of this is — that even the world’s biggest retailer has a limited set of tools when it comes to moving the marketplace towards greener goods, more responsible suppliers, and more conscientious customers.

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Shanghai: A City of Two Tales

I'm writing this en route home from Shanghai, where I've spent most of the past week touring, visiting, meeting, and experiencing this Asian megacity for the first time. The occasion was Expo 2010, the world's fair situated on both sides of the Huangpu River, which runs through the center of China's largest city.

I came to Shanghai primarily for the opening of an art installation, "The Nature of Cities," on cities and biodiversity, at the Expo's United Nations pavilion. The theme of the exhibition — created and produced by Art Works for Change, the nonprofit group founded and headed by my wife, Randy Rosenberg — reflected the theme of the Expo itself: "Better City — Better Life."

That "better cities" theme pervaded the pavilions representing nearly 200 countries, plus dozens more organizations and corporations that are exhibiting here. And it aimed to signify Shanghai's emerging status in the 21st century as the "next great world city" — at least by Shanghai's own reckoning. Shanghai, like most big cities in both developed and developing economies, is a study in contrasts: on the one hand, world-class shopping, fine dining, and some of the planet's most impressive buildings; on the other, choking pollution, gridlocked traffic, and a struggling underclass. A rich and tortured history; a promising but uncertain future.

For two days, amid some of the hottest temperatures Shanghai had seen in 50 years, we toured the Expo, at times standing in long lines. The story each national pavilion told was predictable: "We're a proud people with deep traditions and care for the land that is our home. We support progress and a clean environment. We have great hope for our children. Here are a few of the things we're good at. Come visit us! Come buy our stuff!"

But not the USA pavilion, which stood out among the others, less for its design than its content: Its primary purpose was to showcase the companies that sponsored the building, a roll call of American capitalism: Alcoa, Boeing, Caterpillar, Chevron, Citi, Corning, Dell, Dow, Dupont, Fedex, GE, Goodyear, Honeywell, Intel, KFC, Marriott, Microsoft, Pepsi, Pfizer, Pizza Hut, Procter & Gamble, Visa, Walmart, and more than a dozen others.

The message, as best I heard it: "We innovate to bring great ideas to the world! We build brands that the world wants! We create opportunity! Come visit us! Come buy our stuff!"

But it wasn't the country pavilions that most interested me. On my second day at the Expo, I made a beeline for the corporate pavilions, a smaller group of grandiose buildings across the river from the Expo's main crowds. It was here I found two competing tales of our energy and transportation future.

Up first: the General Motors Pavilion — actually the SAIC-GM Pavilion, reflecting GM's partnership with the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation. The pavilion's theme: "Drive to 2030," an engaging and highly optimistic tale of where transportation can take us within the next two decades, with an emphasis on China's vehicular future. That future, says GM, is one

in which driving will be free from emissions, accidents, petroleum, and congestion. It is a future in which driving will also be more enjoyable and fashionable than ever before.

The keys to this Utopian vision are electrification and connectivity — a technological mash-up of vehicles, energy, and information, where vehicles — from traditional cars, buses, and trucks to a new generation of cool "personal urban mobility" vehicles called the EN-V (pronounced "envy") — zip along at a decent clip, kept collision-free thanks to next-gen technologies GM is developing or integrating into vehicles — or at least plans to. Oh, and the sky is always blue.

I found the vision compelling and hopeful: a car maker that gets that the future is not just about cars and trucks, or even buses and trains — but about mobility: getting where you need to go, when you need to do it, in the least taxing (personally, economically, societally, environmentally) way possible. And maybe even tap into some cool, fashionable technology along the way.

(I'll admit to a little bias: GM is a client of GreenOrder, the strategy and management consultancy with which I am affiliated. But I would have been equally laudatory of any car company that promoted such a sustainable mobility vision. GM, as it turns out, was the only car company hosting a pavilion in Shanghai.)

You might respond, "Great. Nice vision. But when will we actually see it?" After all, we've been tantalized before at world's fairs with cool tech that never came to pass. (Picturephones, anyone?) And GM's track record for delivering on change isn't that great.

"This has become very strategic to GM," David Tulauskas, GM's head of public policy in China, told me over lunch at the pavilion. He cited the growing number of places like London and Singapore that are using congestion pricing; additional cities are creating "back office" traffic management technology platforms to manage vehicle congestion. He described the emergence of Dedicated Short Range Communications standards that can keep adjacent vehicles from colliding in order to utilize roadways more efficiently ("kind of like schools of fish that never run into each other," he explains). He explained how the expansion of GM's OnStar telematics technology could provide a range of consumer-friendly services. Tulauskas also pointed out that the "new" GM has taken a more aggressive stance on innovation, such as the venture fund it recently launched to develop and invest in advanced technologies, and a more robust long-range planning process being undertaken by GM that is approaching business development from a mobility perspective, and looking more frequently outside the company for technology solutions, a far cry from the inward-looking pre-bankruptcy GM.

Of course, it's all just talk and cool prototypes. But I walked away with the sense that this old-line company has a bead on where the future is headed, and wants to be in the driver's seat, so to speak, as that future comes into view.

That was not the case at the second corporate pavilion I visited, the Oil Pavilion, presented by three of China's largest petroleum companies, though it might as well have been sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute.

There was a decidedly old-world vision offered here — a propaganda machine spewing bromides about the wonders of petroleum in our world and how much we rely on it daily. Fortune-cookie-like reminders were everywhere you looked: "Convenient traffic conditions/70% are contributed by oil," read one. "One needs 551 kg of oil for food in lifetime," read another. (I'm guessing they weren't referring to this line of petrochemicals.)

The heart of the Oil Pavilion was an impressive 4-D movie (the fourth dimension is sensation: you "experience" snakes, flies, wind, ocean spray, and more). But its central message was decidedly one-dimensional: Oil is a critical part of everything we do, and it isn't going away, so learn to love it. Even when there is mention of the need for a "low-carbon economy," it quickly and curiously follows that "oil and gas will remain predominantly." Unlike GM's forward-looking message, this industry's viewed tomorrow as a carbon-copy of today — stay the course! — hardly a hopeful vision. Suffice to say that amid the petro-carnage in the Gulf of Mexico, not to mention the Persian Gulf, the core message of the Oil Pavilion seemed to have run out of gas.

And so went the Expo's two tales. Both anticipate a growing global population of urban dwellers seeking the good life, a life that demands mobility, not to mention food and shelter and fun. Both anticipate the challenges ahead of making cities that work, ensuring they aren't paralyzed by polluted air and congested roads, but which offer ways to get where people want to go.

But only one of those is a city I hope to see. The other is a city to dread.

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