The 2008 Shareholder Season
Some of the most important voting of the year doesn't involve candidates or political parties. It's taking place between shareholders and the companies they own.
It has become an annual rite of spring: a bumper crop of shareholder resolutions filed by activist investors aimed at compelling companies to address any of a wide range of social and environmental issues. This year is no different.
A new report on the 2008 season — the majority of companies hold their annual meetings in the spring — has been published by As You Sow (Free download). And while its intended audience are foundations, whose endowments typically include large stock holdings, the report offers insight for anyone interested at the state of the art of shareholder activism.
First, some background. Shareholders file all sorts of proxy proposals at annual meetings. Many have to do with corporate governance — such issues as selection of directors, appointment of auditors, and approving company stock plans. There are also social proxy proposal, frequently introduced at annual meetings by activist pension funds, especially those representing public employees and schoolteachers; universities (remember how schools divested investments in companies doing business in South Africa during Apartheid?), labor unions, foundations, and large faith-based institutional investors (what I lovingly refer to as "Little Sisters of the Immaculate Investment").
Over the past decade of so, shareholder proposals from such organizations have grown, from just over 200 in 1999 to 368 last year, according to As You Sow's "Proxy Season Preview." Environmental topics have historically accounted for the largest category of social proposals filed, covering such issues as greenhouse gas emissions, recycling, water, forestry, genetically engineered food, nuclear waste, oil production, protected lands, and environmental justice.
Many of these proposals never come up for a vote, but that's part of the process, As You Sow explains.
The goal of shareholder advocates is to change a company's practice or policy. Most shareholders prefer to do this through a "good faith" dialogue with the company. Shareholders file proposals if a dialogue is not going well or the company is unresponsive. Filing a proposal can often bring the issue to the company's attention and lead to a dialogue or change in policy or practice, in which case a proposal is no longer warranted and ultimately withdrawn.
Even when votes are held, success doesn't always require a majority vote. While most social and environmental proposals receive votes in the single digits, a significant number have received 20% to 50% in the last few years. "These votes are comparable to or better than traditional governance proposals and serve as further evidence that social, environmental, and reputational risks are being viewed as legitimate concerns in their own right by mainstream investors," says the report.
Because of this, proposals tend to be repeated year after year, largely in hopes of garnering bigger and bigger support. Indeed, says As You Sow, many of last year's top issues will dominate this year's crop of proposals, though 2008 will also see a slew of new proposals and shareholder campaigns. Major issues include global warming (50+ proposals covering climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, energy, and related issues), sustainability (35+ proposals), and animal welfare (25+ proposals).
One topic entering the picture is "toxic TVs." On February 19, 2009, all television signals in the U.S. will convert to digital broadcast, rendering millions of analog TVs obsolete. This so-called Digital Deadline is likely the largest government-mandated planned obsolescence in U.S. history. Tens of millions of TVs are expected to be discarded as consumers purchase new digital sets rather than obtain a low-cost converter which will allow current sets to function. Absent a responsible recycling system, this flood of TVs will add to the growing electronic-waste stream, much of which is sent to unsafe overseas recycling facilities. As You Sow filed a proposal at Best Buy asking the company to study the feasibility of using its stores as a take-back venue for e-waste and to give special consideration to have infrastructure in place for the digital switchover next year.
If nothing else, the "Proxy Season Review" is a good primer on environmental topics companies are being asked, or forced, to confront. Historically, a handful of leadership companies break ranks with their corporate brethren, taking a bold stance on a topic that has become a sore spot with investors and activists.
What topics and companies will be the talk of the 2008 proxy season? What will be the next domino to fall?
We should all take stock.
April 28, 2008 in Money Matters, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (3)
GreenBiz and GreenYour: Something Old, Something New
Something old is new again. GreenBiz.com, of which I am executive editor, has just relaunched with a new, improved format. The new site — the result of a revamping of the somewhat antiquated technology platform on which the site was originally built in 1999 — now reflects the topics you deal with daily: energy and climate; the various aspects of daily operations, from purchasing to cleaning to fleets; the design of products and packaging; the more efficient use of energy, water, and materials; and the way you communicate all of this through marketing, PR, and reporting. There are also sections for smaller businesses and on green careers.
Kudos to the team, headed by Matt Wheeland and Carlie Peterson, for making it all happen.
The new look represents the beginning of a forthcoming wave of new products and other enhancements we'll be making in coming months. Look for new newsletters and sites, and a few surprises.
And while we're on the topic of GreenBiz, please check out Greener by Design, our forthcoming conference on the mainstreaming of green product design at both big companies (Clorox, Dupont, GE, GM, IBM, Nike, Procter & Gamble, Wal-Mart, Xerox, and others) and smaller ones (Method cleaning products, TerraCycle garden products), as well as insight into how green innovation happens inside big organizations. There will also be some features that are not your usual conference fare — such as Green Gurus @ Play, during which conference participants will engage in small consulting sessions with select speakers and panelists (on a first-come, first-served basis); Innovative Flashes; and other experiential opportunities that get past conventional talking heads.
(Also, per my style: almost no speeches or presentations — rather, conversations facilitated by pro's, such as Marc Gunther of Fortune.)
Registrations are rolling in nicely, and the event — June 12 and 13 — is likely to sell out. Don't say you weren't warned.
Meanwhile, my colleagues at GreenOrder have launched a new site that offers a world of green possibilities. GreenYour.com is a smart and information-packed site offering tips and products on the greening of just about everything.
The site features more than a dozen categories of topics — appliances, personal care, energy use, lawn and garden, clothing, car, food and drink, travel, etc. Each category drills down further into subcategories and sub-subcategories — for example, under "Office and School" there are business operations (building, business travel, career, company values, lighting, mail, staff commuting) and office supplies and equipment (batteries, cell phone, computer, copier, copy paper, mobile device, printer).
Under each are clearly written tips, fact, and products. If you register (free), you can register your own tips, products, and resources — the wisdom of crowds.
It's a work in progress, but off to a promising start. For all of the hundreds (thousands?) of consumer-facing websites out there, no one offers such clear, no-nonsense, and accessible information on life's basics. The fact that experts can add their own two cents will no doubt make the site richer and richer over time.
As they say, none of us knows as much as all of us.
April 28, 2008 in Green Marketing, State of the Art, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (2)
Earth Day, Green Marketing, and the Polling of America, 2008
It's time for my (second) annual survey of surveys — the bounty of public opinion polls on green topics that seems to sprout every spring in time for Earth Day. A half-dozen or so years ago, there were perhaps a couple such surveys. Today, there are more than a dozen, ranging from substantive to silly to self-serving.
All told, they paint a portrait that hasn't changed much over the past twenty years: The public wants to buy green products and support good companies. Of course, what this means — and how to define both "green" and "good" — is where the devil meets the eco-details.
But there's something slightly different about this year's bumper crop of data. A shred of realism seems to be creeping into the mix. Whereas such polls traditionally were pretty enthusiastic, a few now acknowledge that the green marketplace is no bed of organic roses, thanks in large part to consumers' lack of understanding of key environmental issues, and their innate distrust of companies' green proclamations.
The overly enthusiastic tone of some polls is understandable, once you scratch the surface. Market researchers proffer tantalizing sketches of the various eco-minded personalities, hoping to entice corporate clients to pay the big bucks for more in-depth and customized data. And then there are the fairly blatant self-serving surveys. A provider of videoconferencing technologies reports that a significant number of workers would prefer to participate in an important meeting by phone or web conference! Well, of course.
So, what did this year's surveys reveal? Here are highlights:
- Almost four in 10 Americans are preferentially buying products they believe to be environmentally friendly, though almost half (48%) erroneously believes such products are beneficial for the planet, as opposed to simply being less harmful, according to the 2008 Green Gap Survey from Cone LLC and the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship. It also found that Americans are pretty open to companies' green messages: 47% trust companies to tell them the truth in environmental messaging; 45% believe companies are accurately communicating information about their impact on the environment; and 61% say they understand the environmental terms companies use in their advertising.
- Gallup's annual environment poll found that 28% of Americans say they have made "major changes" in their lifestyles to protect the environment. Forty percent say they worry "a great deal" about "the quality of the environment," ranking far below the 60% who worry about the economy and the 58% who worry about the availability and affordability of healthcare.
- Almost 200 million Americans buy green products, reports the market research firm Mintel, which also found that the number of new products with an environmentally friendly claim has grown substantially over the past five years — from five such product launches in 200 to "a staggering" 328 in 2007. "Price, perceived value and convenience drive these purchases as more and more people take on a green lifestyle," the company reports. "Thanks to manufacturers' recent moves, consumers can now find more choices of environmentally friendly products than ever before." (Mintel doesn't put these 328 new green products into perspective, one of my pet peeves. So I will: There are about 20,000 new product introductions a year in just the food and beverage category.) Another Mintel study reported that "over one-third of adults (36%) claim to 'regularly' buy green products," triple the number 16 months ago.
- Consumer recall of advertising with green messaging is very high, with more than a third (37%) of consumers saying they frequently recall green messaging and an additional third recalling it occasionally (33%), according to Burst Media. (Again, some perspective would be helpful here: How does 37% compare with overall add ad recall?) One in five (23%) respondents say they seldom or never believe green claims made in advertisements. Two-thirds (65%) of respondents say they "sometimes" believe green claims made in advertisements, and 12% say they "always" believe green advertising claims. More than 40% of consumers frequently or occasionally research the claims made in green advertisements.
- Consumers expect to see significant company commitments to environmental leadership before they buy the green marketing hype, according to marketing firm EcoAlign. Seventy-seven percent of consumers think that an operational commitment to energy efficiency or green energy is the single most important quality of a corporation trying to be an environmental leader. When respondents asked which of 12 major companies they thought were most committed to using or providing renewable energy. GE dominated with 81%, while Toyota came in second at 65%. However, 54% of consumers had difficulty naming any company that supplied renewable or green energy. GE and BP received the most mentions, but only represented 4% to 5% of responses. (In reality, neither firm supplies much if any green energy, though both manufacture solar panels and GE manufactures wind turbines; BP has a tiny renewable energy division, representing less than 1% of its total revenue.)
- One in ten Americans say that they have looked up their personal or household's carbon footprint, according to Harris Interactive. Younger Americans are more likely to have done so. Almost one in five (18%) Echo Boomers (aged 18-31) say they have looked up their carbon footprint, compared to 11% of Gen Xers (aged 32-43), 9% of Baby Boomers (aged 44-62), and 6% of Matures (63 and older). Regardless of whether they are calculating their carbon footprint, Americans claim that they are doing things that will reduce it and their carbon emissions. Almost two-thirds say they may have reduced the amount of energy they use in their home, 43% have purchased more energy-efficient appliances, 27% they have started purchasing more locally grown food, and 21% have stopped drinking bottled water.
- Only 3% of consumers "always" buy green products and 66% said that they "sometimes" purchase them, according to the Shopper Environmental Sentiment survey from corporate real estate giant Jones Lang LaSalle. The survey was taken across 34 Jones Lang LaSalle-managed shopping malls. Around 40% said that they were willing to "do what it takes" to protect and improve the environment, and more than half always recycle at home. Almost two thirds of respondents were interested in learning more about simple ways to save energy.
It's a mixed bag of data, to be sure — and more than a little bewildering. Are consumers really making "major changes" in their lifestyles and purchases, as Gallup reports? Are individuals' carbon footprint numbers on their way to becoming as ubiquitous as cholesterol numbers, as Harris suggests? Are we making more environmentally conscious purchase decisions, as Cone and others report? Will four in ten consumers really "do what it takes" to solve our environmental problems, as Jones Lang LaSalle found? As I have stated so many other times (see here, here, here, and here), I'm a tad skeptical.
One thing is clear: The din is growing. A Nielsen BuzzMetrics report, Sustainability through the Eyes and Megaphones of the Blogosphere, found that the "buzz around sustainability" grew 50% last year. Given the dozens of new books, TV specials, Earth Day events, and green advertising campaigns abounding this April — with more of all of these to come — it's safe to say that the buzz will continue for a while.
The question, as always, is whether (or when) the frenzy will yield to fatigue.
April 20, 2008 in Green Marketing, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (9)
A Deeper Dive into the Business of Water
Water hasn't yet risen to the level of energy and climate as a pressing issue for most companies, but the conversation seems to be flowing lately. And that conversation includes two concepts likely to enter the green lexicon.
One of those, "virtual water," received currency last month when its foremost proponent, Professor John Anthony Allan from King's College London and the School of Oriental and African Studies, was given the 2008 Stockholm Water Prize. Allen coined the term back in 1993 to refer to the amount of water embedded in the production and trade of food and consumer products. A cup of coffee, for instance has 140 liters (about 37 gallons) of virtual water, when you consider the amount of water used to grow, produce, package, and ship the beans. Similarly, a hamburger contains 2,400 liters (634 gallons) of virtual water.
The concept of virtual water (also known as embedded or embodied water) is of more than academic interest. As water concerns flood a greater number of regions, the embedded water of common products provides a useful understanding of how water resources are impacted by global trade. For example, it explains how and why nations such as the U.S., Argentina, and Brazil "export" billions of gallons of water each year — in the form, say, of water-intensive grain or meat — while others like Japan, Egypt, and Italy "import" billions.
The concept also could be useful in national agriculture policy, much as "embedded energy" has aided policy makers' understanding that growing and processing corn to produce biofuels can require significantly more energy than the process yields. (Not that this knowledge has dissuaded policymakers from supporting energy-intensive biofuels, of course.) And it may become a factor in the price of many raw materials, should carbon taxes or trading systems illuminate the energy and carbon intensity of things like aluminum, glass, and plastic.
There are other implications. Virtual water calculations will, no doubt, lead companies, individuals, and others to calculate their "water footprint," the full measure of the water embedded in the products they buy and the activities in which they engage. And it may accelerate interest in what Peter Gleick, co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute, calls the "soft path," a much more integrated, sophisticated approach to water in which different types of water — potable water, gray water, brown water, etc. — are used for their highest and best use, rather than using potable water — the highest quality, for flushing toilets, watering lawns, etc.
Last year, in an interview, Gleick expressed to me how little companies understand the water embedded in their systems.
There are very poorly understood or appreciated connections between business and water. Every business uses water in one form or another. Some use a lot of water, some not so much, but for many businesses, water is a surprisingly large component of production, either directly or indirectly, in the supply chain. So, for example, the beverage industry may use three or four gallons of water to produce a gallon of soft drink or beer or milk, but often a thousand times as much water is used in the upstream part of the process, perhaps to grow the sugar that goes into a soft drink. Similarly, in the textile industry, it takes water to make clothing but it takes a lot of water to grow fiber.
Businesses are often unpleasantly surprised where a local community objects to their use of water or there's a drought that affects their supply chain or there's a water contamination problem that results in their license to operate being removed. We're seeing more and more examples where businesses that don't pay attention to the water required to run their business run into unpleasant surprises.
Gleick went on: "I actually think the risk to companies is larger in some ways for water than it is for energy. There are substitutes for energy. You can replace oil or electricity with biofuels or with renewables. Water has no substitutes."
Coca-Cola recognizes that. And over the years, it has bumped up against activists, communities, and others for its water use — which is, of course, the fundamental ingredient of all of its beverages. In recent years, a series of developments pressed the need for a more comprehensive global water strategy. In the late 1990s, it began acquiring water brands (its principal U.S. offering is Dasani). In 2002, the company faced protests in India about the company's drawing down of groundwater resources. A year later, it began reporting water quality and quantity as a material risk to its business in its U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Form 10-K for investors.
In response to this Coca-Cola "developed and continues to evolve one of the more sophisticated water stewardship programs in the private sector," according to a new report from Business for Social Responsibility (Download — PDF). "As of March 2008, no other organization in the world has publicly pledged to achieve "water neutrality" across global operations that span more than 100 basins and sub-basins around the world."
Water neutrality. It's a compelling idea in the age of carbon-neutral and zero-waste commitments. But water is a bit different from carbon and waste: unlike the other two, there's a finite amount of water. And as Gleick points out, there's no known substitute for it. Moreover, as BSR points out:
True sustainability as it relates to water will involve more than "neutralizing" the volume of water that [Coca-Cola] uses. This is because fluctuations in the amount and quality of water available to a given community or ecosystem play an important role in sustaining the diversity and proper functioning of river ecosystems and watersheds.
Coke announced its water-neutral goal last summer. The company committed to "set specific water efficiency targets for global operations by 2008 to be the most efficient user of water among peer companies" and that by 2010 it would "return all the water that we use for manufacturing processes to the environment at a level that supports aquatic life and agriculture."
Coke will need to work hard to keep its goal afloat. The BSR report notes that last year, six organizations — Twente University, WWF, Coca-Cola, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Water Neutral/Emvelo Group, and UNESCO-IHE — came together to investigate the benefits of water neutrality as a meaningful milestone. The groups developed three criteria for legitimate use of the term:
- Defining, measuring, and reporting one's "water footprint";
- Taking all action that is "reasonably possible" to reduce the existing operational water footprint;
- Reconciling the residual water footprint (amount remaining after a company does as much as possible to reduce footprint) by making a "reasonable investment" in establishing or supporting projects that focus on the sustainable and equitable use of water.
There are more than a few squishy issues here — the definitions of "reasonable investment" and "reasonably possible," for starters. But we've got to start somewhere. Over time, I hope, the bar will rise.
Can it work? Will "water neutral" become the Next Big Thing in the field of corporate resource efficiency? Can it actually make a difference? It's a nascent idea, so it remains to be seen. But the high likelihood of continued water crises suggests that more and more companies will be learning about "virtual water" and "water neutrality."
For now I'm guessing that only a handful of companies — those whose products and reputation are most linked to the precious resource — will be willing to take the plunge.
April 3, 2008 in Business Practices, State of the Art, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (10)
The Death and Rebirth of "50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth"
50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth is back in print, updated for the 21st century.
If that doesn't send a mild shiver down your spine, then you are under 25 years old.
If you somehow didn't catch the early 1990s, 50 Simple Things, published a few months in advance of Earth Day 1990, was a cultural phenomenon. It caught a wave of interest — notably, media interest — in all things green, which propelled the book's sales to cult-like status. The book sold 5 million copies in all, about a third in one of the 20-odd languages in which it eventually appeared.
The principal author and publisher, John Javna — who the first time around hid behind the anonymity of "The EarthWorks Group," basically himself and some helpers — eventually got discouraged and cynical about the book's impact. By the mid 1990s, he had taken the book out of print and took his family, and his newfound wealth, to rural Oregon, where he's been ever since.
I first met Javna in 1988, when green books were just a glimmer in both of our eyes. By 1990, we were both working on our respective tomes — his 50 Simple Things and my book The Green Consumer. I distinctly recall him sitting in my office in early 1990, explaining how his book would succeed because it would be "first, cheap, and simple." And it did. His book was a blockbuster; mine was merely a bestseller. (In 1992 I penned one of the books in the series, 50 Simple Things Your Business Can Do to Save the Earth, which was attributed to, and published by, the EarthWorks group.)
In the wake of the original 50 Simple Things, Javna began to understand that his "first, cheap, and simple" book may have had an unintended consequence: While it made environmentalism more accessible to the masses, it may have lulled readers into thinking that snipping six-pack rings or choosing paper over plastic was all they needed to do to address pressing issues like climate change, water and air pollution, and the squandering of natural resources.
"I had this sense that the simple things that we talked about in the book were not the way to go," Javna told me recently. "I just thought, this is not solving problems, and in some ways it's even creating problems because people think that they're addressing an issue in a deep way when they're just skimming the surface. You could say that that book was a mile wide and an inch deep.
It turned out that there weren't 50 simple things we can do to save the earth — just a half-dozen or so rather difficult ones.
Eighteen years later, the book is back. It looks pretty much the same — Javna recycled quite nicely the look and feel — but the concept is different. The new edition of 50 Simple Things was written by Javna along with his two kids, 18-year-old Jesse and 14-year-old Sophie. Indeed, it was Sophie who inadvertently inspired the project. "After the green-washing and stuff in the '90s, people just sort of wandered away and lost interest and went back to buying their gas-guzzling cars and not voting for the environment at all. And it just became a sub-issue, even though the environment itself was getting worse and worse.
"For years I thought about it — what would be a way to engage people in a simple way? People did buy and use the book, and a lot of people were pretty encouraged by it, and so I thought, 'What's a way to engage them in a way that really would make a difference?'"
"Then Sophie asked me, 'Why don't we compost anymore? And I started to give her my real answer — you know, about how you can recycle all you want. It's not going to take the mercury out of the air, so don't bother.
"And I just sort of stopped myself, and I thought, 'This is crazy because she is in fact the future generation I was talking about when I was talking about 'Let's try to protect the planet' in 1990. And I had really turned my back on her, on the effort to protect her. So I made the decision that I really couldn't afford to be cynical — not if I love my children. I decided that probably the most powerful thing I could do was find a way of engaging people in environmental actions through a new version of 50 Simple Things, but in a way that really mattered.
In this new edition, each of the "things" is an entire issue chosen and developed by an environmental group — 50 in all, from the Alliance to Save Energy to the Wilderness Society. Both large and small groups are represented — the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense, but also Green for All and As You Sow. Each of the "things" has its own page on the book's website (slated to go live on April 1), with additional information and resources.
The book in some ways raises its sights by asking readers to lower theirs. Javna's hope is that everyone who reads the book will do at least one of the "things." Says Javna: "A simple thing is a commitment to an issue. The book says pick one of these issues, not a whole lot of them. Pick one issue and commit yourself — an issue that fits in your life, an issue that feels comfortable to you — and then make that a part of your life. That can be your commitment to trying to change the shape of the world, to protect the life-support system of the planet."
It will be interesting to watch the book unfold anew. A lot has changed — but in some ways not much has. People are still looking for answers — and simple ones are pretty compelling.
Of course, Javna's book will have to compete with all the others — a recent issue of the book industry bible, Publishers Weekly, listed no fewer than 70 green books coming out this spring and summer, many advocating easy ways to live an eco-friendly lifestyle. They include at least one derivative title — Go Green, Live Rich: 50 Simple Ways to Save the Earth and Get Rich Trying as well as a spate of eco-fabulous titles: the Eco Chick Guide to Life; Green Chic: Saving the Earth in Style; Green, Greener, Greenest: A Practical Guide to Making Eco-Smart Choices a Part of Your Life; Green Is the New Black: How to Change the World with Style; and Gorgeously Green: 5 Simple Steps to an Earth-Friendly Life.
Oh, right: and Green Living for Dummies.
With this abundance of green-is-chic books, will it be enough to merely "save the earth"? We'll see.
March 23, 2008 in Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (7)
Where Are All the Clean, Green Jobs?
The promise of the green economy and the clean-tech revolution is that they will bring a new wave of job opportunities — productive and respectable jobs at every part of the economic spectrum, from line workers to senior managers. Nonprofit groups like the Apollo Alliance have made this part of their raison d'etre. A steady drumbeat of studies since the late 1990s has told us that burgeoning markets for solar, wind, clean transportation, and other technologies would represent the next big wave of job creation. Cities and states have been positioning to become clean-tech hubs, eyeing the workforce development potential. Organizations representing low-income populations have been viewing the green economy as an entry point for those near the bottom of the economic ladder.
So, now that clean technology and the greening of business seem to be in full swing, where are all the jobs? So far, they're nowhere in sight — at least not in any appreciable numbers.
The reasons are many and varied. Most of the big companies in the clean-energy business — the BPs, GE, and PG&E's of the world — don't seem to be going on hiring sprees, typically creating clean-tech business units from within. So, too, with much of the green business activity — it has to do with efficiency, with doing more with the same or fewer resources, and that includes human resources. Few of the start-ups are undergoing massive hiring, and when they do, they're more often in the market for engineers and other skilled professionals. And the jobs that are being created are disperse, geographically, meaning that there are few robust Silicon Valley-like clean-tech clusters, where companies congregate and jobs proliferate.
Despite such obstacles, there seems to be new energy building behind the notion of a Big Green Job Machine. Last week in Pittsburgh, for example, a Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference, organized by the Sierra Club and the United Steelworkers union, drew more than 900 people from business, government, nonprofits, academe, and labor unions to share strategies for increasing job opportunities in the environmental and clean-tech sectors.
There were about 8 million green jobs in the U.S. in industries that attracted $148 million in investment in 2007, up 60 percent from the year before, Lois Quam, managing director of alternative investments at Piper Jaffray, told the conference. I haven't yet seen the research on which this was based, but I'm intrigued. As I noted in our State of Green Business report, tracking green job creation has been difficult. One reason is that green jobs, at least by my definition, aren't often identified as such, and can be found throughout companies of all sizes and sectors. Does a procurement manager — whose job entails implementing her company's environmentally preferable procurement mandate, thereby seeking out and purchasing millions of dollars a year of recycled, energy-efficient, and other green products — count as a "green job"? What about the loading dock laborer whose job it is to make sure all packaging materials are recycled? Or the facility manager working to replace maintenance staples with green cleaning products? Are these counted among the "green jobs"? Possibly, but I doubt it.
Fact is, there's no good definition of "green job." Consider this report, released last week, by Raquel Rivera Pinderhughes, professor of urban studies at San Francisco State University. Titled Green Collar Jobs: An Analysis of the Capacity of Green Businesses to Provide High Quality Jobs for Men and Women with Barriers to Employment (Download - pdf), it focuses on opportunities in the San Francisco Bay Area. According to Pinderhughes,
Green collar jobs are blue collar jobs in green businesses — that is, manual labor jobs in businesses whose products and services directly improve environmental quality. . . . What unites these jobs is that all of them are associated with manual labor work that directly improves environmental quality.
Pinderhughes lists 22 types of green collar jobs, from food production (using organic and/or sustainably grown agricultural products) to furniture making (from environmentally certified and recycled wood), from parks and open space (maintenance and expansion) to printing (with non-toxic inks and dyes and recycled papers). It's a good list, but it doesn't seem to cover all that's out there.
Another report, Green-Collar Jobs in America's Cities (download - pdf), released for the Pittsburgh event, lays out steps for creating comprehensive green-collar job strategies at the local level. It also profiles some of the great work already underway around the country. The guide — published by Green For All, the Apollo Alliance, the Center for American Progress, and the Center on Wisconsin Strategy — focuses on local green jobs in clean energy industries: energy efficiency, renewable energy, alternative transportation, and low-carbon fuels.
Yet another new report, Greener Pathways, from the same consortium, profiles some of the best examples in the U.S. where work is underway to develop green jobs, including green construction career development in California, Iowa's biofuels job-training bonds, wind technician training in Oregon; and Pennsylvania's green re-industrialization.
It's all very encouraging, but it feels like there's one key group that's not yet at the table: companies. A look at the impressive speaker roster for the Pittsburgh event reveals only eight of 86 speakers from the private sector — and only three large companies: BP, Gamesa, and Johnson Controls.
Why aren't bigger companies more engaged? Do they not foresee a need for talent in this arena? Are their labor pools overflowing? Or are they simply not tuned in to the opportunity? Any ideas?
For now, groups like the Apollo Alliance and Green for All will have to go it alone, and they have their work cut out for them, helping to ensure, in the words of Green for All founder and president, Van Jones, that "the clean-tech wave lifts all boats." It won't be easy, especially without the active participation of companies in the clean and green sector.
As Jones told me recently: "The next set of challenges have to do with going from rhetoric to reality."
March 17, 2008 in Clean Tech, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (9)
Clean Energy Trends 2008
The latest annual edition of Clean Energy Trends has just been published. My colleagues and I at Clean Edge have identified five key trends affecting clean-energy markets and produced our annual forecast of markets for four clean-energy technologies. And, working with our partners at New Energy Finance, we've analyzed the investment trends of the past year.
As we point out in the free, downloadable report, 2007 was a very strong year for clean energy technologies, with no signs of a slowdown in 2008. That said, with all of the uncertainties facing the economy, there are some potential speed bumps. One of the biggest is whether and how U.S. policies will extend the production tax credits for wind and solar, both of which are expiring at the end of the year. If these credits aren't extended before they expire, we could see the growth of solar, wind, and other renewables come to a standstill in the U.S., much as markets for wind power did at the end of 2006, when those credits expired for several months. During that period, the wind market simply flatlined. According to research by Navigant Consulting, more than 100,000 jobs within the solar and wind industry are in jeopardy, if the same thing happens again.
The problem is that Congress, in its infinite wisdom, seems to have an appetite to extend tax credits for only two years. That's not long enough to do the long-term planning that any emerging industry needs to scale up.Critics of clean energy like to point out that without subsidies and regulation, clean-energy sources would never be getting a foothold in the market. But that misses an important and critical point: all energy technologies are subsidized - some to the tune of billions of dollars a year. What would happen to oil and gas prices if those industries had to do away with federal subsidies and tax credits (not to mention the costs of fighting wars in oil-rich countries).
The five trends we cover in this year's Trends report cover electric cars (how all of the action seems to be from smaller players, not the major automotive companies); sustainable cities (the emergence of new, fossil-fuel, carbon-neutral cities - in the Middle East, of all places); wind (how the U.S. market is being driven by foreign companies); geothermal energy (it is experiencing a global renaissance, particularly as large, utility-scale projects); and shipping (the new push to create cleaner oceangoing transport, including putting sails on freighters).
You can download the free report here.
March 11, 2008 in Clean Tech, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (0)
The State of Green Business, 2008
My colleagues and I at GreenBiz.com have just published State of Green Business 2008, an accounting for how, and how much, the greening of business is moving the needle on environmental issues.
The simple answer: not much — and certainly not enough.
I'd been thinking about this report for a good five years, but it was only last year that my team and I got to it. Probably a good thing: The state of data on business and the environment likely wouldn't have been sufficient in previous years to accomplish this.
The free, 64-page report includes the top green business stories of the year just passed — a lengthy piece I'd previously debuted in this blog (see here, for example). But the heart of the report is the GreenBiz Index, a set of 20 indicators of progress on the greening of business.
It began with a simple question: With all that's been going on in this arena — all of the things I write about here, and the 1,000 or so news stories we reported last year on GreenBiz.com, ClimateBiz.com, GreenerBuildings.com, and GreenerComputing.com — what was the actual impact? Was all this activity actually moving the needle on climate change? Was it reducing our use of energy, water, and materials? Was it making any difference?
We set out to find out.
It was extraordinarily difficult, one of the more challenging exercises I've been through. The quantity and quality of available data were wanting, to say the least. Some of the things we set out to measure weren't possible — for example, it turns out there's no current data on the use of water by business and industry in the United States, the focus of our inquiry. In other cases, we had to cobble together our own indices, such as piecing together the quantity of materials - cardboard, aluminum, steel, and glass - used for packaging.
But the effort was worth it. We believe that the GreenBiz Index represents the best accounting of business progress on the environment.
Of course, I'll look forward to your comments. We'll be updating this annually.
The report is free, downloadable here.
January 30, 2008 in Business Practices, State of the Art, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (6)
The Hottest Tickets for 2008
A new year, a new calendar of green and clean events. Mine is looking awfully busy, with new conferences and events joining old reliable ones.
This spring, three new events will be hot (and pricey) tickets. In chronological order:
- ECO:nomics — the Wall Street Journal's first-ever environmental event, March 12-14, in Santa Barbara, Calif. This is about as high-level as it gets, featuring CEOs Jeff Immelt of GE, Andrew Liveris of Dow, James Rogers of Duke, Lee Scott of Wal-Mart, and Patricia Woertz of ADM. Plus: John Doerr, Vinod Kholsa, Robert Lutz, Robert Reich, and Arnold Schwarznegger. Oh, and Ed Begley, Jr. Being the Journal, there will be a healthy representation from the neocon crowd, such as Fred Singer of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, no doubt talking about how all this corporate do-good stuff is a distraction from the business of making money; Junk Science author and Fox News columnist Steven Milloy; and Red Cavaney of the American Petroleum Institute. Clearly, the Journal doesn't want any riff-raff: There's a $3,495 registration fee — if you can score an invitation.
- Aspen Environment Forum — the premiere of the Aspen Institute's foray into the environmental world, March 26-30, in Aspen, Colo. The conference is an outgrowth of the Aspen Ideas Festival I've written about in the past. The emphasis here is on conversation over cachet, with four dozen or so thought leaders: NGO leaders like NRDC's Frances Beinecke, Earth Policy Institute's Lester Brown, Pew Center's Eileen Claussen, and the Rocky Mountain Institute's Amory Lovins; entrepreneurs like Energy Innovation's Andrew Beebe and New Resource Bank's Peter Liu; environmental justice advocates Majora Carter of Sustainable South Bronx and Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center; and an assortment of corporate types, journalists, scientists, and others. I'll be leading a session on corporate environmental strategies. Registration is $1,700, though discounts are available to "government and non-profit employees, international guests, and university faculty and students."
- Brainstorm: GREEN — Fortune magazine's entry, April 21-22, in Pasadena, Calif. Another invitation-only event, this one will focus, as its name implies, on interactive brainstorming. Organizer (and GreenBiz blogger) Marc Gunther, senior writer at Fortune covering corporate environmental and social responsibility, has brought together a diverse group of speakers, including CEOs (Dell's Michael Dell, Sam's Club's Doug McMillon, Dupont's Chad Holiday), NGO leaders (NRDC's Beinecke, US Green Building Council's Rick Fedrizzi, Ceres' Mindy Lubber), and assorted others from Autodesk, Conservation International, Goldman Sachs, GreenOrder, Herman Miller, Marriott, McDonald's, McKinsey, Union of Concerned Scientists, and more. As Gunther told me recently: "I'm hoping to get beyond the discussion of companies 'going green' to ask what impact they are having, and whether they are changing fast enough, given the scale of the problems." I'll on a panel titled "The Green Consumer: Myth or Reality," with Sam's Club's McMillon and Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm, moderated by Arianna Huffington. Admission is $2,000, but, like the Journal event, you've got to apply.
There are others. This year, being even-numbered, brings back the biennial GLOBE conference (March 12-14, in Vancouver), which brings together a vast audience of corporate and NGO types from Canada, Europe, and the U.S. This year's GLOBE features a piggy-back conference Auto FutureTech Summit 2008, another premiere event, co-produced by HyrbidCars.com impresario Brad Berman.
And finally, the fourth annual Clean-Tech Investor Summit, co-produced by my colleagues and I at Clean Edge (February 6-7, in Palm Springs, Calif.). As in past years, we'll assemble 500 or so clean-tech entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and investment professionals for presentations and conversation in a solar-drenched locale. Should be good.
Keep in mind, those are just the highlights. There are many more opportunities to learn and schmooze this year. Check the calendars on GreenBiz.com and Clean Edge for more.
Just remember to offset those travel emissions.
January 1, 2008 in State of the Art, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (9)
NBC's "Green Week": Not Media Business as Usual
This is "Green Week" at NBC Universal, a seven-day revelry of environment-themed content spread across the company's various TV channels and other properties. The 150 hours of programming — integrated into everything from news and sports to soaps and entertainment — is certainly a first for a major media company.
What, really, is NBC doing? Is this a one-off stunt intended to "green up" its image before it returns to, as they say, regularly scheduled programming? Or is this something more substantive, more integrated, longer-term — a milestone in the greening of the mainstream media? (Disclosure: NBC Universal, like its parent company, General Electric, is a client of GreenOrder, with which I am affiliated.)
I've watched the process unfold, reviewed strategy documents, and talked to the company about its efforts. My only-slightly-biased conclusion: There's more going on here than meets the eyeballs that NBC is trying to attract.
First, the basics. Green Week involves the full spectrum of NBC properties, including its eponymous TV network as well as CNBC, MSNBC, NBC News, NBC Sports, SciFi Channel, Sundance Channel, Bravo, USA Network, and Telemundo — plus Universal Studios and its related theme parks, and the company's websites, including female-focused iVillage. Dozens of shows will have environmental themes or messaging, from Sami and Lucas' green wedding on "Days of Our Lives," to MSNBC's examination of green issues in the 2008 presidential campaign, to "The Office" (based at a fictional paper company) considering recycled paper, to CNBC's broadcast from a clean-tech conference. Tom Brokaw, Matt Lauer, Bob Costas, and other heavyweight talents have been conscripted into the effort. Local NBC stations will incorporate green-themed stories into their newscasts and some will run a half-hour special on "Going Green at Any Age!" Universal Pictures will run environmental public service announcements as part of its online movie trailers and as ads in theater lobbies.
There's more. You get the idea. Suffice to say it's a full-court press.
The whole endeavor no doubt makes great fodder for cynics: What is the company's actual environmental commitment? Is it walking it's talk, or just preaching? Is this just another way to tap into the growing wave of advertisers' green(washing) pitches? Will consumers even care? And why only one week — shouldn't it be a year-round commitment?
In a nutshell: What's really going on here?
"The time became right to recognize that green is a rapidly growing cultural and business phenomenon and is presenting brand new opportunities and challenges," Lauren Zalaznick, president of Bravo Media, who heads NBC Universal's Green Council, told me last week. "And that, as a company, we should be the green media market leader, and be ready."
Zalanick says the company identified three key "customers" for this effort: consumers of its programs, movies, theme parks, and other properties; advertisers, of course; and the company's 16,000 worldwide employees. Regarding that last group, she says, "We want college grads coming into the marketplace — 80 percent of whom say they want a job with positive environmental impact — we want them here. We want to be best in class in every way as an employer of choice."
Interestingly, when I asked Zalanick where she anticipated the most push-back about Green Week, it was this same internal group. "There's no one more cynical than a disgruntled group of large conglomerate employees. They have had many, many, many mass e-mails and initiatives. The longer they're here, the more they say, 'I've seen things come, I've seen things go.' So we have a great challenge to be very real."
"Very real," explains Zalanick, includes various efforts to reduce the company's environmental impacts, including replacing a fourth of its vehicle fleet with hybrids by the end of 2007, evaluating its paper suppliers for environmental content (the company's office paper currently contains one-third recycled content), and conducting an environmental audit of its facilities worldwide. (NBC Universal will work with GreenOrder to provide an independent, quantitative analysis and verification of its environmental footprint.)
What about consumers? Will the typical viewer of college football care that next Saturday's Air Force vs. Notre Dame match-up will include a segment featuring Notre Dame student's and faculty's quest to capture carbon dioxide from power plants?
Zalanick believes they will. She cites research conducted last month in which NBC Universal measured viewers' environmental awareness, habits, and expectations. "We heard loud and clear that there was a very high expectation that consumers have about companies. Over two-thirds believe that businesses have some responsibility for the social good. That's a lot." She says the company plans to track audience awareness and actions over time. "We'd like to hear back that we've had an actual impact — that we caused viewers to buy a hybrid, to not buy plastic water bottles, to turn off their power strip instead of the on-off-standby switch. We want those kinds of activation results." It will be a big challenge "activating" mainstream consumers, as most environmental groups and others have learned over the years, but every little bit helps.
Green Week will no doubt rankle some critics as, variously, being too commercial, not green enough, not serious enough, not entertaining enough, or whatever. Says Zalanick: "We're going to be under a microscope. We're going to plead for a lot of attention, and we're going to get it, and we're really going to try to do everything right. What I hope is that the shoutdown of our perceived imperfections doesn't scare anyone else from trying to do it."
Viewed in its entirety, NBC Universal's approach, imperfections and all, strikes me as a substantive — and welcome — contribution from the mainstream media: a synergy of internal programs to reduce the company's footprint and engage its employees and talent, with an external focus on the company's massive, hydraheaded audience reach. And to do so in a wide range of styles, voices, and depth. One internal document positions the approach as "hopeful, empowering, and pragmatic, not moralistic or preachy." Sounds about right.
A big question, of course, is what happens after Green Week is over. Zalanick agrees that environmental content "should become part of the fabric and rhythm of our every day" and that this, indeed, will be the company's long-term goal. (Internally, this has been described as a "multi-year, ongoing initiative.") "I think it's like any pro-social initiative that starts with some particular mandate," she explains. "It starts out as something conscious, something you have to point to. And the road is filled with potholes and cynics. It would be like saying, 'Was our goal in 1987 to hire a woman, then never do that again?' No, the goal was to have it become the fabric of medical schools and law schools and board rooms and everything in between. The goal was to stop talking about it, for it to be part of the everyday."
No one says it will be easy. "We're learning how to walk," admits Zalanick. "In a few years, we won't have to think about walking any more, and our commissaries are going to be right, and our lighting is going to be right, and our corporate car fleet is going to be right. And we're going to know how to do it. What I found is that we were already doing a tremendous amount of stuff that, for a media company, we were not particularly good at communicating. We never took it on as something we needed to prove to the world. I actually think we were incorrect on that."
Will Green Week help position NBC Universal as "the" green media company, attracting new viewers and advertisers, delighting its employees, and luring the next generation of talent along the way? How will all this affect, or infect, its competitors? What will Wall Street think? The rumor mill has GE selling off its media business in order to better focus on its core industrial products. Will being seen as green enhance NBC Universal's market value?
As they say on TV: Stay tuned.
November 4, 2007 in Business Practices, Green Marketing, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (9)
The Greening of Travel and Tourism, from Asia to Alabama
My travels over the past month have included speeches to two very different audiences on the same topic: The future of travel and tourism, as seen through an environmental lens. Based on these and other calls I'm getting, it seems that this industry is starting to pay attention . . . but only starting.
The two speeches -- in Bangkok, to the Incentive Travel & Conventions, Meetings Asia/Corporate Travel World conference; and in Gulf Shores, Alabama, to the Gulf Coast Convention and Visitors Bureau -- were striking as much more for their similarities as differences. Both audiences are just beginning to come to grips with a new reality on travel and tourism.
That reality is this: Up to now, the conversation taking place on the environmental front has basically to do with "the impact of travel and tourism on the environment." Increasingly, however, it's turning around: there's a growing awareness of "the impact of the environment on travel and tourism."
(The New York Times wrote on a similar topic this week, in an article on climate change and tourism.)
Indeed, both of my audiences' regions had experienced the tragic ravages of nature: Hurricane Katrina, which swept through the Gulf Coast (though 2004's Hurricane Ivan made more of a direct hit on Alabama's coast); and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. Both events decimated their respective tourism industries for a time, and both regions are still grappling with lingering effects, including a more cautious tourist market sensitive to disruptions born of natural disasters.
The two events at which I spoke were different in one key respect. The Asian conference was more business-to-business -- the audience included airlines, hotel operators, corporate travel buyers, meeting planners, and the like, mostly focused on conferences, events, and the "incentive travel" industry -- while the Alabama event was more consumer facing -- Alabama's Gulf Coast attracts largely families and retirees from the South and Midwest, with relatively few conventions or business meetings.
Those differences are significant, and they mirror what's going on in the larger marketplace of green goods and services. There's far more, and more substantive, action on the B-to-B front, as companies in most sectors are leaning lean on upstream suppliers and service providers to reduce costs and environmental impacts and offer their downstream customers less-toxic, better-packaged, and more energy-efficient goods and services. Corporate and some government policies are mandating venues and travel options that include at least some environmental considerations, and a growing number of conferences and meetings are calling themselves "green," whether from reduced waste, lower carbon footprint, or other activities.
Meanwhile, the green consumer marketplace is more of a slog, as I've noted in the past, with fewer genuine success stories among environmentally improved products and services. With the exception of ecotourism -- tours and travel packages that combine some sort of ecological theme, often aimed at well-heeled travelers -- green leisure travel hasn't yet caught on.
As I said, the industry as a whole is just waking up to the realities of a more eco-conscious world. And, to a large extent, they seem to have at least one foot firmly planted in denial that their world will somehow be affected by the world's environmental woes.
They couldn't be more wrong, of course. As the Times made clear, everyone from ski resorts to dive shops are feeling the heat, as it were, from climate change, as tourist-attracting natural wonders -- snow-packed slopes, vibrant coral reefs -- shrink or disappear altogether. In the developing world, where a much greater portion of the economy depends on tourism, this can be particularly devastating. As the Times noted, "In much of Africa, for instance, tourism is the major source of income and often the only source of foreign currency."
It's not just ecotourism spots that are vulnerable. Any destination that depends on visitors arriving by air -- whether tourists or business travelers -- could be hit hard, especially more remote locations like Australia and New Zealand, as well as U.S. hotspots like Las Vegas and Orlando, Fla. Droughts could be another factor crimping the industry, if water rationing limits showers, pool use, water park operation, etc. Don't even think about another SARS-like outbreak of infectious disease, which, some experts say, will be another all-too-frequent manifestation of climate change, and which could dampen people's willingness to travel for both business and pleasure.
Here's one small but significant example of what we're up against. In Bangkok, I gave an hour-long keynote speech that, among other things, challenged the Pacific Rim travel industry to consider how it will remain competitive in an eco-conscious or carbon-constrained world, especially as destinations in Europe and North America increasingly embrace recycling, energy efficiency, sustainable foodservice, carbon offsets, and other practices aimed at reducing the impacts of travel, meetings, and events.
For about two minutes of that hour I spoke about how some companies are starting to use a new, improved generation of teleconferencing technology as a means of reducing business travel, if only by a fraction. For example, I told them, Vodafone has adopted a policy in which employees are now required to justify why they need to fly somewhere, as opposed to using one of the company's 200 teleconferencing centers (or, presumably, simply telephoning). The policy reduced the company's air trips by 20 percent in one year.
"How do you compete in a world in which a portion of business travel is replaced by teleconferencing?" I asked them.
Simply asking, it seems, was a no-no. "Makower Raises Delegate Ire at IT&CMA Meet", trumpeted one industry publication, noting that
His speech prompted a walk out by two Jet Airways executives and upset other suppliers, many of whom were there representing hoteliers and airlines.
Lianne Kelly-Maartens, marketing manager for Sun International in India, said it was the wrong audience for a reduced travel argument. She said she couldn't believe her ears when he started to advocate reduced travel and more video conferencing (with its implied reduced role for hotels) as the way of the future.
“I am well aware of the need to embrace change for the sake of the environment but many people in the audience sponsored the keynote speakers’ attendance through their delegate fees,” said Kelly-Maartens. “It’s like the Rifle Association presenting at a gun control convention.”
Did I mention denial?
(Quick aside: Was it my imagination, or has it been reported that airlines are starting to create teleconference centers inside their major hubs as a nifty means of accommodating both travelers and telecommuters? I swear I'd heard that, but can't find a reference. Anyone?)
It strikes me, as I told both the Asian and Alabaman audiences, that amid these challenges lie opportunities. The Alabama Gulf, fiercely competing with a host of Atlantic and other Gulf beach destinations, might create a competitive advantage by forming a regional commitment to green excellence. That would likely be appreciated by, among others, the growing Boomers population frequenting its towering condos. The region is well on its way, with impressive recycling, biodiesel, land use, and other initiatives already taking place. Such efforts might even help to create new markets for green weddings, business meetings, and other events they're not yet attracting. Meanwhile, Pacific Rim countries, needing to attract Japanese, Australians, and North Americans to remain economically viable, have similar opportunities to compete among themselves to create more environmentally conscious hotels, exhibition halls, and the like, which these travel buyers have increasingly come to expect.
Of course, none of this may stave off the devastation some regions may face in spite of their greenest efforts, should nature wipe out their prime attractions, or should energy markets crimp long-distance travel. Even without an apocalypse, the industry could be in for a tough time.
November 2, 2007 in Business Practices, Climate Change, Green Marketing, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (2)
The Greening of the CIO
The notion of a corporate chief information officer is fairly new -- less than thirty years old -- but the CIO's role has grown in lockstep with the strategic importance of information and knowledge management inside companies. Their ability to think strategically about information technology can help a company innovate, grow markets, streamline operations, cut costs, and generally improve competitiveness.
Now, the CIO is poised to help companies be greener, too.
That's my takeaway from a two-day CIO Summit convened last week by Cisco, the $35 billion purveyor of Internet networking hardware, software, and solutions. The event brought together CIOs from about 120 large companies -- mostly Cisco's customers and partners. I was invited to moderate a panel of CIOs to talk about their role in the greening of business.
It wasn't a topic to which I had previously given much thought. What could a CIO do that would significantly reduce a company's environmental footprint? The one obvious connection had to do with the rising energy use of information technology equipment, as we've been covering daily on GreenerComputing.com and as I've written about in the past. For some companies, the energy costs of IT are becoming burdensome.
I'm not the first person to come to understand the potent power of CIOs. Simon Mingay, research vice-president at Gartner, recently told an audience in Cannes that "Defining the environmental value of IT will become a 'crucial business skill' for CIOs, as green concerns will increasingly weigh in on decisions about IT investments." Mingay defined "three degrees" of IT's environmental impact.
The energy use of computers and such is just the beginning. It seems there are other potentially powerful ways in which chief information officers can play a role in the greening of companies. Here are two brief examples:
As the electricity grid gets smarter and more Web-enabled, CIOs will be in a position to more closely monitor every aspect of their energy use across a vast campus or even a global chain of facilities. That, in turn, will enable companies to ratchet back energy-draining appliances (refrigeration units and HVACs, for example), or switch to alternative or back-up power, in order to avoid peak-power costs. The long-touted energy web will be a boon to the IT crowd, creating new opportunities for them to cut costs and streamline operations with an eye to save energy and reduce a company's carbon footprint. And such monitoring isn't limited to energy. It can be applied to water use and other resource flows.
Of course, all this can be done externally, too. For example, Southern California Edison, the large energy utility, plans to monitor five million customer meters every 15 seconds, yielding huge amounts of real-time data. Transforming that data to provide feedback to customers on how to optimize their energy use can provide valuable benefits to both parties -- saving money for customers and educing Edison's need to build costly new generating capacity.
That could change, thanks to expanding broadband networks and advancing technology. At the CIO Summit, I had the opportunity to demo Cisco's TelePresence technology, a videoconference service that's the next best thing to being there. TelePresence features a half-oval conference table that's mirrored life-size by one or more duplicate settings at various locations, giving the feeling of being at the same table (see photo). In my demo, there were people from four locations in the U.S. and U.K. "meeting." It's still not the same as being there, but it provided a pretty realistic approximation.
TelePresence isn't the only videoconferencing technology, but it's one of the smarter ones, and if it catches on it stands to make a dent in travel. Cisco says that since the start of the year, it has held 30,000 TelePresence meetings -- about 1,000 a week -- and that the utilization rate for its facilities is sixty percent, compared to six percent for its older teleconferencing facilities.
Teleconferencing won't replace all meetings, but if improved technologies like TelePresence can eliminate employee travel by just ten percent, that could provide a meaningful reduction in some companies' footprint. (As an aside, one CIO told me that his company's sales team's performance rose when they started utilizing videoconferencing, thus reducing travel. It turns out that salespeople are happier when they get to stay at home with their families, and happier salespeople tend to be more productive.)
I'm guessing that very few companies are thinking of their CIOs as strategic players on the green scene -- that most companies assume, as I did, that aside from the energy consumption of IT equipment, there aren't many other CIO linkages with their company's environmental performance. That's simply wrong -- and a lost opportunity. As environmental challenges and opportunities continue to spread across company functions -- well beyond traditional environmental departments to include every nook and cranny of business operations -- the information needs and capabilities will loom large. Along the way, CIOs will stand to become key players in the growing world of green business.
And maybe make their companies' sales team a little happier along the way.
October 8, 2007 in Business Practices, State of the Art, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (2)
The Greening of P.R.: Read All About It
You wouldn't think that the world of green business would need much more publicity, given all the media stories, blogs, websites, TV shows, billboards, events, and other shout-outs plugging green companies, products, and services.
But get ready for more. The world of public relations has discovered green with a vengeance, and the big global firms seem locked, loaded, and ready to fire up their drum beating.
In just the past couple of weeks, two P.R. giants -- Fleishman-Hillard and GolinHarris -- have each announced "worldwide sustainability practices." They follow on the heels of other large firms that have set up practices focusing on sustainability and corporate responsibility, including Edelman, GCI Group, Ogilvy, and Weber Shandwick. Most of the other biggies -- including Burson-Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton, Ketchum, Manning Selvage & Lee, and Porter Novelli -- also have focused their sights on the green business world.
What's going on here is part of a sea change: green has gone from a movement to a market. It's no longer just a "nice to do." It's now strategic. As GolinHarris CEO Fred Cook put it:
Sustainability has grown from an important plank in a CSR program to become a global 'value.' Successful organizations must now look at sustainability issues as part of their bottom line — along with profit and community involvement.
But it's more than that. The greening of P.R. reflects a newfound reality: It's now safe, or at least safer, for companies to tell their good, green stories.
In recent years, companies walked more than they talked -- that is, they did a lot more, environmentally speaking, than they took credit for. That may seem counterintuitive to what we expect from companies, but it was done out of necessity, not nicety. When companies hyped their environmental accomplishments, they found they often unwittingly illuminated problems the public didn't know they had. So, it was better just to do it -- gaining business value in the form of lowering costs, attracting talent, retaining customers, and pleasing employees -- and forgo the P.R. points.
I've previously told the story of Levi Strauss & Co.'s reluctance to talk about their organic cotton initiative for fear that it would bring increased scrutiny to the environmental impacts of conventional cotton, which represented 98% of Levi's cotton purchases. Such hesitation to hype is typical. For years, I've heard companies bemoan that they couldn't get credit for their environmental accomplishments for fear that whatever they were doing right might bring unwanted attention to the many things they were still doing, well, wrong.
But two companies helped change that. First was G.E., whose successful ecomagination campaign launch in 2005 signaled to the world that a big company that hadn't previously been seen as a green leader could come out publicly with a bold plan . . . and not get viciously attacked. (Indeed, more than two years later, G.E. execs remain high on the list of desired speakers at environmental and green business conferences.)
And then there is Wal-Mart, which in the past two years has unleashed a dizzying array of environmental commitments and initiatives. (Including two in the past week -- see here and here.) Wal-Mart, while hardly universally admired among environmentalists, has managed to transform itself from a laggard to a leader in the eyes of at least some thought leaders.
Those two success stories seem to have made it safe for companies to jump back into the water -- to be more public about their environmental goals and initiatives, even if they're less than perfect.
The water may still be a bit icy. Consider a just-released survey by Ipsos Reid, which found that "Consumers appear to be wary of companies who label their products as being 'green', or environmentally friendly." The study found that
seven in ten (70%) Americans either "strongly" (12%) or "somewhat" agree (58%) that "when companies call a product 'green' (meaning better for the environment), it is usually just a marketing tactic."
These P.R. firms will have their work cut out for them.
Of course, the bigger question is whether all of this P.R. heat will shed any actual light. That is, will the increased P.R. output and resulting media coverage reflect an increase in company efforts and performance, or just more attention to what has been happening all along? Will increased coverage of green business issues lead to a virtuous cycle, in which heightened public attention and expectations of companies lead to even more, and more substantive, business commitments and actions? Or will the public tire of a steady drumbeat of me-too green products and stories, thus feeding their existing skepticism and spurring them to get off the green bandwagon even before it reaches cruising speed?
It could go either way.
All of which leads me to challenge public relations professionals: Will you steer your clients beyond short-term media hits to create longer-term value by counseling them to aim high, to make bold, audacious commitments in order to stand out from the crowd? Or will you focus on short-term results, creating flash-in-the-pan media moments that celebrate incremental change in lieu of substantive environmental progress?
I'll be closely watching the forthcoming output of press releases and media events to see which way the P.R. winds are blowing.
September 30, 2007 in Green Marketing, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (6)
Green Marketing 2.0: This Time It's Serious
Green marketing is back, and while some may cavil that it never went away, the quality and quantity of marketing messages has shifted markedly in recent months. By all indications, this time it's no longer a half-hearted, fringe activity.
It's been more than seventeen years since my book, The Green Consumer, was published in the U.S. That took place during the media frenzy of Earth Day 1990, when the world (or at least some of it) awakened to many of the significant environmental challenges we face. We were told by bestselling authors and other self-appointed mavens that the planet was ailing but that doing "simple things" could save the earth, and we felt empowered.
At the time, it seemed like the floodgates of greener products were about to open. Large consumer product companies like Procter & Gamble and Unilever were dipping their corporate toes into the green waters, with the expectation that they would eventually dive in. Big retailers like Home Depot and Wal-Mart conducted in-store promos featuring greener products.
We could smell change coming.
It didn't come. Many of those early products were outright failures: biodegradable trash bags that didn't degrade (or degraded a little too quickly); clunky fluorescent bulbs that emitted horrible hues; recycled paper products with the softness of sandpaper; greener cleaners that couldn't cut the mustard, literally. Many of these products were expensive and hard to find. The Federal Trade Commission weighed in during the early 1990s, eventually slapping a few prominent marketers on their corporate wrists.
Now, after years of false starts, a growing number of mainstream success stories suggest that green marketing finally is more than an environmentalist's pipe dream. The Financial Times reported earlier this year that the biggest advertising agencies, including Ogilvy, Y&R, and Saatchi & Saatchi, are predicting a wave of green marketing campaigns as businesses compete on their environmental platforms. "Agencies say communicating green values is fast becoming an act of 'corporate hygiene' needed to retain competitiveness and standing with customers," said FT, adding: "Advertisers that make green claims for products and services however face unprecedented public scrutiny, particularly from bloggers and other web users."
Companies are finding their way through the thicket of scrutiny. Home Depot and Wal-Mart are back in the green-marketing game, as are smaller, niche players from TerraCycle to Terrapass. The lessons learned from these and scores of other firms are helping shape the future of green marketing -- and, in some cases, the future of the marketplace itself.
Clearly, companies need help, and there seems to be plenty of it. This fall, there are no fewer than four significant green marketing conferences -- up from zero just a year ago. In chronological order: