Sustainably Yours, The Year 2016
From the People, Planet, Profits & Projects Blog
by Richard Maltzman,
Dave Shirley
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Richard Maltzman
Dave Shirley
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Date
In this post, I’d like to sum up 2016 (in terms of project management and sustainability) by referring to this article from Harvard Business Review: “Sustainable Business Stories That Shaped 2016”.
2015 was the warmest year on record and 2016 – despite some arctic weather at the tail end of the year in North America – is still poised to break that record.
Climate change is real. However, even if you are a skeptic about the science, the effects on business and countries and companies and projects – especially projects – are certifiably real – with numbers. With results. With data you can see, touch, and feel.
We provide the article as a source of dozens of stories that relate ‘sustainable business’ to project management – your discipline. Read the article for the key stories and the overall flow. But here are a few hand-picked stories that may affect you as a PM in your work, even if you don’t work in the area of environmental science or sustainability:
A major, far-reaching deal was made this year in the reduction in HFCs in refrigerants. If you are working on projects that involve refrigerants, this will likely affect your work. And even if not directly, I bet you have, at one time or another, used an air conditioner or a refrigerator. So...
Do you work in, or with China?How about the fact that China will add 20 gigawatts of wind power and 15 gigawatts of solar power in 2016?
Have you heard of Microsoft?They’re doubling their sourcing of wind power for their data centers
Speaking of Microsoft, and adding Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner, and Michael Bloomberg and others, as investors, Bill Gates announced a $1B investment in clean energy innovation via a new entity called Breakthrough Energy Ventures
In an endorsement of long-term thinking (something we are trying ever so hard to push for in our project management community), here the world’s biggest investor (Larry Fink of BlackRock with over $4.6 trillion of investments) writing to CEOs everywhere (and by extension, the PMOs of those organizations) encouraging them to scrap short-term thinking:
Are you in IT, so you’re thinking that – since you are not in logging or drilling for oil, you have no connection to efforts on sustainable business? Think again: you work with data, data is driven by energy, and these companies have realized that sustainability figures in very much to their operations – initiating project after project to reduce consumption:
Are you of the belief that the efforts to ‘be more sustainable’ are necessarily costly?Not so.Read about 35 counties and 33 US States which have decoupled GDP growth and carbon emissions.
Again, these are just a few of the dozens of stories in the HBR article which wraps up 2016. Really, we suggest you read through it yourself.
What’s brewing for 2017? Do you think that the election of Donald Trump means an end to sustainability? No. Not so. See this additional article from HBR (November 2016), from which we quote:
In short, Trump cannot stop all momentum on the clean economy. The economics are too good. The cost to build and produce solar and wind power, for example, has dropped 60%–80% since 2010, making it cheaper than grid electricity in most states. And, most critical, this economic reality holds even without subsidies. Of course, government aid is helping accelerate the transition, but given the economic boost that clean energy provides to many states, support for wind and solar looks relatively safe in Congress. GOP Senator Chuck Grassley said that if Trump tries to eliminate the wind tax credit, the president-elect will “do it over my dead body.”
And how about the American people? In particular, how do millennials – who make up a huge and growing portion of the population – feel about this? By 2020 (the next election year) they will make up 50% of the workforce. They will be your project team members, your project management directors, your SMEs, your decision makers - in your projects, and in the voting booth. And they are watching. From the article:
A global survey of these 20- and 30-somethings earlier this year showed that 87% believe “the success of a business should be measured in terms of more than just its financial performance.” A Morgan Stanley survey confirmed that Millennials, and particularly those who are active investors, are three times as likely to seek employment with a company that cares about social and environmental issues. The jury is still out on whether this group will shop differently as it gets richer and deeper into adulthood, but every company I work with is feeling pressure from younger workers. In their role as employees, Millennials clearly want sustainability.
So we remain hopeful and confident that sustainability in business – and thus in projects – will continue to gain momentum.
Happy Holidays and the best of the New Year to you and yours from People, Planet, Profits & Projects! Thanks for your readership and support.
Posted
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Richard Maltzman
on: December 22, 2016 02:52 PM |
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