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Date
Believe It!
In 2009, Brett Willis wrote a white paper for High Performance Solutions (HPS) entitled The Business Case for Environmental Sustainability (Green), Achieving rapid returns from practical integration of Land & Green. He wrote “It is a myth that being environmentally responsible is injurious to profitability.” To read the entire white paper, click here. “Environmental Sustainability must be as commonsense as Lean – it must enable us to quickly identify and eliminate wastes that may well include energy consumption, landfill avoidance, and much more.” Mr. Willis goes on to say that to be effective you need a process like Green Value Stream (GVS), a formalized and common sense approach to sustainability with its roots in Lean. He is not necessarily advocating any one approach, but he is advocating that to really be effective, one needs a systematic approach. “Even more good news is the notion that the larger Green initiatives are taken out of altruism is fading as the returns from their implementation are totaled. Many of these have become great revenue generators. Today's leaders understand that sustainability is now a critical part of the core value of the company. Employees are equipped, and given the freedom, to be creative and look for alternatives they may not have seen before. You unleash creativity when you give people a vision like we have for suatainability."
These sentiments are voiced by one of our favorite sustainability champions, Ray Anderson of Interface Global. In a recent (July 2011)
video, Mr. Andersen states that the business case for sustainability has emerged very clearly.
Costs are down, not up. Their products are better due to the inspiration and creativity spawned by the commitment to find more environmental friendly ways to do business; “the well spring of sustainable design, the lens of sustainable design, has made our products better than ever.” He also says that the “goodwill of the marketplace is astonishing.” “There is no amount of slick advertising at any cost that we could have done that would have created the goodwill that this effort (sustainability) has created. You are talking about authenticity at its very, very best.
This is a better way to make a bigger profit and a more legitimate one, at that, because it doesn’t come at the expense of future generations and not at the expense of the earth.”
Still not convinced? Then let’s look at some real numbers. According to The Economist Magazine in a 2008 study “DuPont cut costs by $2 billion since 1990 through energy reduction initiatives alone. In addition, 3M saved $82 million between 2001 and 2005 and reaped another $10 million in savings in 2006.” Since executing on their climbing of “Mount Sustainability”, Interface Global has added more than $400 million to the bottom line. Bob Willard, an internationally renowned leader in sustainability practices, research has shown that large enterprises can additional yield profits in the order of 38% in five years by executing on sustainable practices.
As we’ve said before, and are confirmed in Mr. Willis’ article, there are other benefits, not as clearly definable, but as influential to the business case. In a 2008 survey conducted in conjunction with the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship showed that 68% of the respondents said that if the company had a strong environmental reputation for environmental commitment, it positively influenced their decision to buy the product or service, market share increase. Cone Inc conducted another survey that found that 83% of the Millennials (born between 1979 and 2001) trust a company more if it is environmentally responsible, and 68% said they would refuse to work for a company that is not socially and environmentally responsible.
One more important point that Ray Anderson makes is that the commitment to sustainability is organization wide, from the executive suite to the factory floor. To be truely effective, it has to be that way. That systemic approach is also voiced in Brett Willis' article.
For the Green Wave, the tide is rising. Business cases are being influenced by both real numbers and those not so easily quantifiable issues. It is real. Interface Global had to put together a consulting arm because they have been bombarded by requests from companies who are interested in how Interface has done what they’ve done. Because projects are the linchpin in any organization between business as usual and change, the project manager plays a key role in the execution of an organization’s sustainability practices. Stay in the forefront of your organization’s sustainability efforts. When armed with the facts that there are many ways sustainability leads to an increase in the bottom line, it is an easy sell!
From Ray Anderson: "I'll see you on the way (the journey to sustainability). We'll do this together because it is the right thing to do." From Earth PM's Assertion #1; "A project run with green intent is the right thing to do, but it also helps the project team do the right thing."
Posted
by
Dave Shirley
on: July 23, 2011 12:53 PM |
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