Disclaimer: In this post we will feature two environmental activists. We do this only to show what they've done, what they've accomplished, and the connection to our discipline of project management.
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Keep the change.
Categories:
Activism
Categories: Activism
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Project management is about change. It's literally about change because we try to make projects more effective and efficient, leaving our sponsors with a little bit of change (as in money, thus the image above). It's also about change because by definition, projects are put in place to make a change. A bridge where there was none before. A new release of software which didn't exist last week. A new drug. It's all about change, and so by definition, we are agents of change. When it comes to the environment, this does not mean that we all need to become members of Greenpeace. However, if we feel the inclination to do something about climate change, we have more power (excuse the pun) to do so, and to pull away from that urge to do so, we deny what should be in our own PM DNA. Here are two examples of activism with regards to the environment, which are recent and striking - and also which have been effective. Tim DeChristopher - Bidder 70 Soon, you willl be able to see a movie - a documentary - with this title. It tells the story of Tim DeChristopher, an environmental activist who went to a US Federal Bureau of Land Management auction, and... well, we'd rather let the movie's web page describe what happened: On December 19, 2008 Tim DeChristopher disrupted a highly disputed Utah BLM Oil and Gas lease auction, effectively safeguarding thousands of acres of pristine Utah land that were slated for oil and gas leases. Not content to merely protest outside, Tim entered the auction hall and registered as bidder #70. He outbid industry giants on land parcels (which, starting at $2 an acre, were adjacent to national treasures like Canyonlands National Park), winning 22,000 acres of land worth $1.7 million before the auction was halted. Two months later, incoming Interior Secretary Ken Salazar invalidated the auction. DeChristopher, however, was indicted on two federal felonies with penalties of up to 10 years in prison and $750,000 in fines. Patrick Shea, former BLM Director for Clinton, represented DeChristopher pro-bono. With the threat of prison looming, DeChristopher stepped up his activism and evolved into a charismatic and ingenious climate justice leader. He co-founded Peaceful Uprising, a grass-roots group dedicated to defending a livable future through empowering non-violent action. After two years and nine postponements, his trial began on February 28, 2011. Outside the courtroom, hundreds rallied in solidarity with Tim. Inside, Judge Dee Benson disallowed every defense his lawyers put forth. After a five-day trial, DeChristopher was found guilty. His sentencing was scheduled for summer 2012. Refusing to back down, Tim flew to D.C. in April 2011 to give a keynote speech at Power Shift 2011 in front of 10,000 students. He then led students to occupy the Department of the Interior. Tim wisely avoided arrest, but dozens of others were arrested for this mass act of peaceful civil disobedience. Tim just finished serving his sentence. Here he is on the US talk show, "Late Night with David Letterman":
Ma Jun's new playbook for change in China A recent story in Time magazine shows us another, very different, but equally effective form of activism, this time in China. Ma Jun, who founded the non-profit Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs in 2006, in China, has aimed at cleaning up China's environment. After all (see our post covering the book, The Devouring Dragon) China is responsible for about 25% of global carbon emissions. Ma worked with the government to effect change, not by stopping an auction, like DeChristopher, but instead by the power of data. This snippet from the article makes the main point: Working with two staffers (he now has 10) in a tiny Beijing office suite, Ma found a creative way forward. Rather than overtly pressuring the government--a strategy that rarely succeeds in China--he embraced the government's data as a tool. Ma cut a deal to put China's records about pollution by Western firms and their suppliers online, then used that information to quietly pressure the companies. The results have been remarkable. A 2011 report on Apple, for instance, resulted in a major effort to clean up environmental violations in the company's supply chain. Ma hopes for even more impact with his new action against the huge power and energy companies that are responsible for the lion's share of China's pollution. Because they are largely owned by the Communist Party and funded by state-owned banks, they've traditionally been off-limits for criticism. But buoyed by his wins with Western corporate giants, Ma recently announced plans to compile a similar database on these SOEs. "It's a much more delicate issue," he says with a somewhat nervous smile. "We're not sure yet how it will all work out." Ma's leverage this time is that the government is increasingly concerned about the environment. Leaders know the issue has the potential to galvanize mass protests, bringing out everyone from rural farmers whose land is contaminated by heavy metals to soccer moms worried that their children will get asthma from playing outside their schools in the Beijing smog. The initial goal is to coax the SOEs to grab the low-hanging fruit--retrofitting coal-fired power plants to reduce the worst emissions or stopping overproduction of steel. (China churns out 1 billion tons of it a year even though total global demand is only 1.7 billion tons.) Whether with auction disruptions (like DeChristopher) or increased transparency (like Ma Jun), we see that it's possible to be a change agent in the area of environmentalism. As a project manager, we can be change agents in - and around - our projects. A quick example. We're trying to purchase some supplies for the project and have a choice of two vendors. One has a product which is more environmentally-friendly but consts a little more. How do we justify the more expensive material? Event though the project itself may only use a little in the pilot period, we know that this material will be used in quantity when the product is handed over to operations. We could tie the rationale to the company's environmental purchasing policy. Wait. We don't have one? We can be the change agent that suggests a company policy. Why not? We are, after all... change agents. Have a look at the two stories, see if they inspire you to become that agent of change that you already are. |
Your Customer as a Sustainability Driver
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As we research the intersection of project management and sustainability one of the questions we run into is "who's driving?". Don't take this literally, we're not talking about driving a car, but more from the standpoint of stakeholder analysis. As our observant readers will know, the PMBOK(R) Guide's 5th Edition, recently released, has a brand new Knowledge Area, called Stakeholder Management. PMI has correctly surmised that this is a major piece of what we do as project managers. As we've always said, an unidentified threat is an untreated threat, and an unidentified stakeholder could mean a whole family of both threats and opporunities that are unidentified. So we should know our stakeholders. And obviously, one key stakeholder is the customer. There is hardly much bigger of a customer for many companies as global retailer WalMart. Walmart has made some news over the past few years pushing for sustainability from their suppliers. And more recently, this story from Reuters indicates that WalMart has quite literally become a threat to laggards in the field of sustainability. The threat is this: comply with our environmental rules within 5 years or your projects are off of our shelves. Off. Kaput. Finished. Here's a key clipping from the article. We suggest you read it all because there is more to the story, especially surrounding WalMart's contribution to the trade deficit between the US and China.
The new requirements, announced in China where Wal-Mart has more than 20,000 suppliers, will compel workshops that churn out much of the world's toys, clothing and electronics to improve on energy efficiency, waste reduction and other markers on the retailer's checklist. Wal-Mart said the checklist was voluntary. But if suppliers fall short, they could be cut off from the nearly 4,000 Walmart discount stores and more than 600 Sam's Club wholesale warehouses that the company operates in the United States. The standards set in Wal-Mart's "sustainability index", which has helped to burnish an image tarnished by criticism from labor groups and local communities, have already been embraced by 500 of the world's major consumer product makers. The retailer said that by the end of 2017, U.S. Walmart and Sam's Club stores will get 70 percent of their goods from global suppliers that use the sustainability index. Our take - as project managers? Well, you're right to identify this as an operational thing more than a project thing, but consider this. How would a supplier to WalMart start to meet these requirements? With a project. What is the entire roll-out of WalMart's initiative to control its suppliers? A project. And from our perspective as project managers it helps answer the question we asked up front in this post. Who's driving sustainability in your project? Sometimes it's the EPA. Sometimes it's a group of 'environmentally-minded' employees. It could be the CEO, after having a sort of green epiphany. Or, as in this case, it could be a gigantic big-box store which just happens to be your biggest customer. |
Sustainability: is it a PM thing?
Categories:
Activism
Categories: Activism
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Since we started asserting that there is a vital, fundamental intersection between project management and sustaianability (since about 2009), we have seen three basic responses, which we summarize below with representative composite "quotes" from these response populations:
(now leave us alone, we have enough constraints already) [To you, we say, with the deepest respect, you are missing the boat. Look at your sponsor organization's website - you will find that they are indeed comitting publicly to CSR goals. To be honest, as a pure PM you need to take a step back, look at your project's objectives as linked to enterprise-level objectives, and look at the steady state success of the product of your project, not just the project handover - you'll actually be serving your sponsor more effectively]
(I'm willing to learn, even to become a change agent) [To you, we say, welcome. Join us. There is a lot to learn. And here's a secret: there is a lot to gain, both from an altruistic standpoint and for you personally. As a person well-versed in sustaianbility language and familiar with these issues, you will likely advance more quickly than your colleagues in the other two categories]
(La, la, la, la, I am not listening) [To you, we say... well, it doesn't matter what we say. But we'll wait. One day you will end up unblocking your ears, even if it's because your current projects are successful but there are no more forthcoming because you took the short-term view.] What's alarming to us is that even some very respected voices in our field fall into to the Busy Ostrich or Purist categories - either straightway disagreeing with us, or choosing to simply not really listen. One of the ways we realize in which we have to make our point is that sustaianbility issues, only ONE of which is ecological in nature, don't seem to have an impact on our projects. To that particular end, we wanted to provide a couple of recent videos that show that climate change is not only an environmental challenge but rather one that is economic and more "overall human" in nature. Sustainability is also increasingly a drivier of innovation, and thus a "launcher" of projects (the Cesara Harada response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an excellent example). This is evident in the final video from the BBC. As project managers, overseeing budgets and people, and wanting to understand the rationale of the project's launch in the first place, perhaps this will strike a chord, if you are in the Purist camp. Consider. Think. It really can't hurt.
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Driving advances - electrifyingly!
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Let's say you are in the market for a new desktop computer.
Those are some of the key features of the new IBM 5150 Personal Computer! And all of this for a starting price of only $4400 (in 2013 dollars)! So - are you buying? Probably not (unless it's for collectability reasons). Why do we mention this in a blog regarding sustainability and project management? Simple. It has to do with innovation, with inspiration, and with the fact that if you do things right, the environment - as a stimulus - falls to the wayside in comparison to the end result in terms of innovation. So the analogy of the PC is meant to help take away the 'sticker shock' (pun intended) of the Tesla Model S - an all electric vehicle, costing about $75,000, which just received the following quote from Consumer Reports: "it's not only the best electric car we've tested, it's now our top-rated model overall". So that's the point, isn't it? We can - and should - use sustainability as a trigger for innovation. But it doesn't mean that everything having to do with sustainably-developed products has to mean sacrifice and skimpiness. The Tesla is luxurious, comfortable, spacious, and loaded with features. Sustainability can be a driver (pun again intended) but does not have to be the rationale for purchasing. The Tesla is an example of a product that in-and-of-itself is just better than its carbon-hogging peers. We need more of these innovations. And yes, it's expensive. But that brings us back to the IBM PC. Go back up again and look at the features and price. When it first came up, only the extremely wealthy (or extremely geeky, or both) were buying that machine. Same for the Tesla. But look what happened to the great-great-grandchildren of the IBM PC. Witness the fact that your $50 MP3 player or even perhaps your coffeemaker has more computer power than that PC, and you can buy a Chromebook for $199. The $75,000 price of a luxury sports Tesla can easily become a price that is more than competitive with combustion-engine sedans. If not ourselves, our kids will be driving cars like this (carefully, we hope). It will take projects and project managers to get that price down - to design more workaday vehicles that you and I may drive - but it will happen. And it's going to take sustainability thinking built in to our discipline of project management to keep the spark of innovation alive and to keep electrigfying products like the Tesla Model S coming down the road. The move to electirc vehicles is a good thing for the planet. Yes, there is debate over the fact that this simply "moves the problem", but we're on the side that says it's much better to have the car run on electricity because we can innovate more easily on making power generation (in general) more renewable, and not so easily when each vehicle is a small fossil-fuel power plant itself. In fact, each combustion-engine car generates about 20 pounds of C02 for every gallon it consumes. And transportation consists of 29% of all human-generated CO2. We just blogged about great successes in the ICT industry, which makes up only 2%. So improvements in the area of transportation are more than 10 times more effective in impact - clearly showing that innovation in this area is key. We at EarthPM have been working in this area ourselves, as we've described on previous blog posts, running workshops for the ECOCAR2 program of the US Department of Energy and General Motors. We look forward to more collaborations in which project management contributes to innovations that electrify us and improve our lot - and, oh-by-the-way contribute to a more sustainable world. Note: the inspiration for this posting came from a great opinion piece in today's Boston Globe by Tom Keane. |
Told you a THOUSAND times...
Categories:
Leadership
Categories: Leadership
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We all have probably heard that phrase - "I told you a thousand times", from our sons, daughters, moms, dads, spouses, nurses, doctors, customers, bosses, and so on. Above, you see an old 45rpm record label with the title, "I've Changed My Mind A Thousand Times". So it seems like a bad thing... But in this case - it's a good thing. The 1000 times we're talking of is a 1000x reduction in energy use by the telecom industry. Yes - a one thousand times reduction. GreenTouch, a non-profit consortium of companies (see http://www.greentouch.org ) which are normally compeitiors and customers and suppliers of each other, have collaborated on several key energy saving schemes since its inception in 2010. We blogged about this on our EarthPM site. This story, posted just a few days ago, gives a great update in detail. To save you some time, we're just going to point you to a short video that sort of says it all. After watching it, we'll give you the connection(s) to project management, which you've probably already made.
Our favorite quotes: "Anything that is not green does not belong to the future" "new projects - ongoing....starting... it could be the blueprint of what R&D means to society" "give yourself the freedom to think differently" The project connections are obvious:
Once again - opportunity is knocking. If you are in the ICT industry, it's wise to become conversant in the language not only of bits, bytes, lasers, radio... but also the language of sustainability. |