The Triple Bottom Line Blog

If you're not already visiting Joel Makower's blog on a regular basis, you should be. Joel is one of the most consistently interesting commentators on the environmental and sustainability front--and an excellent writer, to boot.

His last post is a great example. It tackles the much-debated question of whether sustainability has achieved a "tipping point" in the public consciousness. To Joel's credit, his answer is an honest, cautious "Not yet." (It's tempting for all of us who have been working in the field for years to want to cheer-lead rather than analyze issues like this objectively.) But then Joel goes on to make an even more important point--namely, that reaching a tipping point in terms of public relations or poll responses is, in a sense, irrelevant to the longer arc of how business practices are evolving:

The quality movement of yore represents a good analogy. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, "total quality management," popularized by American statistician W. Edwards Deming, was the rage. There were books, magazines, conferences, and untold experts making the rounds, preaching the gospel of kaizen, quality circles, and other business practices. Inevitably, it ran its course.

But when TQM faded from the limelight and the business media turned its collective gaze elsewhere, quality didn't go away; companies didn't revert to their old, inefficient ways. Quality became part of the fabric, eventually showing up in the form of six sigma, lean manufacturing, just-in-time inventory, and other business processes and strategies.

So, too, with the greening of business. Yes, some green products and companies will, inevitably, fail or lose favor. But the hardcore (and largely unsexy) stuff--energy efficiency, waste reduction, pollution prevention, supply-chain management, environmental reporting, etc.--will be around in one form or another for decades. So will the innovations, which are increasingly coming into the marketplace: green chemistry, biobased materials, nature-inspired design, cradle-to-cradle products, and all the rest. They're not going away once the green fever cools down.

Joel is right. Fads come and go, and there's little doubt that sooner or later the intense media spotlight attracted by Hollywood stars, Oscar-winning documentaries, and best-selling books will shift away from the environment to other important topics. But the underlying issues that the sustainability movement is grappling with are too important and too closely bound up with companies' bottom line to disappear altogether.

A decade from now, we may not still be reading magazine stories listing "Today's Top Ten Green Businesses"; we may not be seeing major corporations building entire marketing campaigns around their environmental innovations. Instead, environmental issues--along with social and economic issues--will have been incorporated into the fabric of everyday business, just as product quality, customer service, and efficiency have been today.

We'll still read about great sustainability programs--but they will be discussed in roundups of "Today's Greatest Companies," rather than being relegated to an environmental sideshow.

The embedding of sustainability into the structure of business processes will be the real measure of success for leaders of this movement--not feature articles in Fortune or stories on Entertainment Tonight.

Labels: Joel Makower, Management and Organization, Personal Musings