The Triple Bottom Line Blog

Check out this story about a smart new program that brings together corporations, the GRI Sustainability Reporting Guidelines, and university students who are learning about the principles of sustainable business. Under the new GRI Matchmaker Program, companies are linked with undergraduate and graduate business students who offer their services in assessing, evaluating, and critiquing the companies' sustainability reporting efforts. The student teams, guided by business professors, act almost as free consultants, creating benefits for both the learners and the companies they study.

The article describes successful collaborations between businesses and student teams from two universities, Boise State University in Idaho and the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary. The potential exists for broadening the students' participation in the future--for example, by having student teams assist in compiling the data used in producing company reports.

Today the GRI Matchmaker Program is small, but it suggests other possible links between companies and universities around sustainability performance and reporting. It's a natural outgrowth of one of the central ideas of sustainability--that businesses should strive to identify and nurture mutually beneficial links with all their stakeholders. When the right relationships are forged, colleges, universities, and the students and professors associated with them can became powerful associates and advocates for companies and sustainable business practices--not just potential anti-corporate protestors and adversaries.

As we discussed here, companies like IBM are discovering the practical benefits of transparency, including the fact that working cooperatively with community groups, advocacy organizations, and NGOs can actually reduce some of the burdens that transparency imposes on corporations. The GRI Matchmaker Program shows one way companies can add colleges and universities to that list.

Labels: Boise State, GRI Matchmaker Program, Reporting and Transparency, University of Calgary

The notion, discussed here recently, that automated, easy-to-understand metrics are one key to sustainable consumption seems to be gaining traction. One straw in the wind: this article in the New York Times, which references a new book, Nudge, by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago.

The book is about how well-chosen, readily accessible pieces of information can be more effective than either financial incentives or government regulation in encouraging smarter consumer behavior. A key passage from the Times article:

"Getting the prices right will not create the right behavior if people do not associate their behavior with the relevant costs," says Dr. Thaler, a professor of behavioral science and economics. "When I turn the thermostat down on my A-C, I only vaguely know how much that costs me. If the thermostat were programmed to tell you immediately how much you are spending, the effect would be much more powerful."

It would be still more powerful, he and Mr. Sunstein suggest, if you knew how your energy consumption compared with the social norm. A study in California showed that when the monthly electric bill listed the average consumption in the neighborhood, the people in above-average households significantly decreased their consumption.

Meanwhile, the people with the below-average bills reacted by significantly increasing their consumption--not exactly the goal of the project.

That reaction was avoided when the bill featured a little drawing along with the numbers: a smiling face on a below-average bill or a frowning face on an above-average bill. After that simple nudge, the heavy users made even bigger cuts in consumption, while the light users remained frugal.

Amazing, isn't it, how subtly powerful even simple-minded devices like smiley faces can be for nudging people in the right direction?

And please don't write in with indignant complaints about "the nanny state" manipulating us. Does anyone really think that smiley faces on our utility bills would outweigh the thousands of pro-consumption messages we absorb every day through television commercials, radio ads, billboards, print ads, and all the rest?

We already have plenty of nannies trying to manipulate us--and they are all sending the same message: "Buy, buy, buy!" A few nannies offering a gentle warning about the long-term dangers of over-consumption won't deprive us of our freedom.

Labels: Cass Sunstein, Climate and Carbon, Nudge, Richard Thaler, Sustainable Consumption

In a world where fast-growing giants like India and China are rapidly catching up to the West in terms of their consumption--and the burden they place on the environment--we sometimes assume that creating sustainable approaches to growth will involve impositions on the developing world.

This assumption helps produce friction around environmentalism between the world's haves and have-nots. The fear is that newly-enlightened Western thinkers will "change the rules" and prevent the countries of the global South from claiming their fair share of consumption--all in the name of sustainability.

But maybe there's an alternative. Maybe the peoples of the developing world will devise their own environmental solutions, based on ideas about respect for nature, our dependence on the planet, and the unity of life that are deeply embedded in traditional religions and cultures.

That's the possibility suggested by this NPR piece about business leaders in the Middle East who see sustainability as naturally linked to Islam and the traditional Arab way of life. Here's a quote from one of the Kuwaiti business people interviewed by NPR:

Think about it. This [the Middle East] is one of the hottest inhabited regions in the world and yet people lived here not only in days before electricity, but in days when people were dirt poor, I mean literally had nothing . . . . There's still memory, individual memory of what it was like in the time before oil. There's still that link to a not-so-distant past.

Doesn't it make sense that peoples in the Middle East are more likely to draw inspiration for their own approach to sustainability from Islam than from Western environmentalists?--just as the peoples of India are more likely to be inspired by Hinduism, and those of China by Buddhism and Confucianism.

I'm no expert on any of these great non-Western faiths, but everything I know about them suggests that they are at least very compatible with the core concepts and ethical requirements of sustainability--at least as much as Christianity and Judaism, and arguably more.

As the global impact of this century's environmental challenges becomes more and more apparent, the need for a global sustainability movement becomes more and more clear. And while such a movement will require international cooperation and some universal standards--tomorrow's improved versions of Kyoto, if you will--it will also require roots in dozens of local cultures.

As a planetary people, we'll need many forms of sustainability, driven by leaders who speak not just in the accents of New York and Portland and Stockholm and Berlin but also those of Abu Dhabi and Mumbai and Kinshasa and Beijing.

Labels: globalization, Islam, Personal Musings, sustainability

Our crack web design guru Dan Kirshenbaum has added a new feature to the site. Scroll to the bottom of this page and you'll find a list of Categories covering posts we've written since the inception of the blog. Click on any Category title and you'll get a page containing every post related to that topic. We hope you'll find this a useful tool for quickly zeroing in on content that is particularly relevant to you and your work.

I thought about Andy's provocative post on sustainable consumption when I discovered that yesterday was the fortieth anniversary of this speech by Robert F. Kennedy. Speaking at the University of Kansas less than three months before his murder, Kennedy contrasted mere consumption with real wealth. Here's an excerpt:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product--if we judge the United States of America by that--that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife [RFK is referring here to two notorious mass killings of the 1960s]. And the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Labels: Personal Musings, Robert F. Kennedy, Sustainable Consumption

Last summer, when my wife bought her first Prius, I wrote elsewhere about how the new car had affected her driving:

As you may know, the car's dashboard features a touch-sensitive screen that displays various kinds of information and can be used to control the sound system, the air conditioning, etc. Mary-Jo normally keeps the screen set to show fuel economy, and the effect is quite fascinating. The display shows the current mileage you are getting (ranging from less than ten miles per gallon to a maximum of a hundred), the mileage you've achieved in five-minute travel increments, and your average mileage over any period you want--the current trip, the last week, whatever.

As a result, driving becomes a kind of video game: How far can I get the current mileage bar to extend? How high can I get my mileage rating for this trip? Can I beat my score from my last trip? And Mary-Jo is clearly driving differently. Her foot on the gas is much lighter, she avoids fuel-draining accelerations and needless braking, and she uses cruise control on long straight stretches of highway.

These are significant changes for a woman who used to get antsy when stuck behind a slow vehicle. Now instead of changing lanes she smiles serenely as her speed drifts down toward 50 mph and her mileage bar stretches up above 50 mpg.

Turns out I wasn't the only person to notice this effect. According to a recent article in The Economist, some smart companies are trying to apply the idea to another big energy guzzler, the average home:

What if you did the same thing to houses? A variety of products can provide real-time information about electricity consumption. Working out how much energy a house is using is harder than with a car, because electricity meters are generally hidden away in cupboards or cellars, and many people find them hard to understand. So an easily understood real-time read-out, akin to a car's fuel-efficiency gauge, could make a big difference.

The Economist articles goes on to describe two gadgets, the Owl and the Wattson, designed to make such energy-usage measurements easy and routine.

Of course, both the automative and home examples simply illustrate the old management principle, "You get what you measure." Whenever you develop a metric for tracking some activity, that act of measurement tends to affect the volume of that activity. So if, for example, you start providing daily reports about the number of defective products coming off your assembly line, within a few days it's likely that the number of defects will start to fall, just because people are suddenly thinking about and noticing defects more than ever. There's no reason to think the same can't apply to energy use, waste production, and other environmentally-sensitive activities.

Two lessons related to sustainable business:

1. A big, usually unremarked obstacle to green behaviors is the lack of reliable, easy-to-obtain feedback about the impact of our activities. (In most homes, even the traditional electric and water meters are located in an out-of-the-way corner of the basement or a closet and are hard for the average person to read and interpret. This is silly, and represents a big wasted opportunity.) Conversely, there's enormous value to be realized in the development of products, like Owl and Wattson, that don't save energy or reduce pollution directly but that improve human environmental behavior indirectly simply by making it transparent.

2. On a corporate level, the powerful impact of simply knowing what you are doing is one reason the reporting movement promoted by GRI and others is actually more important than many people realize. When a company is "forced" to report on its environmental, labor, and social practices every year, it has an automatic impact, subtle or marked, on the way its employees tend to think and act. The impact would be even greater, of course, if sustainability reporting were quarterly or even monthly rather than annual, but having any metrics at all is valuable in its own right.

In one sense, of course, just knowing what you are doing isn't terribly meaningful. Standing on the scale every day doesn't, by itself, make you lose weight. But buying a scale and using it regularly--along with a full-length mirror!--is a pretty important first step in any weight-loss plan. It's all about metrics.

Labels: GRI, Measurement, Prius, Reporting and Transparency

I do a lot of public speaking on sustainability, but my very first speech after The Triple Bottom Line appeared in print over a year ago is still the most memorable--not for the speech itself, but because of what happened afterwards.

I was running late for the airport and my cab was waiting in front of the hotel. Before I could sit back, the cabdriver asked: "How was your speech?" I looked up and saw, looking at me in his rear view mirror, an older cabbie with a scraggly goatee and a cloth cap.

I asked him how he knew I had been giving a speech, and he told me that the hotel concierge had told him. "What was it about?" he asked.

Hmmm, I thought, how to explain this? "Well, I am an expert on something called sustainability. It's about how companies are expected to do more than just make a profit, and I was speaking about how profits can actually be increased by good social and environmental performance."

He didn't reply, so I tried again.

"Sustainability is about how companies can do the right thing and make money at it."

He still said nothing.

Instead, he reached over into the front passenger seat, and, without taking his eyes off the road, handed back to me a fifteen-page, single-spaced manuscript entitled Sustainable World.

"Read this," he said. "I wrote it three years ago and have given out over 1,700 copies from this very cab."

Huh? The first paragraph began with a quote from the UN Commission On Our Common Future. As I read it, I had three thoughts.

The first one was: "Am I on Candid Camera?"

If you're too young to remember, Candid Camera was a TV show from the 1960s that featured practical jokes played on unsuspecting victims--an early form of reality television. Laugh if you will, but I have three jokester brothers, and it seemed entirely possible that one or all of them had hired an actor and rented a cab to do this to me on my maiden voyage.

I actually accused the cabbie of this. I really did. He assured me he was on the level and had never met my family.

As this sunk in, my next thought was: "Wow, do I have the right book at the right time, or what?"

And then, as I continued to read his highly articulate tract on what companies, governments and NGOs needed to do to save the world, a final and more somber thought occurred: "This guy is a competitor of mine. And at the moment he's 1,600 copies ahead of me."

In hindsight, I realize that the second thought is the most important one. When cabbies are talking and writing about sustainability, can real change be far behind?

Labels: Personal Musings, The Triple Bottom Line