The Triple Bottom Line Blog

Over at Techworld, a U.K.-based business website, blogger Chris Mellor posts an interesting comment about the sustainability initiatives of BT (formerly known as British Telecom). Mellor notes, "BT's urging of sustainable business practices on to business in general is closely aligned to its own self-interest," and asks, "How real is BT's commitment to sustainability?"

He then shows that many of the eco-friendly practices, such as teleconferencing, that BT is promoting in the name of sustainability are also revenue sources for BT. And this leads Mellor to question--albeit gently--the genuineness of the company's commitment to the cause:

Here we have a hugely-prominent British company enthusiastically evangelising the sustainability (read 'green' mostly) agenda, practising what it preaches, which is a solidly good thing, and using the green agenda to sell its kit and services.

This could be interpreted as having an element of jumping on the green bandwagon to pursue its own self-interest. When BT says sustainability makes commercial sense it certainly does for BT because other businesses may well use BT products and services to pursue their own sustainability goals. . . .

For BT it's almost a case, one might suggest, of self-interest driving its sustainability agenda rather than being a byproduct of it. I don't know if this is true and am not pointing an accusatory finger at BT. But the co-incidence of self-interest and the sustainability agenda evangelising at BT is surely worthy of note.

One instinctively believes more in the commitment of priests who take a vow of poverty than in the religious faith of television evangelists living in million-dollar homes.

We all share Mellor's cynicism about televangelists who live high on the hog. But that's because living in luxury contradicts the spiritual message most televangelists promote, which is about humility, self-sacrifice, and service to others. However, there's no contradiction between running a profitable, growing business and the "green gospel" of sustainability, so Mellor's comparison seems off the mark.

If anything, we'd make the opposite point: The more profitable BT's eco-friendly offerings are for the company, the deeper and more sincere BT's commitment to sustainability is likely to be. Anyone who has worked in a corporation will confirm that there is nothing more heartfelt than the desire of executives to report healthy profits every quarter! And this sincere love of profit is shared by board members, shareholders, and all the other key decision-makers at most companies.

So the extent to which BT is able to align its profitability goals with genuinely sustainable practices is not a measure of the company's insincerity, but just the opposite. Such alignment is exactly what believers in sustainable business need to pursue. Without it, green initiatives lose money and therefore become philanthropic efforts rather than profit sources--which makes them inherently less sustainable in the long run.

This is not to say that teleconferencing and the other business practices being promoted by BT are genuinely green--that's a matter for experts to evaluate by objective criteria. But the fact that promoting these practices serves BT's self-interest isn't a bug--it's a feature.

Labels: BT, Chris Mellor, Finance and Investment, Measurement