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We filled the house at the Commonwealth Club
of California August 18, where I officially
introduced The Truth
About Green Business to
our Bay Area community, and talked about "the
three barriers to building a sustainable
economy" (see below). If you weren't there,
we're sorry to have missed you (and sorry you
missed the great salmon from our friends at
CleanFish at our
after party at the Temple night club), but
you can watch
or listen to the speech here.
The
Truth About Green Business is selling
well, with a growing number of companies
buying dozens or hundreds of copies to give
to employees, customers and suppliers, and
business schools adopting it for courses. You
can get individual copies from your local
bookstores or various online sellers -- or
contact
us for bulk, customer or autographed
copies.
There are lots of interesting developments
with projects with current clients; we can't
talk about them yet, so watch for updates in
forthcoming newsletters.
One other update to watch for: our Carbon Neutral
Learning™ distance learning
programs resume this fall, with webinars
based on The Truth
About Green Business -- and more.
In other news, I've been appointed to the
faculty at Presidio Graduate School (formerly
Presidio School of Management), where I'll be
teaching two courses this fall -- Marketing
Management and (jointly with long time pal
Hunter Lovins) Principles of Sustainability
Management. It's not like I've been drowning
in spare time, but it's great to be able to
share some of what we've been learning, and
get put through my paces by the next
generation of business leaders.
The Three Key Barriers to Building a Sustainable Economy
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How purpose drives both profit and environmental performance
Sustainable business strategies often hit a
surprising roadblock -- the limiting (and
false) assumption "green" will cost money,
require sacrifice, and delay profits. The
problem isn't that companies can't afford to
operate sustainably. The problem is that too
many businesses just can't count -- operating
with accounting systems that miss real value
and consistently leave money on the table.
To address this assumption, businesses -- and
the economic systems within which we operate
-- need to overcome three key barriers:
Business must get the prices right, break the
addiction to "stuff," and tell the truth
about purpose.
Get the Prices Right
Adam Smith observed that
perfect markets depend on perfect information.
In the absence of perfect information -- that
is to say, "In the world we do business in,"
companies and customers operate from a
distorted sense of the real cost of things.
The myth of environmental impacts as
"externalities" suggests that ecological
degradation is something external from our
lives, when in reality it's fundamental -- to
the economy as well as to life itself.
Consider: if you had to pay the full the
external costs of
gasoline, an estimated $10-20 per gallon,
would you drive the car you drive today?
Would anyone try to make or sell the car you
drive? Consumers can make decisions and
changes when they make purchases. Until
external costs are built into prices at the
point of purchase, the best we can do is to
regulate and make policies to rein in the
negative environmental impacts made by
others. So like Sisyphus, we push the
sustainability boulder up the regulatory
hill, only to watch it roll back down again.
Get Off the Stuff
Most macroeconomic policy (including the free
trade agreements of recent decades) has been
aimed at removing all impediments to the flow
of stuff across the planet. The challenge is
that the maximization of the extraction,
refining, manufacture, shipping use and even
recycling of stuff also means (all other
things being equal) the maximization of
environmental impacts. But as demonstrated by
Ray Anderson and the people at Interface (and
by Hertz and Xerox before them), there are
ways to decouple money and stuff, to increase
profit, maximize value to customers, and
minimize the flow of stuff. The challenge for
business is to build economic value on less
stuff, not more consumption. It's a profound
challenge, one very few companies have taken
this on, but it's a real key to getting
sustainability done.
Get Real With Your Purpose
Most people assume that the purpose of
business is that its function is to maximize
profits and returns to shareholders. It's
not. AP Giannini, the founder of The Bank of
America, understood this. The purpose of his
bank was to make credit available to
under-served immigrant communities of San
Francisco. If we do that well, he predicted,
Bank of America would make plenty of money.
Giannini knew that profit was the consequence
of business, not its purpose, and the purpose
was what the bank was really there to do.
Actually, everybody understands this. No one
goes to work thinking, "My purpose is to pay
the the electric bill." You have to pay it,
of course, and you have to pay shareholders
for the use of their capital, but why think
the purpose of the company is to pay
shareholders any more than it would be to pay
the utility company?
So what is the purpose of your
business? What are you really here to do?
(This commentary is adapted from Gil Friend's
presentation at The Commonwealth Club, The
Truth About Green Business: The Potential for
Jobs and Prosperity. You can watch
or listen
to the speech here. And read more about these
ideas in Gil's next
book, Profit on Purpose.)
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Putting Natural Logic to Work for You
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Natural Logic helps businesses and
governments prosper -- designing and
delivering exceptional environmental, social
and economic performance -- by embedding the
laws of nature at the heart of enterprise.
We bring an integrative approach
to our work with clients, since piecemeal
approaches just don't do the job. The ideal
engagement takes clients through the complete
cycle of charting your course (Strategy),
reading the signs (Feedback) and making it go
(Implementation).
But "integrative" doesn't mean "all at once."
You can begin with any of our three options,
each at a different scale of intensity. In
each case we
tailor our approach to your organization's
needs, circumstances, and readiness -- and we
design each engagement to produce clear,
reliable results:
Strategic briefings: Our
CEO and senior associates conduct a customized,
confidential briefing for your
executive team on the key trends and emerging
issues
facing your company.
Rapid diagnostics: Our team provides
a fast, focused, rigorous diagnosis of your
current baseline performance -- from carbon
to operations, from measurement systems to
risk -- and recommends prioritized
opportunities for profitable improvement.
Comprehensive engagements: Our
team helps you design and implement
systemic change at your company and
supply chain to ensure that you effectively and
consistently harvest the value you
identify.
For details on Natural Logic's offerings, see
our Harvesting
Value, or call CEO Gil Friend directly at
510-248-4940.
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Events
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Please join us! (And invite us to keynote your next conference.)
Recent:
Interview on Free Forum with Terrence
McNally on KPFK.org September 1, 2009. You can listen to the podcast
here.
Interview
September 16 with GritTV --
watch for it next week!
Telling The Truth About Green Business - and
the Three Key Barriers to Building a
Sustainable Economy in Charleston SC
September 14, the Commonwealth Club of
California (VIDEO NOW AVAILABLE) San
Francisco, CA, August 18, and at Friendly
Favors Walnut Creek, CA, July 28
Upcoming keynotes include:
September 17 (tonight!): US
Green Building Council Northern California
Chapter, Livermore, CA
October 25-28: SRI in
The Rockies conference (with Hunter
Lovins), Tucson, AZ
October 29: Western Sustainability &
Pollution Prevention Network, San Diego CA
November 11: Green
America conference, San Francisco, CA
Other upcoming events:
September 22, Sustainable Business Book
Fair,
Berkeley, CA
September 29, A Sustainability Compass-
Navigating the Business Frontier
-- Workshop, reception and book-signing
with NBIS, Seattle,
October 1-3, West
Coast Green, San Francisco,
CA
November 24, The
Truth About Green Business at EcoTuesday
San Francisco, CA
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