Archive for the ‘SBN’ tag
Ghandi, Business Values, and Green IT
I attended (and spoke at) the Eleventh Annual Symposium on Spirituality and Business yesterday. I am not a religious person. But it was a great opportunity to step back and reflect. The highlight of the day was listening to Kevin Lynch, Executive Director of Rebuild Resources. He reminds himself daily of all of the advantages that he was born with that he has not earned. That he has suffered from drug and alcohol addiction, like those he serves. The people Kevin works with are not clients, but fellow human beings.
This is the concept of the servant leader that I spoke of earlier in the day. My speech was called: Satyagraha for the Business Leader:
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If you like this then please subscribe to the Helping Businesses Survive and Thrive in a New Economy
As President of the Sustainable Business Network, I have been reflecting on our mission in the context of our current recession. Are local business owners are fully aware of the new economic, environmental, and political realities? What does it mean that we are just coming out of 8 years of hypnotism and denial from the Bush administration? During tough times, it is important to cut back on business activities that are not destined to provide value in future years (although they may have in the past) and to start building some resiliency into the business model by developing products and services that are non-polluting, energy-efficient, healthy, and sourced from the local community.
Now is the time to make critical decisions. Which business models will thrive in the new economy and which legacy operations should be pruned now? Many business decision-makers assume that normalcy will return towards the end of 2009, or, at the latest, early 2010. But there are countervailing forces that will make it difficult, if not impossible for America to return to an economy based on infinite resources, unlimited transport,and blatant disregard for the environment.
For example, there is the issue of peak oil. Robert Hirsch, author of Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management (a.k.a. the Hirsch Report), has said that new technologies and new drilling won’t solve the peak oil problem, and that we should expect $12-15/gallon gasoline followed by rationing. If businesses are not waking up to the possibility that they cannot count on cheap energy prices, many American cities are. At least twenty-five American cities are creating contingency plans based on the possibility that oil prices will remain highly volatile. They recognize that we are heading into a time when both energy costs and pressure to lower CO2 emissions will be high. Public sentiment may turn against businesses heavily dependent on products sourced from halfway around the world.�
Is Big Business Sustainable?
In most industries, large-scale enterprises can extract resources, create product, and distribute finished goods more efficiently than locally-owned, small-scale businesses. They can use their economic clout to develop new products, broadcast marketing messages to a national audience, and influence government regulation to their benefit.
Despite real economic disadvantages, the small business continues to flourish in some market segments. Small biz advantages include agility, understanding community needs, and ability to cost-effectively utilize resources not easily aggregated for use by larger-scale industries.
More recently, small firms have been touted as one of the building blocks for creating strong local economies. Local businesses can contribute to a community’s development by involving more local partners, creating jobs and offering fair wages to employees. But are small businesses more sustainable? We could argue that small businesses–unable to take advantage of economies of scale–waste more resources than larger businesses. Think of the prepared foods section at a little-trafficked store. Markets, catering shops, and restaurants–most of them small businesses–generate 27 million tons of food waste annually.
High-volume distribution centers such as Walmart would appear to be the most efficient method of distributing foodstuffs and consumer goods. One would think that efficient distribution would be the sustainable choice. Especially at a store like Walmart, which has the following environmental goals:
1. To be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy.
2. To create zero waste.
3. To sell products that sustain our resources and environment.
So, should we all shop at Wal-mart? The answer is: “No.” Sustainability cannot be achieved by centralizing resources and distributing on a large scale. According to “It’s Not Easy Being Green: The Truth Behind Wal-mart’s Environmental Makeover,” big business means bigger environmental impacts. The average Wal-Mart supercenter is a 200,000+ square foot behemoth sitting on 20 to 30 acres of land. There are over 2,200 supercenters in the United States, and they are adding more at such a rate that even if they meet their goal of reducing carbon emissions by 20% by 2013, in the interim, they will have built enough new stores to completely offset emissions reductions at existing stores.
Let’s return to small businesses and vibrant local economies. Suppose that local businesses are created to fulfill local needs. When local businesses use local resources, sustainability and environmental protection become a necessary component of the production lifecyle. More importantly, it will not be possible to produce locally-made goods at the same variety and scale that we do in today’s global market. Not all resources required for producing products will be locally available. Also, production labor will be priced at the local prevailing rate. This means that the price of locally-made goods will be more congruent with the time required to produce it. It will once again be less expensive to have a product repaired than to replace it.
Sociologist Paul Ray, who pioneered the concept of “cultural creatives,” estimates that 36 percent of Americans (45 percent of voters) fall into what he calls the “Wisdom Culture Paradigm.” Among its characteristics are: an “anti-materialism . . . that comes partly from movements like voluntary simplicity and ecological sustainability”; an “emerging post-Eighties dimension [that] wants outright prevention of ecological destruction, a slowing of economic growth for saving the environment . . . and an anti-big business, anti-globalization position”; and “a mainstream concern for relationships, altruism and idealism.”
Much of what we hold dear is neither enhanced nor accrued through improved efficiency. We do not seek to love efficiently, to eat efficiently, or to experience beauty efficiently. Then let us not praise big industry for consuming our natural resources efficiently. Small, local businesses are more sustainable in the long run not because they are more efficient, but, because they are less efficient.
Laury Hammel’s Birthday
Before I met Laury Hammel, I had many heros. People like Wangari Maathi, Mohammed Yunus, Mother Teresa (yes, I know they’re all Nobel Peace Prize winners.) Not that I was friends with these people. In fact, I have never met any of them personally.
When I first met Laury, it didn’t occur to me that he would become one of my heros. I thought he was more of a character, a rebel, and an idealist. He showed up at meetings dressed in gym clothes, even when they were held in formal settings. He would say injudicious things. Like the time he clashed with someone over a green justice issue before he had really made the connection between the problems of the inner city and the degradation of our environment. And I thought he talked too much at our Sustainable Business Network board meetings.
But, I was wrong. Laury did not talk enough. So it took some time for me to learn that there are hundreds–no, thousands–of people whose lives he has enriched. Read the rest of this entry »
I must be dreaming
No, seriously. That’s how I was feeling last Thursday when I attended the SBN Annual Conference at the Hampshire House. What a beautiful venue! It was set up like a Victorian library with antique books lining the built-in bookshelves and squat little vases filled with roses scattered artfully around the room. But, I digress.
As I mentioned, it was a dreamlike atmosphere for me. So many of my ideas for SBN had come to fruition. From changing our name, to the Boston Green Business Awards, to the Sustainable Business Leaders Program… It had all happened in just 18 months.
And we’ve gone from a sleepy little non-profit with a $10,000 annual budget to a staff of 4! As Laury Hammel would say: “Rock on!”