Greener working can save millions

David Bent, July 8th 2010, Business

Communications technology can help organisations introduce greener, more productive working practices and save millions in the process.

When O2 moved to new headquarters earlier this year it put in place a greener working programme with impressive results: £3.84m saved in hot-desking alone; 100% of flexible workers report better work-life balance; absenteeism down; and a 53% reduction in head office CO2 emissions.

Forum has been helping O2 develop and implement its sustainability strategy for the last few years so they invited me to open this webinar on how to use communications technology to enable greener working. I was asked why the agenda should be important to organisations. The basic answer: you can save money while getting ready for a carbon-constrained future.

You can watch the webinar to find out more about the technology O2 used to achieve its results and, crucially, the way they involved people in creating the new social practices around how to use that technology well.

My opening is much more about the scale and urgency of the challenge of climate change. The Sustainable Development Commission's Prosperity without Growth illustrates the scale: we will need to get 130 times more economic value for every gram of CO2 emitted by 2050. The Met Office's report on Informing Choices gives the urgency: to have a 50% chance of avoiding 2 degrees of warming we must have peak global emissions by 2020, with 5% reductions each year thereafter.

Greener working will never be the full answer. But it is a start that most organisations can make that does have financial returns now. An astute business person can use it to start exploring the opportunity for their business to profit from moving to a carbon-constrained world.r

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Can the creative industries seduce us into sustainability?

Jonathon Porritt, June 16th 2010, Business, Futures, Innovation, Leadership

Shock them? Seduce them? Educate them? All of the above? When it comes to getting people to accept the reality of climate change (and the urgent need to be doing something about it), politicians have got themselves into a bit of a pickle by depending too much on the science.

Scientists would love to think that evidence alone would be sufficient to guarantee people’s buy-in. To their growing horror, however, people’s scepticism about climate change has deepened even as the evidence has hardened.

Bottom line: science alone is not enough. The truth has not set us free. And nor will it.

This is where the Creative Industries can play a vital role. When it comes to shocking, seducing and educating, there’s no limit to the creativity that can be brought to bear on influencing people’s attitudes and behaviour.

Delighting people with new designs for everyday appliances; inspiring them with spirit-lifting music; building empathy with brilliant documentaries; ‘selling’ sustainability through viral marketing; fashioning fair-trade clothing; creating a new ‘app’ to help people make better use of public transport – or even their legs: there’s a wealth of ways to mobilise the talents and resources of all the different sectors that make up the Creative Industries.

But these are not industries that see themselves at the cutting edge of today’s sustainability agenda. Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that the majority of the very large number of SMEs involved have very little awareness of their own sustainability-related performance. Let alone what they should be doing about it.

So Forum for the Future and the Creative Industries knowledge transfer network are setting out to address this. Today we’re launching a nationwide campaign designed to make the sector champions of a sustainable future.

We’ll be working with the industries to examine how the UK’s creative businesses can  use their skills to tackle issues like energy, climate change and social justice and help other sectors innovate. We want to inspire them with new business opportunities and also help them understand the rewards they can reap by improving their own sustainability performance.

Lord Puttnam, the distinguished film producer, will give a keynote speech at our launch event in London where some of the sector’s leading lights will take part in a round-table debate on how the Creative Industries can lead us to a sustainable future. We’ll follow it up with regional workshops where professionals from different parts of the sector can collaborate on how to turn these ideas into reality.

The Creative Industries are a vital part of the UK’s economy, generating almost £68 billion in 2007, and have huge power to change our world for the better. But it’s going to be difficult to ask them to play their part in shocking, seducing and educating the general public unless they first get their heads around the basics.

The round-table debate takes place on Wednesday June 16th and will be streamed live from 4pm at www.creativeindustriesktn.org/live/

Transcripts of the debate and a video of its highlights will be posted after the event on a website where industry professionals can follow the project and debate the issues it raises. http://creativeindustriesktn.org/beacons/pg/groups/689/sustainability/

For more information on the project click here.

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Dealing with the deficit: what the Chancellor could learn from a Dame

Sally Uren, May 20th 2010, Business, Climate change, Finance

‘If nature was a bank, it would have been bailed out a long time ago’. I heard that quip in the US last week and it came to mind again during our new Chancellor’s first set-piece speech at the CBI’s annual dinner.

Close your eyes and it could have been our Prime Minister talking – lots of mentions of small government, big society, enterprise, blah blah.  Oh and the need to urgently tackle our massive deficit. I’ll say one thing for the new chaps in charge – they do appear to be a team, and they are consistent in their messages, which, whether or not you buy the content, is probably a good thing.

Chancellor George Osborne finished with a triumphant flourish, stating that ‘Britain is open for Business’. Excellent news. One small niggle though. He made no mention of the other balance sheet we need to sort out – the one that belongs to nature.

We are not only out of cash, we are nearly out of the other resources which both the UK and the global economy are totally reliant upon. From water to oil, we are getting very close to the bottom of the barrel. But Mr Osborne didn’t mention this other, more pressing resource crisis. His vision is of Britain selling stuff to the emerging middle classes of the developing economies as a road to growth.

This vision is fundamentally flawed. It totally misses the point that economic growth based on existing energy sources and existing manufacturing processes will speed up our descent to a world where there are not enough vital resources to go round, a world where climate change has started to disrupt significantly the very economy Mr Osborne is trying to resuscitate.

This is where the Dame comes in. Last night we also heard from Dame Ellen MacArthur. She told us the story of her grit, determination, bravery and courage in breaking the world record for the fastest navigation round the world. She also gave the best analysis of the current resource crisis we face, and ways to deal with it, that I have heard for a very long time.

Being alone on her boat opened her eyes to the reality of the utter dependence we humans have on the resources around us. Running out of oil in the middle of circumnavigating the globe just wasn’t an option for Ellen. It would have meant the end of her journey. In the same way, running out of resources will spell the end for our collective journey. And according to lots of real-time data, we are on that trajectory.

Ellen has given up sailing to try and do her bit to open the eyes of the world to the crisis we face – and to offer her take on the solutions. Her answer is not tinkering around the edges, or creeping incrementalism, but totally rethinking how we do things. In her view, nothing short of radical innovation will cut it. She’s absolutely right.

George Osborne talked convincingly about the need for ‘a sustainable path back to fiscal growth’. But based on what I heard last night, apart from one measly mention of renewable energy, I wonder if the new Chancellor has a full grasp of what true sustainability is. 

Mr Osborne – learn from the Dame - take the path to smart growth and new, sustainable business models, not the path to any old growth, because that path will very quickly lead to a dead end.

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Did we predict the Tesco Village?

James Goodman, April 29th 2010, Business, Retail

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Is risk management ready for sustainability?

David Bent, March 30th 2010, Business

The recent financial crisis demonstrated that large, unexpected disruptions happen. Most companies were not prepared, despite risk management procedures. Last year I was speaking to a senior accountant at a major company about the financial crisis. He said something truly startling: his company had struggled to roll over its debt in the corporate bond markets, and they had nearly gone under as a result. Fortunately they had found the funding in time, but it did prompt this question from the Finance Director: “why wasn’t that on my risk register?”.

Risk management failed in the financial crisis…
It is obvious that risk management failed in many financial institutions. Sometimes people failed to spot risks in their business model (for instance Northern Rock). Sometimes people failed to see the systemic risk of lots of companies having the same business model (both financial regulators and the big US investment banks). Sometimes people would spot the risks, but a combination of culture and strong personalities ignores the risks (Lehman Brothers). And, as my conversation above shows, there was a failure of risk management in many companies too.

People had assumed that tomorrow will look a lot like today only more so. Back in early 2008 we were so used to years of high-growth and low inflation that we thought it would continue forever. Now we now know we were creating asset bubbles and toxic debts that were just not sustainable. We were living beyond our means, and it was bound to come to a messy end. Companies and governments were either blind to the risks or were prepared to turn a blind eye for the sake of short-term success.

..and is failing again in the sustainability crisis
Well, exactly the same dynamic is being played out right now on a host of sustainability issues. Global society is acting as if tomorrow will be like today.

We are so used to a stable climate that we think it can go on forever – even though the science is categorically saying disruptive change will happen with business-as-usual. Bodies like the Met Office and the Tyndall Centre say that we need global carbon emissions to peak in the next ten years – or maybe less – if we are to have a path to a safe concentration of greenhouse gases. We are used to poverty in developing nations, and in our own countries too. We are so used to food security that we act as if it is inevitable.

The UN convened several hundred scientists to assess the natural world in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Their conclusion:

“Human activity is putting such a  strain on the natural functions of the Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems can no longer be taken for granted.”

So, we have been living beyond our means in another way. This is the decade when it will come to a messy end. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s recent ‘Vision 2050’ report calls the coming decade the “turbulent teens” with good reason.

In my view, corporate risk management is failing again. Few companies have a good handle on either the particular sustainability risks of their business model, or on the wider systemic risks these issues present. I believe no company is ready for the disruptions – and opportunities – that sustainability will bring over the next decade. But some are beginning.

Putting sustainability into strategy and risk management
Take PepsiCo, the global food and beverage giant. In 2008 they wanted to identify the business risks and opportunities of sustainability, and what it needs to do now to ensure it is successful in decades to come. With help from Forum for the Future, they developed several plausible versions of 2030 with inputs from literally hundreds of executives across the world. Senior executives used these global scenarios to identify and prioritise risks and opportunities, which were used in different ways

The corporate strategy team put the top five risks into their annual planning cycle. Each strategic business units was required to evaluate how exposed it is to each risk, and to create a plan to mitigate it.

Outside the annual planning cycle, PepsiCo is building ‘centres of excellence’ that create deep capability and learning on particular risks. For instance, there is a new team that focuses on sustainable agriculture, so it can mitigate the risks that climate and water crises pose to its supply chains. PepsiCo has applied the identified opportunities to its long-term research and development plans, as well as to other internal ‘innovation’ methods.

In addition, the whole process of creating and using scenarios means there are hundreds of PepsiCo executives who have a greater appreciation of how tomorrow will not be like today. The scenarios have been used in executive development programmes in Latin America.

The case for business leadership
The ‘turbulent teens’ will affect all businesses. Services we currently get from the natural world that are cheap today – like soil quality or flood prevention – will be expensive. The rules of the game will change: customers will expect businesses to be part of the solution; regulators and governments will incentivise and punish; and, investors will want to know how their assets are protected.

Companies need to change their risk management and more. In an interconnected world, it is sometimes hard to see who should act first. Waiting for governments to regulate or for changes in customer demand risks acting too late and greater costs. The longer we wait, the greater damage will be and the more we will have to do once we start. This, then, is the case for business leadership.

There is another angle, looking at how much businesses like to operate without government interventions. The financial crisis compelled governments to break with economic orthodoxy and seriously intervene in markets. How much will governments have to do if we delay action on climate change by another 5 years? If you believe in free-markets then you should be lobbying for market solutions now, rather than risk big government interventions later.

If companies are in the business of long-term value creation, then they need to do more than satisfy shareholders’ desires for returns in the short-term. They also need to create the foundations for future successes. It means acting now for the best future, and preparing for radical change.

What you can do today
Here’s what that can mean in practice:

1. Act now to achieve the best future

• Look for commercial opportunities that generate immediate returns and are the first steps to a sustainable future. Examples: GE’s Ecomagination and M&S’s Plan A.
• Create alliances to identify and manage risks, with investors, customers, staff, competitors and regulators. Example: The Forest Stewardship Council came from an alliance of NGOs and companies wanting to protect forests.

2. Prepare for radical change

• Explore different plausible futures to identify a wider range of risks and opportunities. Example: see PepsiCo above.
• Take a broad definition of the challenges, and avoid reducing sustainability simply to climate change. Example: see PepsiCo.
• Embedding sustainability in key decision-making and operational delivery. Example: Balfour Beatty are using their understanding of sustainability in key decisions like business development and training people on what sustainability means in their operational roles.

For more see: Acting Now for Positive 2018, Preparing for Radical Change, sponsored by Capgemini.

For more on the PepsiCo example see the Global Scenarios and Strategy 2030 project.

This article was first published in Sustainable Business. Click here for the magazine’s digital edition.

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A £2 billion green investment bank is just a start

Peter Madden, March 24th 2010, Business, Finance, General, Public Sector

The big news in the Budget was the green investment bank – a welcome development, but only the start of what Britain needs to create a low-carbon economy.

The chancellor, Alistair Darling, announced that the government and private sector would each contribute a billion pounds and the bank’s initial focus would be on green transport and sustainable energy, particularly offshore wind power. The bank’s stimulus would unlock billions more of investment, he predicted.

Our future prosperity relies on making a rapid transition to a low-carbon economy, so a green investment bank is long overdue. We need to get this up and running as soon as possible to help Britain emerge from the recession and create the new jobs and businesses of the future.

The pledge of £2 billion is a good start but further funding will be needed to stimulate investment in the infrastructure we need to underpin a green industrial revolution. Sustainable energy and green transport are both important, but we also need to build a smart electricity grid to manage our energy use efficiently, and overhaul our homes and buildings so they are warmer and consume less power.

The green investment bank should also take a broad view of sustainable investment. An over-emphasis on carbon reduction will not serve the climate change agenda well in the long run if it ignores the needs of the poor, or the wider environment.

And it must create incentives for private investors to take a longer-term view and accept steady returns over a period of time. Public funds should not just create higher short-term returns for private investors.

The Government now needs to develop additional mechanisms to create a thriving green economy by stimulating local initiatives. We’d like to see funding to encourage small-scale initiatives throughout the country which will create new jobs, develop new technologies and launch new services.

Finally, investment in forests is vital to our future even though this will create few jobs in the UK. If we want to hold global warming at two degrees Celsius we will have to reduce carbon emissions by a massive 17 Gigatonnes in the ten years to 2020, according to a McKinsey study. They conclude that forests will have to generate more than half of that – nine Gigatonnes from avoided deforestation, reforestation and land use change – because there is not enough time for other technologies to fill the gap.

See Project Catalyst working paper for more on forest-based mitigation.

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Sustainability meets big brands: video

Dan Crossley, March 18th 2010, Business, Procurement, Retail

Sustainability is no longer the preserve of niche brands. Major manufacturers and retailers are now recognising the value that integrating sustainability into their key product lines can deliver, both in terms of strengthening ties with the consumer and for protecting their market share in an increasingly uncertain future.

At our recent Mainstreaming sustainability into brands event, Ben Eavis from Sainsbury’s explained the principles behind making their bananas exclusively Fairtrade and Alex Cole from Cadbury spoke passionately about the motivation and the journey that the chocolate manufacturer embarked on in their Purple Goes Green transformation.

We captured the essence of the event in a short video:

You can also watch or download it here: http://vimeo.com/10174247

Video round-up:

Dr Sally Uren, Deputy Chief Executive of Forum for the Future, introduced the session by talking about the opportunity for brands to accelerate the transition to a more sustainable world (0:00-03:08 mins)

Ben Eavis, Corporate Responsibility and Ethical Trading Manager, Sainsbury's gave examples of how they are making the more sustainable decision on behalf of the consumer (e.g. by making all their bananas Fairtrade), and talked through some of what is going on 'behind the scenes' to get sustainability at the heart of the Sainsbury's brand (03:09-09:09 mins)

Alex Cole, Global Corporate Affairs Director, Cadbury, set out how they segment consumers and what that means for Cadbury. She then described the story of how Cadbury Dairy Milk has embedded sustainability into the brand. (09:10-18:23 mins)

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M&S sets a sustainable benchmark for the retail world

Jonathon Porritt, March 11th 2010, Business, Forum founders, Retail

I spoke at the annual M&S Suppliers’ Conference on Tuesday, which took place in Kensington Town Hall. This venue has a particular resonance for me as it was where the votes for the 1979 and 1984 European elections were counted – and every time I’m back there, I can’t help but recall that sense of consternation that so few people seemed to be prepared, at that time, to put their cross in the Green Party box!

Twenty-six years on and it seemed as if the M&S Suppliers were all voting enthusiastically for the updated version of Plan A! And that was not just because Sir Stuart Rose made a very powerful pitch telling them all that this was their reality whether they liked it or not. By the end of the day, they would certainly have had an unnerving sense of bars being raised all around them, in terms of production standards, transparency, reporting, innovation and so on.

Plan A was launched three years ago, and instantly captured people’s imagination. The combination of carbon neutral and zero waste to landfill pledges, the 100 Action Points, the commitment to invest £200 million, and the sense of all this being at the core of the company rather than being grafted on made an immediate impact. It also gave Plan A the kind of brand profile that took it way beyond the usual corporate responsibility strategies.

Three years on, the £200 million cost has been turned into a £50 million contribution to profit. Forty-five of the Action Points have been delivered, and another 80 have been added on. The ambition level has been ratcheted up several notches, with M&S now committing to becoming the world’s most sustainable (major) retailer by 2015.

Forum for the Future has worked closely with M&S throughout this time, so we are not exactly disinterested parties, but Plan A does provide the benchmark for the whole of the retail world. It’s visionary, it’s applied, it’s comprehensive (as in covering all the sustainability bases), and it’s succeeding in getting whole-company buy-in, through the high level  “How We Do Business” Committee, chaired (and driven!) by Sir Stuart Rose.

So it’s well worthwhile checking out the new version of Plan A, available at: http://plana.marksandspencer.com/media/pdf/planA-2010.pdf

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Lessons from Kraft’s Cadbury takeover

Jonathon Porritt, February 12th 2010, Business, Finance, Forum founders, General

So the first blow has fallen on Cadbury’s from its new owners, Kraft.

The Keynsham plant near Bristol (pictured) will close, despite the fact that Kraft promised to keep it open (that was actually a bit weird, as Cadbury itself had announced that Keynsham would be closed at some stage in the future).

And the fear, of course, as much in the mind of Peter Mandelson as in the minds of all Cadbury’s workers, is that this is just the first of many cuts that will be brought forward during the next few years.

I haven’t written about this since the takeover. Apart from the odd sardonic chuckle as the process unfolded (with that arch-globaliser Mandelson shedding a few crocodile tears at another ‘great British company’ being gobbled up by ‘predators’ like Kraft – or Warren Buffet (who owns about 9% of Kraft) complaining that it’s a really bad deal for Kraft shareholders, however good a deal it might be for Cadbury shareholders), it’s been too bloody miserable.

The optimists would have curmudgeons like me cheer up a little. They point to the pledges made by Kraft to stick by Cadbury’s ethical and Fairtrade commitments. Just before the Cadbury’s Board accepted the bid it announced that Green & Black’s would be moving its entire range to Fairtrade by the end of 2011, which elicited the following emollient words from Kraft:

 “We strongly support certification as a way to improve sustainability in cocoa farming, so we welcome this step by Green & Black’s. Cadbury and Green & Black’s have proud histories in ethical sourcing, and if our offer is successful, we look forward to maintaining this heritage.”

Just so long as you ignore the unmistakable sound of grinding teeth behind the reassuring words, perhaps that really is something to be optimistic about.

But it is still a wretched outcome. And surely a complete failure on the part of Cadbury’s shareholders to tell the difference between ‘a good price’ and ‘lasting value’.

Roger Carr, who has just stepped down as Chairman from Cadbury, having felt ‘obliged’ to recommend to shareholders the offer of £11.7 billion (up from the opening bid of £9.8 billion in September last year) has now weighed in with some ‘radical ideas’ to ensure that something similar doesn’t happen again.  He has suggested raising the ‘victory margin’ from 50% plus one share to 60% plus one share, and that simultaneously there should be a rule that those who bought shares during the course of any takeover battle would not be permitted to vote until the battle was over.

Useful ideas. But the lack of any genuinely radical ideas during the takeover battle was very noticeable. “This is just the way it is with markets”, as one commentator put it. Indeed! Which is why we go through the same nightmarish process with every single takeover proposal.

Why don’t we, for instance, have more John Lewis look-a-likes in the UK? The John Lewis Partnership is hugely admired even by people in the City – even if they don’t really approve of its ‘bizarre’ employee benefit Trust. But this example has been followed by very few companies over the years. As is the case with Scott Bader (a successful chemicals company), and Tullis Russell (a successful paper company in Scotland).

But there is still Royal Mail, which currently has only one shareholder (the Government), which would make it easier to think of some kind of employee ownership basis. Allan Leighton, Royal Mail’s Chairman, has indeed hinted at the possibility of some kind of employee share-ownership.

The interesting thing is that employee-owned companies regularly outperform those in the FTSE All-Share Index. Over the last 17 years, employee-owned companies have outperformed FTSE All-Share companies each year by an average of 10%. In the third quarter of 2009, for instance, employee-owned companies’ share prices were up 27.6% compared to FTSE All-Share companies share prices, which were up 21.3% over the quarter.

But we are still so stuck in our wretchedly unsustainable ways when it comes to ownership structures within the capitalist economy.

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Unleashing brands as agents of transformative change

Sally Uren, February 1st 2010, Business, Innovation, Retail

Consumer brands have the power to create huge change, helping millions of customers lead better, more sustainable lives.

A growing number of big businesses are making sustainability a core part of their brand, (we’ve looked at the business reasons behind this in a previous piece) and this is hugely encouraging to anyone concerned with our planet’s future.

Generally speaking, consumers don’t particularly trust governments. You only need to flick through public opinion polls asking who people trust to see that politicians tend to do quite badly, and in the UK, in the wake of the expenses scandal, trust in politicians is probably at an all time low.  So, governments exhorting the general public to do their bit to save our ailing planet will only ever have limited success.

But, generally speaking, consumers do trust brands.  Whether we like it or not, there is often an emotional attachment to our favourite brands, although often at a sub-conscious level.  The power of that consumer/brand love-in is proved by the massive waves of disapproval when a brand gets things wrong, from using child labour in sweat shops (think back to Nike), to charging more for underwear for, ahem, the fuller figure (M&S has almost recovered from this blip in its otherwise savvy reading of its customers).

And the need to shift towards more sustainable patterns of consumption is urgent.  We are running perilously low on resources. We have to cut carbon out of our daily lives, and soon.  In order to meet the scale of the challenge, we need to muster every tactic possible to move from our high-carbon, resource-intensive lifestyles to low-carbon loveliness. Now is not the time to get precious about the morality of deploying business and brands to help provide the solutions to our current crisis.  

So, just how can the humble brand communicate the sustainability agenda in such a way that encourages more sustainable behaviours, from how a product is used, to what the consumer does with it at the end of its life? 

At this point it’s worth remembering that when it comes to green and sustainability issues, the average consumer is confused and disempowered.  He or she is also very clear that business needs to do its bit – there needs to be a clear compact between the brand and the consumer – based on ‘I will if you will’.  Finally, most people want simple actions, not a menu of complicated and often contradictory choices.

Which means that when it comes to communicating sustainability, brands must remember that labels have their limits.  It is estimated that most of us take an average 45 seconds to make choices when we’re buying our everyday necessities, and a proliferation of sustainability labels, be they fair trade, red tractors or carbon labels, may influence the purchase, but won’t lead to any changes in behaviour. 
Simple messages are needed to cut through the clamour of labels. The Ariel ‘Turn to 30oC’ is perhaps one of the most successful pieces of brand communication on this agenda – a very clear message encouraging the customer to do something very simple.  It won’t save the planet on its own – but millions of people turning to 30 oC just might help.

Motivating consumers as a group – convincing them that their own simple actions can make a difference - is a key to successful sustainability communications.  Unilever’s relatively new ‘Clean Planet Plan’, currently promoted here in the UK through its Persil brand, has the power of collective action at its heart, trumpeting the strapline, ‘lots of small actions = a big difference’.

Two final tips for effective consumer communications.  The first is something the green movement has got horribly wrong in the past, and might be one reason public support for green issues has taken so long to muster.  Make people feel good.  Urging consumers to do their bit by scaring them and painting a more sustainable world as the equivalent of living in a cave with a candle, weirdly enough, doesn’t tend to make people want to change.  You stand much more chance of success by showing the links between using less energy and saving money, or recycling products and saving beautiful countryside from being used as a waste dump.
 
Finally, tell your customers about the success of your efforts. In celebrating the successes of Plan A, M&S is able to share a whole range of facts, from the money it has been able to give to charities to the thousands and thousands of recycled coat hangers.  Generally, this all helps to show that the M&S/consumer compact is making a difference.

We live in interesting times, and brands are definitely getting better at helping the consumer do the right thing.  But, so far, only a small handful have dared enter the ultimate hard-core sustainability territory, where the penny has dropped that actually, sustainability might just being about selling less stuff.  Reducing impacts in the product use phase does make a difference, but not if the absolute numbers of people using those products keeps going up.

For now, innovation still has a big role to play in giving us truly sustainable products and services, but that is only part of the answer. The other part is quite straightforward -  we simply need to consume less stuff.

An edited version of this article appeared in the Guardian Sustainable Business section.

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