Supersizing Responsibility, Not Portions

According to UNEP, 30 percent of global fish stocks have already collapsed – meaning that they now yield 10 percent or less of their previous potential.  I also know full well that some one billion people around the world, most of them from developing countries, rely on seafood as their primary source of protein and a major source of their sustenance.

Responsible fisheries management and improved practices here in the U.S. and around the world are a good start and help alleviate some of my guilt.  Fish farms also have a role to play in meeting the world’s growing demand for seafood, but they are not without their challenges or critics.  And while I’m intrigued by the promise of genetically altered fish, there are many unanswered questions and many associated risks still to be addressed.

Although my concerns about the health and vitality of the world’s fisheries are rooted in a desire for ecological sustainability and preserving biodiversity, a connection between overfishing and societal health and wellness (in America at least) is becoming increasingly clear.  I’m talking specifically about portion sizes and how (and how much) we consume.  The seafood platters I saw this summer were huge – as big, or bigger, than I can ever remember.  This trend isn’t limited to fish, and it certainly isn’t limited to Cape Cod.

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Cause Sponsorship: The New Model

The way corporations sponsor causes is changing dramatically. Sponsors are moving from investing in “properties” that deliver quantifiable ROI in terms of impressions, interactions, and sales to developing proprietary social programs that deliver qualitative ROI such as employee and customer trust and engagement.

Here’s the old paradigm: your corporation identifies a cause property (i.e. an event such as a Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure or the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation’s CIBC Run for the Cure), pays a sponsorship fee to the related charity, and then spends, on average, at least 75 cents per dollar of the sponsorship fee on activating the event through a combination of internal and external marketing and communications.

Here’s the new model: your corporation identifies a social issue that is aligned with its overall community investment strategy and of high relevance to employees and external stakeholders, you develop a proprietary social program and secure one or more charitable organizations as partners, you activate the social program at a much lower cost through direct participation that delivers real engagement and through social media that delivers more reach and is seen as more authentic.

Here’s a great example: This summer, Pepsico’s Frito-Lay division launched a mobile greenhouse designed to help Americans who have never been to a farm learn more about where their food comes from and interact with potato farmers and plants. The Lay’s brand will give away approximately 8,000 individual basil plants to people who participate in the farm experience.  And, at each city stop, the brand will donate potato, tomato, onion, pepper and basil plants to non-profit groups that are creating and maintaining community gardens. The Mobile Farm Tour stopped in New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas.

I’ll be talking more about this important shift at a presentation for the Sponsorship Marketing Council of Canada on September 23rd.

Vivi’s Pick of the Week – Organic Hero Tee

Go Gently Baby’s Hero Tee! 100% Organic and totally adorable. Perfect for the little hero in your life. Click the image to shop Go Gently Baby on Vivi.

“This little Hero is saying the words, “Faster than a recycling truck, Able to spread peace in a single bound, and on a mission to help children in need”. He is a wonderful little character who has big plans to do good things. Made from 100% organic cotton jersey, screened with water based ink.” – From Go Gently Baby

The “Vivi Store,” as my niece calls it, is a small clothing shop (located in Ho-Ho-Kus NJ) for babies and children, designed around the concept of living green, reducing waste and supporting socially responsible companies. Everything at Vivi is made with natural fibers. We have a mix of lines that are either organic, handmade or made with recycled fabric. And most of our designers are doing something to give back to the global community. Whether it’s in the structure of their company and how it’s run, in their philosophy of giving back or in their efforts to reduce their carbon footprint, they are all producing fantastic products that are healthy for the planet and for the children who wear them. As consumers, we really do have the power to change the world for the better just by choosing to support the companies that are working to do just that.

Learn more about us…

So You Want to Start a Green Business

According to Glenn Croston, author of “75 Green Businesses You Can Start to Make Money and Make a Difference” believes that it’s a combination of business savvy and a commitment to the future that defines the successful green entrepreneur.”Ecopreneurs have got to believe in the importance of working for a greener future and a sustainable economy,” he says. It’s also important to “be a solid business person, someone who knows a good product and can deliver it.”

Within our sustainability consulting, we’re frequently greeted with questions pertaining to starting a green business: 

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Cultivating Talent with Sustainability-Based Incentives

Many believe we are fast approaching a turning point towards economic recovery, yet most businesses will be emerging from these leaner times resource limited.  As a result, engaging and motivating the organization will become even more critical to drive efficient productivity. 

Talent management encompasses the entire spectrum of sourcing, attracting, developing, retaining, and measuring the performance of organizational talent.  Our sustainability consulting has observed talent management leaders utilizing progressive measures to meet employee interests and ensure business sustainability alignment across the organization. 

So what do current and prospective employee’s want?

•    Employees want rewarding and meaningful work
•    Employees want to make a difference
•    Employees want growth and development opportunities

And let’s not forget about pay!  Traditionally the underlying objective of a compensation structure has been to attract and retain quality staff.  With the need to get more from today’s workforce, payment structures have to do more. 

With the myriad of compensation strategies available, how can you be assured your structure is driving the right behavior?  Performance pay is a structure that provides bonus pay based on certain performance criteria. It is a widely used in particular industries, based on the concept that pay can motivate job performance, increase employee effectiveness, and align business goals. Research suggests that pay can do this when it’s linked to actual performance.  This model offers several potential advantages:

•    Ties compensation to performance
•    Rewards the right behaviors and builds business sustainability alignment.
•    Encourages leadership and self-management
•    Encourages innovation

Our professional consulting realizes that there is no one a single incentive structure right for all business.  However linking compensation to specific sustainability concepts, businesses have the potential to align the sustainability goals of the organization and motivate behavior.

Understanding Shorebank: A community development bank passes

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT stories for the nonprofit sector last week crept by with nary a mention in the press about its connection to nonprofits. ShoreBank, the nation’s preeminent community development bank, finally succumbed to a long spiral of financial troubles. ShoreBank will now be acquired and managed by a new entity, the Urban Partnership Bank, pulled together with investment support from major financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase among others.

This iconic institution, with a current asset value of $2.2 billion, is almost four decades old. ShoreBank’s establishment in 1973 preceded the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, passed in 1975, and the Community Reinvestment Act, signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. The message of the Community Reinvestment Act was that banks had to cease their destructive, neighborhood-destabilizing, discriminatory lending practice known as “redlining.” ShoreBank was out to prove—successfully for most of its existence—that community reinvestment was also good business. For most of ShoreBank’s history, business was good, and after its first few years, it was making profits and expanding.

But community development banks are no less immune to the economic downturn than their commercial peers, especially if they are located in Illinois and invest primarily in the state. One of out seven bank failures in this recession has occurred in Illinois, with ShoreBank’s extensive holdings in Chicago’s South and West Side neighborhoods, making it a strong candidate for failure during the economic downturn. The FDIC’s seizure of ShoreBank and seven others last week brought the list of official bank failures so far in 2010 to 118, compared to 140 in all of 2009 and only 25 in 2008 (these figures don’t count banks that avoided FDIC actions due to last minute acquisitions or mergers).

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How Do You Measure Sustainability?

How do you measure sustainability ? I have been fortunate to gain a little preview of the input supporting the soon-to-be-released report offering answers to this very question. The report has been compiled by  Ethical Corporation and is called “Social and economic impact: measurement, evaluation and reporting: A must-have guide for companies operating in emerging markets and vulnerable communities”. This  report promises to offer answers to many of the questions that most CSR practitioners and observers have been seeking. If only there were a way to capture all of a Company’s sustainability impacts in a clear and consistent measurement methodology, we would all be much wiser, and probably, much more sustainable. The Ethical Corp report promises to include ”a break-down and analysis of impact measurement methods, tools and processes currently available” based on insights from a survey of 116 CSR professionals worldwide, 30 in-depth interviews, a review of 60 Sustainability Reports and will include case studies from Henieken, Vodafone. SAB Miller, Tata, Unilever, Nike and more. There have been some spectacular impact assessments produced, such as Unilever’s economic impacts in Indonesia, published in 2005 and further studies in South Africa and Vietnam.  In fact, Unilever measure quite a lot, including their water footprint and more.

This focus on metrics and measurement is certainly welcome, as, beyond carbon footprinting and community giving, most companies haven’t a clue as to how to calculate their sustainability impacts.

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Business Sustainability: Optimizing the Flow

Have you ever observed a once thriving business, product line, or an innovative idea suddenly begin to falter and eventually disappear?  Often viewed as a failure in management or neglected operations, we instead ask the question: was sustainability an engrained part of this company’s strategies and operations?

Business sustainability has traditionally been put into the box of environmental or social action.  While these are certainly two very important areas of focus, business sustainability is really about taking action to maintain the on-going health and profitability of the company. 

Also viewed in terms of risk, sustainable business actions are really activities which have a positive impact on the flow of money and resources through an organization. 

Think of it as a forward flow of product and a backward flow of money.  Business sustainability action increases the volume, efficiency, and stability of product flow out, bringing more money in.  At the same time, applied sustainability concepts effectively improve internal and external business practices to slow the flow of money out.

•    Increase responsiveness to customer expectations.
•    Expand into new markets with innovative products and services.
•    Increase internal and external process efficiencies.
•    Increase employee productivity.
•    Reduce procurement and supply chain expenses.
•    Reduce business and operational waste.
•    Reduce environmental and social impacts.

In far too many cases, business models and strategies become misaligned with some basic business sustainability concepts.  Cash flow eventually slows and may even come to a stop.
By regularly reevaluating the company’s business model and its applied sustainability concepts, sustainable organizations are able to respond to the critical questions affecting the flows through the business.

The strong voice of the CSR community in response to WSJ’s “case”

It is now exactly 7 days ago that a storm in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) world broke out over an article by Aneel Karnani published in the Wall Street Journal titled: ”The case against Corporate Social Responsibility”.

In the article he argued that the idea of companies having a duty to address social ills is not just flawed but that it also makes it more likely that we’ll ignore the real solutions to these problems.

All week last week the reactions to this article from around the CSR community flooded in. People tweeted on Twitter, shared on Facebook and emailed from one practitioner to the the other arguing for and against this point of view. Some reactions where in support of Mr Karnani but the majority where criticizing the simplicity of his argument and absolutely disagreed with his assessment that CSR in itself as a business principle was flawed.

This is a list of some of the reactions by authors and websites:

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The Endangered Species of Wood

In order to help green building professionals avoid inadvertently using endangered species in green building projects, the Pharos team has just added a section to the Pharos Chemical and Material Library (CML) that deals specifically with trees and other biobased materials. The CML now includes over 800 entries for tree species or groups of species with reference to any applicable warnings of threats to their survival or their habitats. Species warnings indicate the Pharos system’s prioritization of concern based upon the degree of the threat to the species.  One of the most widely accepted criteria sets for rating the threat to endangered species is the Red List Categories and Criteria prepared by the Species Survival Commission of the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources).  Pharos structures its prioritization of the relative significance of threats based upon the IUCN categories.

Warnings are categorized using a colored-flag system, similar to the one used in the CML for chemical warnings:

• Black – Extinct (EX) or Critically Endangered (CE) – species is extinct or facing an extremely high risk of extinction.  Species that have been listed as extirpated in a US state (locally extinct) are also included in this category.

• Red – Endangered (EN) – species is facing a facing a very high risk of extinction. Pharos also places most endangered species warnings from organizations that do not use the IUCN classification system into this category.

• Orange – Vulnerable (VU) – species is facing a high risk of extinction. Frequently referred to as Threatened.

• Yellow – Near Threatened (NT) – species is not yet considered vulnerable or endangered, but is close to qualifying for or is likely to qualify for a threatened category in the near future. Species not yet evaluated (NE) are included here.  Data deficient species (DD) are also included in this category where more information is required and the possibility that future research will show that threatened classification is appropriate.

• Green – Least Concern (LC) – species is still widespread and abundant

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