Hubsphere

Sustainability: Why bother?

2012-01-06T03:38:00.000-08:00

Afew weeks back, I wrote a post aboutestablishing a meaningful business case for sustainability, and I said that Iwould follow that post up with another, outlining the core benefits ofsustainability programmes, so that they might act as inspiration and complimentthe original post. In the currenteconomic climate, sustainability agendas may tend to take a back seat. Itmay therefore be prudent to outline some tangible business advantages relatedto sustainability programmes.

The benefits of sustainability programmes tofirms generally fit into one of 3 categories: a) cutting costs, b) reducingrisk, or c) increasing revenue. I’lladdress each of these in turn.

Cutting costs

Perhapsmost obvious is the potential to cut costs associated with utilities andwaste. Monitoring the sources, times andcosts of electricity, water, waste and gas consumption or production allowsorganisations to work towards reducing them. It’s clearly important to develop a good understanding of usage in thiscase, but the potential benefits are easy to see. Costs can also be cut in transportation. Conducting conference calls and web meetings,or sourcing materials locally, is clearly environmentally friendly, and canbring significant savings too. Forexample, Marks & Spencer, the UK retailer, is currently overhaulingits supply chain, taking measures including stopping the purchase of suppliesfrom one hemisphere to ship to another. This is expected to save the retailer £175 million annually by fiscal2016.

Costsrelated to employee turnover can also be cut. As consumers become increasingly aware of the importance of sustainability,they do not wish to be employed by unsustainable firms. Sustainability can also include a broaderscope, encompassing elements of Health and Safety, and therefore reducing costsrelated to sick days. Johnson& Johnson, the US healthcare and pharmaceuticals company, has implemented anumber of wellness programmes, including smoking-cessation support. The company has saved $250 million onhealthcare costs, a return of $2.71 for every dollar spent on wellness from2002 to 2008.

Reducing Risk

Alongwith cost saving, perhaps equally clear and established is the potential forsustainability programmes to reduce business risk. This can be done via improved compliance,mitigation of potential future regulatory change, or by bolstering brand, imageand reputation. Around the world,governments and international institutions have taken steps towardsstricter environmental policy. JamesMurray, editor of BusinessGreen.com, outlines the need to prepare:

“...governments of different stripes have consistently accepted therecommendations of the Committee on Climate Change, despite fears that carbon intensive businesses could experience considerable short- tomedium-term pain as a result... Any business that does not have a clearstrategy in place to deal with this new reality is guilty of considerablenegligence.”

Thesame goes for brand image. In theopinion of Lee Daley, chairman and chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi UK:

“Companies which donot live by a green protocol will be financially damaged because consumers willpunish them. In the longer term, I do not think they will survive.”

Increasing revenue

Aswell as risk mitigation, sustainability programmes offer opportunities forgenerating increased revenue and market share. There is a big market out there for green products, despite the world’seconomic woes. Sales of GE’sEcomagination products, those tailored to environmental solutions, reached $18billion in 2009 – the size of a Fortune150 company all on its own. Revenuecan also be generated through productivity gains. Productivity can relate toimproved health and attendance, or to efficiency gains such as the reduction ofwaste and transport costs, both of which I mentioned earlier.

Theseare a few examples of the different benefits available to organisations thatchoose to adopt sustainable practices, and there are countless other examplesonline. All examples areorganisation-specific to some degree, but they can serve as inspiration forfirms to create their own, tailored objectives and to estimate outcomes. Guidance on identifying which impacts toinclude in a sustainability strategy was given in my last post, which can befound here:

http://hubsphere-en.blogspot.com/2011/11/prioritising-sustainability-building.html

Sourcesfor my examples in this post are listed below.

Thanksfor reading.

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Sources:

Porter and Kramer ‘The Big Idea: Creating SharedValue’ 2011

BusinessGreen.com

www.ft.com ‘Wave of eco-marketing predicted’12/02/2007

CSR in Eastern Europe

2011-12-09T02:16:00.001-08:00

In my experience, if not for their sense of humour, you canat least rely on the Germans to do things right. After all, this is a nationthat uses the phrase “Mach’s gut!” (“Do it well!”) in the same way in which theEnglish use “Goodbye!” So, when I plunged into an Internet research on CSR andsustainability related issues in Eastern European countries and was faced withthe disheartening mass of undigested and scattered information online, it wasnot surprising that my salvation came in the form of a German website. “CSRWeltWeit – German Business Global Citizen” is an information portal created bythe German Federel Foreign Office and Bertelsmann Stiftung. The aim of theportal is to promote social engagement by German companies abroad. Moreimportantly (for me), it also provides details on the CSR attitudes andinitiatives of various countries, including Eastern European ones!

I have a personal bias towards Bulgaria and Russia so thosewere the two countries I looked up first. They make a good pair for comparisonpurposes, too.

Bulgaria is one of the more recent members of the EU. With apopulation of about 7.5 million, it is a relatively small country. Its economicdevelopment is hampered by corruption in the public sector, a weak judiciaryand the presence of organised crime. Nevertheless, since Bulgaria joined theEU, NGOs and the Bulgarian government have been making more pronounced effortsto develop and encourage CSR. A nationalstrategy for CSR (2009-2013) has been adopted and various awards have beengiven to socially responsible companies in recognition of their efforts in thisarea. Although awareness of environmental issues is relatively poor, there area number of active environmental organisations focusing on renewable energysources, preservation and conservation of natural resources, etc. In addition,120 Bulgarian organisations are members of the UN Global Compact. This showsthat Bulgarian society and policymakers are slowly progressing on the path to amore sustainable future.

Russia needs little by way of introduction. Its CSR profile onCSR WeltWeit is sketched with somewhat critical strokes. It reports that“overall, the impression is that companies depict their CSR activities publiclyin order to attract media attention without actually being able to prove theirinvolvement.” It adds that “CSR concepts and strategies are in their infancy”and that there is a tendency to use the frequency with which social involvementof a company or a person is mentioned in the media as an indicator for theirsocial responsibility. It should be noted that there is no legislation orofficially approved public frameworks for CSR in Russia. However, a SocialCharter of Russian Business was initiated by the Russian business community in2004 and it has been signed by 230 organisations so far. In comparison, 30Russian partners are registered in the UN Global Compact, only 4 of which have providedreports and information concerning their CSR actions. It appears to be the casethat Russian organisations do not make good use of the existing internationalframework and structures. Perhaps this could be explained by the well-knownRussian tendency to do things its own way. Unfortunately, this means that thetype and scope of Russia’s involvement in CSR cannot be accurately assessed.

Amid growing recognition of the importance of CSR tobusinesses and societies across the world, stakeholders’ expectations forcompanies to demonstrate their commitment to the environment and society are becomingmore acute. Phrases like “sustainable business development”, “stakeholders’engagement” and “triple bottom line” are now part of the business jargon.Ignoring the issue is no longer an option. The above two outlines of the CSRpractices in Bulgaria and Russia demonstrate that a communal effort to make adifference and implement CSR practices renders the process more efficient (asis the case with EU’s influence on Bulgaria) but it also reveals the challengesarising from the lack of agreed upon regulation on both global and local level.Here is where politics stands in the way of sustainability.

Why did Steve Jobs not care about the environment?

2011-11-30T01:21:00.000-08:00

As a Mac fan, I have always wondered about this. Steve Jobs simply DID NOT REALLY CARE about the environment and other social matters. For those of you that still have doubts about this – I would point you to the numerous surveys that have been done on this topic by Greenpeace over the years (http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/climate-change/cool-it/Guide-to-Greener-Electronics/ ) as well as other campaigners for the respect of employee rights in developing countries (please view report from China Labor Watch http://chinalaborwatch.org/pro/proshow-149.html ). I am not saying here that other manufacturers of consumer electronics equipments are better or worse. It is just that I would have expected more from a firm setting trends and redefining the market.

So why is that? Surely design is about creating a rich experience between a human and an object. If we take a Gaian view of our world (in a nutshell, we are far more connected to Mother Earth that we believe – more like a branch is connected to a tree), then interacting with humans means interacting with nature all the time. Wouldn’t it make sense in this case to take a slightly broader view of the overall impact of an object and decide that 1) yes indeed we need these really cool products and slick features but 2) since that object may ultimately spent far more time in a junkyard that it will have spent with the user - then surely we want to mitigate its negative impacts as much as possible!? Fair enough, not everybody may agree with this extended definition of design and my Gaian views...

So let’s take another view of this. How abourt Yin and Yang? The principles are pretty simple: all good things are naturally balanced out with negative stuff to create something over time that is more...average. Hangovers and Coming Downs are pretty good example of this. Sometimes the negative impact also happens before the good stuff. All those that have been skiing in the French Alps during the busy holiday period will also agree that queuing for 45 minutes (sometimes with a hangover..) is hardly worth the 4 minutes down the slope. It is therefore not entirely surprising that elegant objects such as iPads and MacBook Airs (Yang) are designed without consideration for the environment (Yin) by cool people in California (Yang), produced by near slaves in China (Yin) – imported by plane (Yin) - sold in really flashy stores by really cool people (Yang) – used a few years by more cool people (Yang)– before ending in a dump where nasty chemicals and other dangerous materials will pollute the earth for centuries to come (Yin). There is definitely a lot of Yang in this - especially for a £200 premium on a laptop! - but also quite a bit of Yin...

As I am running of out of simplified philosophies, I guess it is time to come clean. Steve Jobs did not care about the environment because it just DOES NOT SELL. He had the most extraordinary flair for understanding what would make people go crazy for certain features and objects – and spend a lot of money on them - and clearly a more environmentally friendly computer just did not cut the mustard. Or not enough to put Jobs’s creativity to work anyway. Or maybe it was just too early for this. The fault is probably on our side. If we were really ready to accept paying a premium for cool looking and environmentally friendly machines, Jobs would have provided for us. For a profit, of course.

Prioritising sustainability: building a business case

2011-11-11T08:46:00.000-08:00

There are many potential barriers preventing organisations from starting or expanding sustainability programmes, whether they be due to cost, lack of understanding, or simply misaligned priorities. All of these can ultimately be overcome with a solid business case for sustainability. I’m going to start a two-part series of posts on the sustainability business case. In this first post, I hope to offer some useful guidance for deciding which indicators and impacts to include in your business case. The next post will then detail some generally perceived business benefits of sustainability programmes.

The case for sustainability can be made on an environmental, ethical, religious or moral basis. The business case is separable from these for having an ultimate financial bottom line. This does not mean that only short-term financial returns are taken into account, but rather that all benefits, regardless of time scale or impact type, are translated into their equivalent financial benefits. Beyond even that, the sustainability business case is about not just the balance sheet, but also longer term competitiveness and comparative advantage. In a world of increasing consumer awareness of sustainability-related issues, a strong sustainability agenda can not only save costs, but improve brand image, increase employee satisfaction and enhance a company’s value proposition.

The first step towards building a strong business case for sustainability programmes is deciding which impacts and issues to address. Organisations should identify what aspects of their operations have particular impact on an environmental or social level, where potential threats and opportunities lie, and what Key Performance Indicators are most relevant. The simplest way to do this is to conduct a company-wide impact assessment. This can be done using general principles from standards/guidelines such as BS EN ISO 14001, ISO 26000, or the GRI, or more simply by just logically and methodically considering all aspects of the business – the nature and scale of their impacts. Either way, a list of impacts and their relative importance should be drawn up at the organisation level. After that, the list of impacts should be reviewed with reference to their importance for different stakeholders. Stakeholders to consider may include:

· employees;

· company owners, shareholders and investors;

· partners;

· government and other regulators;

· and local communities.

With a list of organisation impacts now formed, based on scale and importance to stakeholders, organisations should next identify which impacts present opportunities for value creation for the business. I’ll go into more detail on this sort of thing in the next post, but typical opportunities may include minimisation of compliance risk, reputation and brand profile enhancement, and protection against rising commodity prices. Aligning the list of impacts with a set of relevant opportunities should help to clarify which impacts to target from a strategic perspective.

Now that you know what organisation impacts you want to address, and how doing so will bring benefits to your business, the final step is to decide how you plan to make those changes. There are a multitude of different potential programmes to choose from. Examples include:

· the appointment of a Green Team to oversee and implement actions,

· encouraging public transport use to reduce travel miles,

· installing efficient appliances to cut utilities costs,

· recycling to reduce waste to landfill,

· monitoring charitable contribution with a view to increasing it,

· or monitoring accidents with a view to reducing them

· etc. etc.

This step is a case of identifying which actions will be most effective for influencing the desired impacts, and which will perform best in terms of cost and resources.

So now you should have a set of actions which are relevant for your chosen impacts, which are in turn aligned to your organisation strategy and are most tailored to your operations. These are the actions which are best to add to your sustainability programme, and are therefore the ones you should be including in your business case. The next stage is to elaborate on exactly how these actions are going to benefit your organisation. In the next post, I’ll run through some typical benefits which you’ll be able to adapt and take inspiration from for your organisation. Until then, hopefully this post has helped clear up how to start defining your business case.

As always, thanks for reading.

The sustainability concept deconstructed: history, characteristics, prospects

2011-09-12T08:56:00.000-07:00

Recently I’ve been writing a White Paper at work, one section of which is a brief introduction to sustainability. It mentions a basic definition ofsustainability and lightly touches on the actual concept ofsustainability. As I was writing the section, I was reminded of an essay I wrote a couple of years ago on the same topic, whilst studying at University. So I dug up that old work and found loads more information. I couldn’t really add any of this to the White Paper as I was already battling page numbers and word counts as it was, but I’ve always hated having to cut out potentially good content. So, I thought it may be interesting to discuss some of the topics I discovered in this post, seeing as here I’m mercifully free of length constraints (within reason!).

In this post, then, I’m going to go back to basics. I’ll talk about the origins of sustainability, its meaning today, and some of the finer points of debate and principles surrounding the subject. Rather than just trying to define sustainability, as has been done a thousand times, instead I’ll be taking a definition, and breaking it down. Taking the definition as a proxy, I’ll be reviewing modern sustainability itself. Hopefully this will prove interesting for you, the reader, and leave me content having found a forum for what I think are some topics worth airing.

History

Firstly, sustainability is not an entirely new concept. Indeed, it has been applied in practice by indigenous populations around the globe for thousands of years. At its core, sustainability is about living within one’s means. When populations use resources in a non-destructive manner, they are sustainable. Therefore, it is arguable that nomadic tribes, taking only what they need from the jungle, forest or desert, moving on and only returning to an area once it has had time to replenish those resources, have been practicing sustainability principles for eons. It’s something we could learn from today, here in the UK. According to McLaren, Bullock and Yousuf, in their 1998 book Tomorrow’s World: Britain’s Share in a Sustainable Future, if the entire world consumed as much energy as the average Briton, we would need 7 extra planets. And we’re by no means the worst offenders. More recently, the concept of ‘sustainable yield’ has been applied to renewable resources such as fisheries and forests. Sustainable yield is the amount a resource may be exploited with no long-term effect to the amount ofthat resource that will be usable in the future. The precedents do not apply to ecology alone either, ‘sustainability’ has been a legal term for years too. If sufficient evidence is presented as to be convincing, then the advanced argument may be said to be a sustainable argument.

So there is a history to the concept of sustainability, but certainly it has gained momentum in relatively mainstream thought and in the form as we understand it today, namely that it applies to virtually everything, since the 1970s. Many readers will probably already be familiar with the definition of sustainability proposed by the Brundtland Report in 1987:

“sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”

WCED ‘Our Common Future’ 1987

Though an old definition now, it is still probably the most widely quoted and referenced, and arguably the most relevant. Its simple assertion neatly sums up the breadth, temporal emphasis and vagueness of sustainability as we know it today. It can be applied to virtually any context, but can equally we twisted to fit any agenda. There is an almost endless potential to deconstruct this definition, and in doing so analyse the state ofsustainability today.

The need to be holistic

The first notable characteristic is the incredibly general nature of the definition. With reference only to ‘progress’ and ‘needs’, there is an almost endless scope for application of this definition. This is no accident; it is meant to reflect the modern emphasis on the necessary ‘holistic’ nature of sustainability. If true sustainability is to be achieved thenis must be applicable to all persons, organisations and institutions in all contexts, and must itself imply the necessity of its application in all relevant situations. A general concept of sustainability is useless if a government department managing forests cannot apply it just as easily as an individual on a weekly shopping trip. Equally, a property developer must be able to apply sustainability to their community impact as well as to their sourcing of raw materials. It is applicable for multiple actors, or to one actor in a number of different operations. Modern sustainability must be holistic, since if an organisation is unsustainable in any one aspect, then it is unsustainablein the whole.

Weak versus strong sustainability

The second major characteristic is the focus on time. The definition compares the interests of the ‘present’ and the ‘future’. This temporal aspect is a key component of the modern sustainability concept. Obviously, the whole point of sustainability is to allow human, natural and economic processes to continue unaltered and unthreatened indefinitely though time. Over the years, however, there has been considerable debate, academically at least, over how to actually manage and conceptualise the temporal element.

Originally a concept governing investment management, ‘intergenerational equity’ has been applied in this context to explain how opportunities should be the same for all people at all times. Further attempts to marry sustainability with asset management have included the advancement of the concepts of natural and man-made capital. Viewing natural processes as assets means that the benefits they have for humankind are presented as the asset returns. This may be easily quantifiable monetarily, such as in the case of crop yields and fish stocks, or less well defined, as with the carbon sink effect associated with rainforests.

Disagreement has arisen, however, over whether natural and man-made capital is substitutable over time. A ‘weak sustainability’ viewpoint would argue that there can be full substitutability between the two, and therefore a process is sustainable as long as natural capital is replaced by man-made capital of at least equal value. Using this logic, pollution from agricultural fertilisers is OK so long as the cost of that damage does not exceed the increased revenues the farmers enjoy from using the fertiliser the first place. This approach is dubious at best and dangerous at worst, implying that even an unrelated trade, such as happily killing rhinos so long as we can keep building taller skyscrapers, is permissible. Many prefer to think in terms of ‘strong sustainability’ instead. This viewpoint posits that natural and man-made capital are not entirely substitutable – some amount of natural capital cannot be replaced. Even within this viewpoint there is considerable scope for interpretation and variance, depending on individual definitions of how much or what characteristics of natural capital are unsubstitutable. It may be permissible to exploit a certain amount of rainforest and turn it into paper, for example, but completely inexcusable to diminish any further the polar ice caps in the name of increased transport freedom.

Predicting the future

The final characteristic of the definition that I wanted to highlight is its focus on ‘needs’. This is an incredibly vague term. For example, it is not clear what the ‘needs’of the future may be, or how we should attempt to predict them, or indeed what the needs of the present are and how they should be quantified. The relative importance of present and future needs is equally not addressed by this definition and hence it is difficult to decide what future targets should be and at what present day cost, or what the present value of future gains is. Much has been debated about the potential for sustainability, and particularly climate change, objectives to be achieved in the future through scientific and technological advancements. But it is unclear how much faith we should put in these predictions, and even if you think such a scenario likely, it is unclear how that should translate to our behaviour today. Even if you’re certain that we’ll all be in hydrogen powered cars in 30 years time, does that mean we should drive around consuming oil to our hearts’ content today until hydrogen becomes a viable alternative? Some say we should. Why deprive ourselves of life’s pleasures whilst it’s likely the situation will resolve itself in the future anyway? This is a dangerous position to take because the situation will not simply resolve itself, if everyone relies on someone else then no progress would ever be made. But, from an economic perspective, this is a perfectly rational attitude. Why waste resources when you can free-ride on the work of others? It’s a powerful disincentive to act.

So some key components of sustainability today are its holistic nature, its temporal aspect, and the uncertainty surrounding its prospects. This post has briefly covered these topics, but there’s still more I wanted to mention. I haven’t even discussed the three pillars ofsustainability (economic, social and environmental for those keeping score), or sub-principles of modern sustainability (such as the ‘polluter-pays’, ‘precautionary’and ‘subsidiarity’ principles). Needless to say, I find dissecting the concept of sustainability a fascinating subject, and I can see myself coming back to this topic at some point in a future post. For now though, I’ll end it there and leave you with that food for thought! If you’ve got an opinion about any of the dimensions of sustainability I’ve described then please leave a comment below.

Thanks for reading.

Matt

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LINKS:

McLarren, Bullock and Yousuf. 1988. Tomorrow's World, Britain's Share in a Sustainable Future. Earthscan, Oxford.

The Brundtland Report

Are we a sustainable sustainability start up?

2011-08-23T09:55:00.000-07:00

Having created a start up to help other companies be more sustainable, this is a subject that is obviously fairly close to my heart. In this post I will look at our own business and try to bring you an honest answer to this question – or at least one that goes beyond anything our marketing literature would dare say or suggest.

We obviously need to start by defining what we mean by sustainable. To keep things short – and pertinent to our business, we will simply be looking at how we are managing our environmental impact and how we contribute to the social and economic good of the UK and French economies.

Let’s start with the latter. We mainly employ young and bright individuals that want to do great things, in a mostly very friendly working environment. We have more than 10 nationalities from various parts of the world on the team with at least 4 different religions (including Jedi!) – so we score OK on diversity. About 20% of the team are interns (not so good on not taking advantage of the UK economy...) but since we started the business 4 years ago we have consistently offered them decent intern packages (approx £1000/month) and approximately 50% of them have been hired at the end of their internship. I have not seen any metrics on this but my guess is that it is somewhat better than in much larger organisations.

As far as our impact on the economy is concerned, we do great: 80% of our outgoings are wage-related, so we spend a great deal of money on our hard working employees who in turn spend this money to enjoy life in London or Paris, support their families or both – basically re-injecting most of it in the local economy.

On the less positive side, the average age of our employees is less than 30. Not only does it make me feel quite old (I am 38), it also does not bode well with providing a platform where people with different skills from various age and social economic backgrounds can thrive, but start ups usually don’t score well here...

We work hard and we expect a lot from the team, and sometimes people just don’t fit. As we do not have the luxury to pay people who do not perform – or implement extensive training programs to help them reach their full potential, we sometimes need to make tough decisions and let people go. This has personally been one of my hardest challenges over the past few years...

One of the advantages of not having a big budget for offices and business travel activities is that we keep our environmental impact pretty low. Most business travel activities are done through train travel (in the last 4 years I can count on my fingers the number of times I have used my car for work). We are also lucky enough to be operating in two cities connected with the Eurostar – powered by nuclear energy – and with residual CO2 emissions compensated by carbon credits. As far as international business travel is concerned, this is simply as good as it gets...

Everybody in the team is commuting to work by foot, bicycle, train or tube. A number of employees are also working from home on a regular basis – improving their overall work life balance while putting less strain on already very crowded transport systems.

On the waste side, we have implemented a recycling scheme in our French and UK offices. In any case, our waste is kept to a minimum (mainly cardboards, plastic bottles, some paper) due to the very nature of what we do. Very little use is made of the printer (in London we only have one for a 14-person office), staff is used to reading documents online and wherever possible we have implemented paperless processes. We could improve on recycling our IT equipment though as we have a couple of old laptops and a few phones lying around in cupboards. Interestingly enough for a software development house, we do not have any servers in-house, they are all hosted by third-party providers. To be fair, we have little idea how well these guys are managing their overall environmental impact, but we hope that the scale of their operations provides some genuine efficiency when it comes down to energy consumption...

When it comes down to our own energy consumption we face the standard “small business” situation. Our UK office is part of a 4-floor 7,000sq ft office block built in the seventies. Not only is it probably the ugliest building in Wimbledon, but it also leaks quite badly...

We have done and are still doing some good stuff there: we have asked the landlord to remove half of the fluorescent tubes in our office to reduce our energy consumption relating to lighting, we have a small AC unit that we use on very rare occasions and we switch off virtually all equipment at night. I am sure we could probably get better at this – personally, as has been pointed out by our resident Green Champion a number of times, I could probably get a little bit better at not filling up the kettle to the rim – but all in all we are doing quite well. Our main “small business” issue is that we do not control at all what goes on in the rest of the building: the lights in the stairwell, the 40°C temperature in the shared meeting rooms, the old windows that could surely do with some insulation, the list goes on... Over and above the fact that the landlord does not really care about this – from an environmental and financial standpoint (why bother doing all these things for savings of at most £500 a year?) – we do not have the time to bother them relentlessly so that they take action on these items. We are simply too busy responding to proposals, making sales presentations, developing ever cooler software features on our platform etc...

There is no black and white situation when it comes to sustainability, just various shades of grey. As far as Hubsphere are concerned, we definitely bear a light greyish tone, somewhere behind businesses operating in slick eco-offices with bamboo-built laptops powered with renewable energy, but still much at the forefront of a majority of SMEs and big businesses.

I tend to reassure myself with the fact that we spend most of our time trying to convince small and large organisations to build sustainability into their processes, and surely all these efforts must be taken into account regarding our overall impact, ultimately ensuring that we are a force for good within our corporate landscape.

Welcome

2011-08-16T05:44:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome to the first ever post on the Hubsphere blog! My name is Matt Hayes, and I am a sales and marketing professional at Hubsphere. There’s more in the ‘Authors’ section on the right, but the short version is that I graduated June 2010, then travelled for 8 months, before joining the Hubsphere team on my return. Hubsphere is a software provider for Sustainability Performance Management, where I’ve been working for 6 weeks. For more information on the work we do, see the links below.

This blog is intended to offer an insight into the modern sustainability business environment. I will offer my perspective on the industry as a relatively new participant, and specifically from a sales and marketing point of view. Ronan Kerouedan, the founder of Hubsphere, will also post on this blog, relating his experiences operating a sustainability business through the toughest economic conditions since WW2, and sharing thoughts and opinions on industry developments.

More broadly, the blog will also be used to examine the nature of sustainability today, both academically and within the business context, and try to offer advice relating to the industry. The blog is aimed at other sustainability professionals, managers interested in improving the sustainability credentials of their businesses, or indeed anyone else interested in sustainability issues and trends. Other entrepreneurs who have started their own business like Ronan, or other sales and marketing professionals like myself, may also find this blog informative, regardless of which industry they operate in.

This is intended to be a collaborative forum for discussion of sustainability business issues. Readers are invited to join the discussion on this site through comments and by sharing their own blogs. Hubsphere also have a LinkedIn group, titled ‘Building Sustainability Into Business Processes’. Any readers of this blog are warmly invited to join that group, where issues raised in the blog will be examined further, and to enable readers to contribute their own related discussions and share their backgrounds.

So that’s the plan. But enough about how the blog will work, the best way to demonstrate what I’ll be talking about is to start talking!

When I talk to people outside the industry about my work, often I am asked whether businesses see sustainability as a priority. There is still a general perception that a sustainability agenda is a luxury for businesses, and certainly something unlikely to be budgeted for in the current economic climate.

This is probably the foremost challenge I face in a sales role within a sustainability business. In the sustainability industry, success relies not just on convincing prospects of the value of your product or service specifically, but of the value in committing to a sustainability agenda at all. This need for an effective double-sale is not unique to sustainability, but it is incredibly pervasive in this industry. Of course, increasingly businesses do see the value in operating a sustainability agenda as environmental concerns continue to impact on consumer decision-making, government implements a growing number of environmental policies, and word spreads about successful corporate sustainability campaigns.

The fact is, a sustainability agenda simply is worth the effort. Much has been written about the business drivers behind sustainability and its role as a strategic consideration. Arguments tend to focus on environmental and institutional risk minimisation, efficiency gains and associated cost savings, competitive advantage, and brand value and reputation. There is a fair consensus surrounding this kind of analysis, and I will go into greater detail about the evidence supporting it in a later post.

Explaining potential benefits is only one side of the coin, however. The other is demonstrating that actually not that much effort is required to obtain those benefits. Many case study examples use large organisations with at least a fair budget, and particularly SMEs may presume therefore that such solutions are not obtainable for them. In reality, however, meaningful behavioural change can be achieved relatively easily and cheaply. Again, I’ll discuss this more at a later date, but suffice it to say that my experience with both SMEs and large organisations shows that significant results are certainly achievable on any scale and with any budget.

Already I’ve touched on themes such as the degree of take-up of sustainability policies, the value of such policies, and perceptions regarding the relevance of sustainability agenda for large firms and for SMEs. These are all topics which I will return to in later posts, and I’m very much looking forward to discussing them in greater depth. I hope this post has given you some food for thought, and that you will check out my future posts. Thanks for reading!

Matt

LINKS

More info on the Hubsphere Sustainability Performance Management platform:

www.hubsphere.com

The LinkedIn discussion:

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4046632&goback=%2Eanb_4046632_*2