Sustainability and Corporate Consciousness

The INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR LEARNING (IIL) is launching the largest PM Leadership virtual conference in the world tonight, November 14, at 9 PM EDT. And it is FREE. The conference is designed to help celebrate INTERNATIONAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT DAY, a global recognition of PM Excellence.

Nearly 50,000 professionals have signed up to view 35 video presentations by world leaders in leadership, program management, and organizational management. I’d like to invite you to view my presentation, “Trust, Ethics, and Values: Critical Foundation for Success,” then share your thoughts with me on live chat.

Find me at the Project, Program and Portfolio Management virtual booth on November 15 during the following times:

9am – 10am EDT
11am – 1pm EDT

Register now at http://engage.vevent.com/index.jsp?eid=1022&seid=665.

Hope to see you there!

Greg

Register Now

I was thinking about my last blog post. I said I was frustrated, but I should also honor those who are making the change.

I actually speak about the success stories often in my speeches throughout the world. The Coca-Cola Company, BMW AG, Whole Foods, IKEA, and many more have been the central discussion points as I have tried to continue a global conversation about corporate awakening. No doubt, there are many we can celebrate. In fact, BMW AG is the head of their super sector in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. It demonstrates their commitment and passion for sustainability.

But I can’t help thinking that there are millions of companies in the world that just don’t get it. In the U.S. alone there are 8 million registered businesses with a payroll, yet globally there are less than 50,000 companies that are reporting some effort in corporate responsibility. Sure, there are a few more that don’t report on it, but let’s face it—the vast majority of businesses and organizations are doing very little to solve our looming crisis.

I am sitting here thinking that it is time to stop pandering those who are slow to react. In fact, it is time to enact the old cliché of tough love.  The producing or servicing organizations of the world today need to be awakened to the urgency. They need to “feel the heat” and understand that the heat they feel is the burning platform under them—and they need to recognize that it will burn through and destroy their organizations unless they act now, not 20-30 years in the future.

I know that it sounds harsh, and maybe it is, but I just feel a bit frustrated about all of this. I have read many publications on the need for transformation, but the literature and the articles seem to rely on honoring those who have made the leap and not enough on how to do it, or enough to stimulate the small and medium-sized businesses to transform themselves.

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This is the little village I stayed in on the last night of my motorcycle trip…it is in the district of Hope, in the province of British Columbia, Canada.  

This is where we should always reside…especially when we begin to build our future.

-Greg

According to UN projections, 2050 will dawn with over 9.5 billion people on the planet. The very good news about that situation is that prosperity is pulling more people out of poverty than ever before in man’s history. This means that nearly 40% of the 2050 population will be in emerging middle classes around the globe. Again, to put that into numbers, the middle classes in the world will reach nearly 4 billion people, vs. 1.2 billion today.

This outcome from prosperity means that 4 billion people will have the expectation of receiving many of the same things that the middle classes of today receive: cars, smart phones, flat screen TVs, more clothes, food selections, and more. This will translate to a dramatic increase in consumption, with the greatest growth in consumption in the ASEAN countries.

Too, mankind has already reached a new “first” in its history. For the first time, more than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities. In fact, the projection is that the emerging middle classes will continue to be a primary demographic of urban population, with people pouring into the cities, seeking the necessary opportunity of prosperity that the middle classes desire. Most futurists say that the cities of 2050 have not been built yet, and yet they must be built to accommodate this human flow rate, with the necessary infrastructure, support, and jobs to continue to build this burgeoning middle class.

The bad news is that many planetary-watch organizations predict that planet Earth is not capable of providing the necessary resources to meet this demand. This is what I would call a “planetary crisis.” We have already reached the capacity level for food, water, and energy and production capacity. The great cities of today, particularly in the ASEAN countries, are bulging with capacity and overburdening the infrastructure of the cities. And many companies are beginning to realize that the unlimited supplies of raw materials that existed in the last century don’t exist now, and clearly won’t exist in the future.

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(Thank you, Yogi Berra… or Donella Meadows?)

A friend of mine just sent me an excerpt from Harvard Business Review’s email newsletter, Morning Advantage. I was taken aback by it since the quote was from a special report entitled Limits to Growth, written in 1972 by MIT faculty. The authors were Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III. The four were systems specialists who were studying the impact between earth’s systems and human systems. In short, they were looking at demand and consumption and waste, versus supply and regeneration. The comment in the Morning Advantage is clear. Read on.

18 Years to Go

In 1972, researchers at MIT released the seminal — and frightening, and controversial — report, Limits to Growth, predicting a catastrophic collapse in 2030, followed by decades of slow decline. The basic gist: if we continued to consume non-renewable resources at our usual pace, then sometime in the mid-21st century we’d experience an economic crash followed by rapid population decline. While some greeted this wake-up call as the nerdy version of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, many prominent economists excoriated the report’s methodology and findings.

Now, 40 years later, Australian physicist Graham Turner has looked back at some of their data. Comparing actual results against the MIT team’s computer modeling, he looked at rates of industrial output, pollution, natural resources, and population growth, among other measures from 1970 to 2000. This alarming chart in Smithsonian shows that, for that thirty-year span, the MIT team’s projections were almost spot-on.

Excerpt from Morning Advantage, April 9, 2012; Harvard Business Review

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I mentioned in a previous post that I attended the Quality in Sustainability Conference in Anaheim, California. The conference was part of the World Conference on Quality and Improvement (WCQI), sponsored by the American Society for Quality (ASQ). The conferences were great, and I met some wonderful people who believe in sustainability and the need for organizations to step up and take the lead in solving many global problems.

However, I was really struck by one individual—another “hope builder”—by the name of Majora Carter. Majora is the entrepreneur who coined the phrase “Greening the Ghetto.”  She was the driver behind the initiative Sustainable South Bronx, which turned around a devastated area of Bronx, New York into a thriving community (www.ssbx.org). Go check this out. It is a demonstration of how vision, belief, a sense of real community, and creation of green collar jobs can breed incredible success. She essentially went back to her roots, said “I can change this area and make it thrive,” and created a miracle. Check out her speeches on TED. You will quickly see why Majora is so special.

So, I had the unique opportunity to have breakfast with her, along with a few others whose belief in a sustainable future is part of their DNA. For those of us at the breakfast table, we all considered Majora the star because of how well-regarded and recognized she is. In fact, you could say I was a little giddy to meet her. Just to be sure you don’t think I am a bit off on my hormones, let me tell you about her.  She received a Liberty Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the New York Post, was described as “The Green Power Broker” by the New York Times, and named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company magazine in 2010.  Okay,can you see why I was giddy?

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True story time…

One of my friends, Robert, was helping a colleague, Jim, through a very difficult time in his life due to loss of work and looming financial challenges ahead. Jim was consumed with the difficulty in his life, wrapped up in a very small world of grief, and his daily calls to Robert were filled with monologues of “Why me?”

Robert decided that he would ask Jim to do something different.  He said, “Jim, to get you over the hump in this period in your life, do me a favor; spend the next two days walking around and observing everything around you and just look for hope. Then come back to me in a couple of days and let me know what hope looks like.” Jim’s first reaction was that Robert had, well, gone over the edge. However, long-term respect for one another made Jim go out and try it.

I am sure that you can figure out the result. Within a few days, Jim had seen hope all around him—individuals faced with the same dilemma, acting and working on clear solutions. They “dropped the rocks” in their backpacks and started to pick up the pace of working on solutions—lots of them. Jim began working on his own solutions, one day at a time, one step at a time. It was a fabulous example to me.

I use this often in my own life and with my own challenges, sustainability being one of the big ones. It could be easy to say that the glass is half empty and we will never fill it, so why try?—or we can see how many people around us are making small steps that are making a big difference. Let me tell you about someone I met recently who fits the “hope” model.

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