Find out the latest news and innovations in business sustainability. These articles are from trusted resources and can give some great insight to common practices around the world.
By Doug White, Whitestone Partners
It’s become very fashionable and trendy to go “green.” There is considerable social pressure to be “green.” People spend money to conform. We recycle even though it costs time and there is no economic return to us. People invest in solar panels even though the payback is so long that it can’t conceivably be cost effective. Being “green” may seem expensive, but there’s certainly a social, if not a moral imperative, so we pay the price.
By Steve Caballero, U.S. Alliance Partners
If you own a small or medium sized business and you think “sustainability” is just for the big boys, you are wrong. I hope I’m not coming on too strong here, but you need to hear the tough love. There is a wave coming toward your shores and it will hit the beaches whether you are ready for it or not. This wave is being pushed by winds coming at us from all directions:
By James B. Godshall, Total Quality Institute
In the words of my father, “The most uncommon thing in the world is common sense.”
People tend to either make things more complex and difficult than needed, or over simplified to the point of ineffectiveness. We see these dynamics in many attempted organizational change processes. To employees, management seemingly wakes up one morning and declares there is a new company initiative, and everyone is expected to fully participate. An outsider can almost hear the foxholes being dug because everyone in the organization knows that this too shall pass. All they have to do is lay low for a couple of months and stay out of the line of fire.
By Grant Tate, the bridge, ltd
Ask the average person on the street to define sustainability, they’ll probably say, “Oh, it’s that green stuff where they try to recycle or save energy.” Indeed, many people including leaders of our businesses, government, and other organizations think of sustainability as strictly relating to the environmental movement. But, Wikipedia defines sustainability as, “the capacity to endure.” Given that definition, what does it mean to organizations? What is a sustainable organization?
By Betsy Allen, Gaining Results, Inc.
Imagine being asked to join an effort to create the very first strategic plan for the County in which you live, pay taxes, and vote for county officials. This request stimulated a conflicted reaction. I was alarmed there had never been a collaborative strategic perspective applied to running our county and thrilled to be part of initiating such an effort.
By Robyn Rickenbach, Springboard International Inc.
In a recent New York Times article, the author Bryan Burrough compares the “knot of issues that have come to be known as ‘sustainability’ … ” to other global issues that “went on for so long that [we] finally gave up [following them.]” In other words, the notion of sustainability is thrown around with different meanings for different people, akin to how people use the word Kleenex to mean any sort of tissues. Depending on whom you ask, sustainability might mean very different things.