Daily Archives: March 2, 2007

Life Study – Continous personal development

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If continous improvement for organizations is important for growth and competitive advantage, then what about people. Especially people in the growing area of Sustainability, it is important to continously learn and keep up to date with the latest thinking. This needs to be supplemented by ongoing action at the work level.

Emma Clarke writes about this need for purchasing and supply chain professionals, however, the ideas can be used by anybody.

Professor Richard Lamming…claims that if senior purchasers want to drive change, instead of simply achieving best practice, they must take a more rigorous approach to continuing professional development. “Most development comes from consultants,” he says. “But wouldn’t it be nice if companies could do it all for themselves?”

Personal development begins with reading, says Lamming. “You have to create space to read. There’s no substitute.”

In addition to SM, professionals can subscribe to CPO Agenda, the international business review aimed at chief procurement officers and senior purchasing and supply chain executives. Broader business titles include Harvard Business Review, a research-based magazine.

Academic articles can also be of use, adds Lamming. While many of them may not be written for a practitioner audience, readers could still find the kernel of the idea, particularly if they have a masters degree.

Another way of tapping into the output from academia is by getting involved in a local university’s research projects. “It doesn’t cost a penny to become a case study or to put a person on to a think tank,” says Lamming. “This will help put purchasers into contact with new areas.”

Senior purchasers should also recognise that they do not have to be the originator of all new thought, says Sutherland: “I have never had a good idea in my life,” he claims. “I have always been reliant on networking to find out what other people’s ideas were.”

And, for most, networking is the key.

Read the above article again replacing purchasing for ‘sustainability’ and it is ready for ‘us’.

There are some nice ideas in that article. For me personally, I have the following strategy.

When I took the decision to work in the Sustainability field, the first thing I did was to update myself with the work in that area and this was achieved mainly through academic courses and reading books.

I took the “environmental economics” course in my MBA which provided me with the basic principles used in the green world from the Stern Review to Carbon trading and Kyoto. This was supplemented by a practical self-study model in Environmental Accounting focussing the life cycle of products and the office environment. I added Project Management and Entrepreneurship to the mix to back up my experience with academic knowledge to start “green projects” in various types of organizations in the future.

Also, in all the courses I completed in the MBA (strategy, finance, leadership and change etc) I always concentrated on sustainability when trying to understand the concepts and figuring out a way to apply the knowledge.

A second supplement to the academic courses is books. I read the following books.

  • “The Ecology of Commerce” by Paul Hawken
  • Natural Capitalism by Hawken, Lovins and Lovins
  • Cradle to Cradle by McDonough and Braungart
  • Capitalism at the Crossroads by Stuart Hart
  • Mid-Course Correction by Ray Anderson

    • More on the way,

  • “The Natural Step for Business” by Nattrass and Altomare
  • “Biomimicry” by Benyus

    • Adding to this principles and ideas, I am reading business strategy and sustainability books.

  • Corporate Environmental Management by Richard Welford
  • The Sustainability Advantage by Bon Willard
  • Sustainable Business Development by David L. Rainey

    • One source of book ideas was my personal interaction with Amory Hunter Lovins who provided me with her reading list for her MBA class. (thanks Amory Hunter!)

    Supplementing this is general reading of news articles, academic articles, searching and news alerts through Google News, sustainability blogs etc.

    My work provides with a platform to test some of the ideas and principles. However, it is a mighty challenge to say the least.

    In the end, this blog is providing me an avenue to bring all of this together. It is providing a medium to synthesize by learning and opening up new avenues of knowledge.

    The quest of sustainability is also the quest of personal improvement. Excellence in one area will lead to excellence in another. I have a long way to go but I believe I am on the right path.

    Learn from the Leaders

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    GreebBiz.com reports that “Strategy consultancy SustainAbility, CSR communications agency Flag, and data management system providers credit360 created a partnership to develop Learn from the Leaders, which contains benchmark research into sustainability reporting excellence. “

    The database, called “Learn from the Leaders” contains more than 350 specific examples of reporting best practice drawn from over 100 of the world’s leading reporters including BT, Nike, Ford, BP, Rio Tinto and Shell.

    “Extending reporting to help deliver real solutions to sustainability challenges has tremendous market potential and should be at the heart of any decision-making processes about transparency and stakeholders’ expectations.”

    Each report in the database has been assessed across four principal categories: governance and strategy, management, presentation of performance and accessibility and assurance. The database offers users an assessment of how well a particular company explains and evaluates its sustainability activities, integrates sustainability into its business strategy and how successful its reporting approach is in meeting the needs of key audiences.

    The quality of reporting has improved significantly since SustainAbility published the first Global Reporters survey ten years ago, as companies recognise that sustainability strategies, performance and reporting can and will deliver value and competitive benefits.

    A free trial offer for one week is available after which it will cost US$7,500 for a Annual Subscription with a 10% early bird discount and a further 15% discount for registrations from emerging markets.

    For people in reporting world this should be a invaluable tool.

    Private Equity and Green Business Strategy

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    James Murray at Green Business News writes an interesting article on Private Equity from the merit of Green Business Strategy.

    The Private Equity world has taken the world by storm from the America’s to UK, Europe, to Australiasia. There is growing concern in different parts of the world on the dangers of private equity especially with their cost-cutting and job destroying strategy nicknamed “The Barbarians at the gate”. In Australia for example, the bid for Qantas is raising questions all the way to the Prime Minister.

    However, Murray concentrates on the private equity vs public companies and its effect on taking green decisions.

    But amidst all the talk about the different levels of job security, innovation and growth provided by opposing ownership structure little attention has been paid to which model is most likely to deliver environmental sustainability.

    Advocates of public ownership argue that being listed on the stock exchange with its quarterly reports and numerous regulations encourages environmentally responsible behaviour. Moreover, the recent increase in shareholder activism – as evidenced by organisations such as Ceres – has introduced another layer of environmental accountability for many firms.

    However, these benefits have to be offset against the short termism and obsession with quarterly figures that critics claim define many listed firms. The need to constantly answer to Wall Street analysts and meet their expectations is often seen as an anathema to good long term management and makes it harder to justify investments that will take time to deliver a return. This problem is particularly acute for green investments, such as building insulation or solar panels, as they tend to be expensive up front and can take years or even decades to pay for themselves.

    Private equity backed companies, in contrast, do not face these problems – or at least not to the same extent. While still evident the pressure to deliver quarter-on-quarter is less apparent, arguably making private firms a better place to develop and execute long term plans.

    Such a climate is likely to favour environmental investments, and it could be argued that the $44bn buy out of TXU provides ample evidence of this, with the private equity groups behind the bid Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Texas Pacific Group pledging to slash carbon emissions at the company and scale back plans to build more coal-fired power stations.

    Do go ahead and read the entire blog post. Murray at the end raises the vision paper from the International Audit Networks which is arguing for real time reporting and according to him may provide the basis for greater long term investments for public companies.