Micro-Actions for Change

When it comes to the crisis of Global Warming (what author and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman says should actually be called "Global Weirding"), things can get pretty overwhelming fast.

Animal extinction, water scarcity, rainforest destruction – these are all pretty heavy topics requiring big picture thinking and action.

And if world governments can't even build consensus to take action, how can we as individuals ever expect to make a difference?

Well, I'm here to say: Don't Get Discouraged.

Sure, many of these issues can only be solved through global coalitions that unite for a common purpose (and boy, does that sound like hard work!).

Nonetheless, it's important to remember that even big problems can be helped through small “micro-actions".

Take, for example, what happened just a few weeks ago at my own business school. The Boston University chapter of Net Impact organized something called “D.U.M.P. Week” (aka: Don’t Use More Plastic).

In essence, D.U.M.P. Week was about rallying the internal community to consider how their everyday choices – in this case, using plastic bottles – impact the world around them.

During each day of the promotion, members of the Net Impact board set up shop in the graduate student lounge to educate and connect with students around the topic of sustainability. Through tidbits and facts written on poster board, an informational video showing the impact that plastic has on the Earth, and fun contests and games, the chapter leaders were able to successfully and effectively get the student body engaged in sustainability in a very personal and on-the-ground way.

In addition to education, the organizers of D.U.M.P. Week asked students to consider signing a sustainability pledge that outlined a set of behaviors each student would agree to uphold. These included:

1. Power Down Computers
2. Bring Your Own Mug and Water Bottle
3. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
4. Think Before Your Print
5. Use Compact Fluorescent Bulbs
6. Turn Off the Lights
7. Take Shorter Showers
8. Carry a Reusable Shopping Bag
9. Walk More, Drive Less
10. Wash Laundry in Cold Water

In exchange for signing the pledge, each student received his or her very own reusable water bottle (not plastic!) to kick-start these new behaviors.

So why was D.U.M.P. Week so successful? In many ways, it serves as a real-life example of everything I'm learning in my marketing classes:

You can always grab people's attention with big ideas, questions, even images. But until you tell consumers why it matters to them, you're missing your opportunity to connect, engage and inspire action.

D.U.M.P. Week wasn't just about scary doomsday scenarios or cold environmental terminology; it was about inspiring our community to connect, learn, and take action in easy and understandable ways.

As I waited in line to sign the pledge myself, I couldn’t help but feel excited by this small yet motivated demonstration of commitment by my fellow students (who, by the way, are still using their water bottles weeks later).

On their own, these behavior changes may seem like a drop in the bucket – but taken together they represent a collective, united plan of action that can and will have meaningful impact.

When it comes to sustainability, every bit (or micro-action) counts.

I encourage you to think about what micro-actions you could take to help move us toward a more sustainable planet.

And, if you’re looking for other examples of micro-change, check out Cindy Gallop and IfWeRanTheWorld.com. Cindy and her team (who I first learned about at The Feast) have created a crowd-sourcing platform for people to declare the actions (big and small) that they would take if they ran the world. Even better, the platform lets you share your idea with others and activate your network to get involved. Definitely worth checking out.

A TED Wish: Teach Every Child About Food

Anyone who knows me knows that food is a big part of my life - learning about it, talking about it, and especially eating it! I've written about my interest in food in past posts, and today I came across a recent TED talk about food that I thought was worth sharing.

First, for those of you who don't know, TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a non-profit "devoted to ideas worth sharing".

Every year TED organizes a conference that showcases truly outstanding collections of today's greatest thinkers, scientists, artists, activists and changemakers doing great things in the world. And the best part is that after each conference, TED posts these talks on its website so that everyone can learn and participate in the idea-sharing.

In addition to showcasing these incredibly diverse, passionate and articulate speakers - and this year's list is no exception - TED hands out an annual TED Prize. The goal of this Prize is to grant someone's "One Wish to Change the World". In addition to $100,000 in seed money, the TED Prize winner gets the chance to pitch his or her wish in front of the conference's incredible collection of attendees - with the purpose of inspiring the audience to act.

TED's goal, then, is to harness the power of its network to inspire collaboration on some of the world's most important and pressing problems.

The 2010 TED Prize winner is Jamie Oliver, a well-known British chef who's launched a campaign called Jamie's Food Revolution. Jamie's wish is this:

I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.

To learn more about the problem that Jamie sees, and the solution he proposes, check out this video.

Congratulations Jamie, and good luck!

What Yoga Can Teach Us About Sustainability

After a brief hiatus, I’ve recently taken up yoga again as way to inject a little clarity and exercise into my otherwise crazy daily routine.

For those of you not familiar with yoga, let me say first that it’s not just about stretching (although that’s a part of it). In fact, what we Westerners think of as yoga is actually just the physical component of an overarching mental, physical and spiritual practice that originated in India.

In most yoga classes in the U.S., students spend time moving through a series a poses or postures – some seated, some standing, even some inverted or upside-down. Each pose, or asana as they are called in Sanskrit, is a measured movement that aligns physical effort with breath.

Sometimes you do poses quickly (to generate heat) and sometimes slowly (to increase strength and endurance) – but no matter the speed, yoga poses are rigorous, physically challenging, and precise. Each new movement requires focus, concentration and calculated positioning to ensure the alignment of body and breath.

Interestingly, while your body works hard in each pose, your mind and spirit do as well. Each day you come back to yoga, your body responds differently. Some days you’re tired or sore, while other days you feel light and nimble. Each scenario requires both mental and physical adjustments, and those can only happen when you clear your mind of other details and focus solely on the pose at hand.

In yoga, each student brings unique abilities and challenges to class. Some students are more flexible than others, for instance, while other students have more trouble balancing or finding stillness.

In a roomful of yoga students, sometimes I find that it can be easy to get competitive, to want to “be better” than the person next to me, to reach farther or hold a pose longer. Other times when I see someone who’s obviously better than me, I want to throw my hands up and leave the studio, thinking it’ll be easier to save face by walking away entirely.

What I love about yoga, however, is that it’s not about winning. It’s not about being competitive.

Instead, yoga is about a continual acceptance of where you are at that very moment.

In its most basic form, yoga is a practice. It’s a journey.

It’s not about perfection – it’s about checking in with yourself, taking stock of your progress, and making adjustments and corrections to find the right position.

As a recent class wound down, I started to think about all of these things and in the process, had a bit of an epiphany: in many ways, yoga and sustainability aren’t that different.

Like yoga, sustainability is rigorous, demanding, and requires careful and measured movement. Companies must work tirelessly to create sustainability programs of substance, ones that actually have a powerful and lasting impact on communities and our environment. And to make that progress, sustainability officers must somehow find ways to cut through the clutter, clear their desks, and focus on the big questions at hand.

Yet also like yoga, sustainability is a practice – a long journey towards what’s achievable.

Like me in my yoga classes, companies may strive for perfection, and at times may also face the urge to compete against others and to win. Alternatively, some companies may choose to not even give sustainability a try, fearing that they'll be exposed as incapable or inadequate.

In the end, corporate sustainability it isn’t about being perfect.

Instead, it’s about being thoughtful, discerning, and patient in our move toward progress. It’s about taking stock of where we are and recognizing the small and big adjustments we can make to improve and/or reduce our footprint.

Just imagine how powerful our sustainability efforts could be if we stopped thinking about it as a public race to the finish line, and instead saw it like a collection of students, each striving toward incremental yet powerful improvements for our planet and our communities.

Now that’s something to ponder the next time you’re in child’s pose!

The Value of Listening

I wrote a post last week on The Changebase that seems to have hit home for some readers.

It was about the value of storytelling in CSR reports  as a way for companies to not only connect with various audiences but also to bring their sustainability stories to life.

Obviously, I’m a big believer in storytelling – otherwise I wouldn’t have written that post! Yet the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had missed one crucial element: Listening.

Sure, storytelling is a valuable way for a company to get its CSR message across. But even this is still a very one-sided way of communicating.

With the increase in consumers wanting and expecting to have a more immediate and impactful voice on business today (especially via social media channels), it seems that the true CSR winners are those companies that not only tell stories, but that allow their stakeholders to shape the story that gets told.

Stakeholder engagement is an incredibly complex topic, and to be honest, I’m still learning about best practices in this area. If you can imagine that each business faces unique industry- and firm-level opportunities and threats, then it follows that each business must also consider and engage with a unique set of supporters, critics and third-party groups. Not only are there a lot of different voices to consider, but there's no one-size-fits-all model to follow.

Some companies (often the ones that have been burned by crisis or stakeholder anger in the past) have invested a lot of money in better managing these external and internal audiences. Nike and Gap, for example, are two companies I’ve heard (at least anecdotally) that have full departments dedicated to stakeholder engagement. Which makes sense since, in my opinion, it certainly sounds like a full-time job.

Timberland is another company that’s chosen to listen, not just talk. In its Voices of Challenge project, Timberland has created a platform for stakeholders to share ideas, discuss concerns, and create collaborative opportunities for the company.

We’ll be incorporating your feedback as we develop Timberland’s CSR strategy. We hope you’ll join the conversation by posing questions and comments and providing suggestions for how to approach opportunities and challenges. Let your voice be heard – join the conversation by clicking on the buttons below.

And here's an example of the type of contributions Timberland is getting:

By creating a two-way dialogue in which the company has the opportunity to hear directly from its stakeholders, Timberland wins a couple of big ways:

• It earns additional credibility and loyalty from consumers, suppliers, NGOs and others who appreciate corporate transparency and authenticity, and who want to have a voice in Timberland’s business decisions
• It solidifies the brand as forward-thinking, inclusive and progressive – all adjectives, by the way, that differentiate Timberland from its competitors and inevitably will help drive sales
• It provides Timberland with additional raw data to understand who its stakeholder audiences are, what matters to them, and by extension, what should matter to Timberland.

Ultimately, when companies listen, they learn.

It’s the kind of no-brainer statement that any market researcher would agree with, yet when it comes to CSR, it’s not always so easy to do.

Companies often worry that by opening themselves up to a conversation with stakeholders, all they may get in return is criticism, anger and frustration. And sometimes, that’s exactly what happens.

Yet this fear of being criticized should actually be outweighed by the possibility that true idea sharing can lead to innovations and developments that the company could not have conceived of on its own.

Funny enough, one of my research projects for this semester is to work with a marketing and communications firm to dive deeper into the opportunities that exist for companies to drive innovation, improvement and ultimately revenue by engaging their stakeholders. When you distill it down to our most basic research question, it’s this:

Can listening be a company’s competitive advantage?

Time will tell, but my initial hunch is that it can.

In the meantime, what’s your company doing to listen – I mean, really listen – to what your consumers, customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and community members have to say? What ideas and insights could you gain from them that will make your business more effective, strategic and successful going forward?

The Value of Storytelling

Picture this:

Four MBA classmates and I are sitting in a large, somewhat imposing corporate conference room at one of the world’s largest chemical and gas manufacturers.

In front of us sit 12 Director and C-level executives from our client company, and they’ve come here specifically to hear what we think – as MBA students, as potential employees and investors, and as concerned citizens – about their current sustainability reporting materials.

After four months of intensive learning about best practices in CSR reporting – as well as doing a deep dive into this company’s business and industry – we developed a set of recommendations that really centered around the following:

A successful CSR report doesn’t just tell impact – it tells stories.

Granted this is an oversimplification, but not by much! From what we could gather, it’s clear that this company is committed to not only reducing its own carbon footprint but also that of its customers. When it comes to being an environmental steward and good corporate citizen, this company is doing lots of things right.

Yet, all of this great work had been lost on us initially as readers; in fact, it wasn’t until just days before our presentation that we realized how stellar this company really was.

How could this have happened? How, after hours and days spent poring over their sustainability documents, could we have possibly missed the point?

It comes down to communication. While this company was obviously successful in its sustainability efforts, it had done so little to communicate its story that we’d almost missed it entirely.

With that we presented a number of recommendations on how to present content and provide context in ways that are engaging, interactive and customized for stakeholders.

At the end of the presentation, during the Q&A period, one of the executives asked: “Why does it matter if we don’t tell people about what we do in sustainability. Isn’t it good enough that we do something at all?”

To that our team answered an emphatic “No”. It’s not enough to just do something.

Sure, companies need to be mindful of greenwashing. Consumers can certainly smell insincerity from miles away - and these days they've gotten even better at sniffing out fake green marketing claims.

Nonetheless, it seems to me (and others out there) that this concern about greenwashing has gone too far. In fact in some cases, greenwashing worries are actually holding companies back from saying anything at all about sustainability – mainly for fear that someone, somewhere will find something to criticize.

Ladies and Gentlemen of Corporate America, take note: 

A fear of greenwashing is not an excuse to stop you from telling your sustainability story!

In fact, by effectively communicating a company’s CSR successes – and, crucially, also its shortcomings – in authentic, transparent and collaborative ways, a company can achieve an array of benefits, including (but certainly not limited to):

• Proving to investors that it’s focused on the long-term viability of the business
• Giving consumers a voice and a stake in the company’s efforts to improve communities and the environment
• Demonstrating to its employees that the company’s values and culture are aligned with their own
• Engaging NGOs, the media and potential detractors in conversations around the company’s sustainability process, goals, and strategies.

By not focusing on the manner in which it told its sustainability story, our client company had inadvertently left very real value on the table – value that instead was being captured by competitors who had done a tremendous job on both the reporting and storytelling fronts.

Now, don’t get me wrong – to have a successful CSR program, a company surely needs to know its footprint, set strategic and forward-thinking goals, and report its numbers.

But to be a true leader in sustainability, a company must be able to go beyond its numbers and move towards an inclusive, engaging and heartfelt discussion with its stakeholders about its current sustainability journey.

In my research, I came up with a couple of good examples of companies that tell their sustainability stories in compelling ways (Cadbury, Shell, and Timberland, just to name a few). What companies do you think are doing a good job of communicating the story behind the numbers? I’d love to hear what you’ve found.