October 2011

Starbucks: We are indivisible

October 30, 2011

I’m not much for patriotic displays, but I’m proud to wear this red, white and blue wristband inscribed with the word INDIVISIBLE.

I hope you’ll wear one, too. They’re available, beginning Tuesday, at Starbucks, for a donation of $5 or more to a project called Let’s Create Jobs for USA.

The program aims to create thousands of jobs across the country, by investing community development financial institutions (CDFIs) — mostly credit unions and community banks — that will then lend to small businesses, nonprofits, housing and commercial developers, micro-enterprises and the like, all to spark the economy and create jobs.

I’m a fan of this project,  for several reasons.

First, there’s no more front-of-mind issue in America today than jobs. So this a great example of how a big company can help tackle an important  problem–while enhancing its reputation as a business that supports its communities.

Second, Let’s Create Jobs for USA underscores the fact that, despite the rhetoric from politicians, jobs are best created by the private sector.  If you’re anti-business, you’re anti-jobs.

Ben Packard

Third, although credit for the campaign ultimately belongs to Howard Schultz, Starbucks CEO, Let’s Create Jobs for USA unfolded as it did because of a connection between Ben Packard, vice president of global responsibility at Starbucks and Mark Pinsky, president and CEO of the Opportunity Finance Network, a national network of CDFIs. Ben, Mark and I serve together on the board of Net Impact, a great organization of students and young professionals whose purpose is to inspire and equip young people to use the power of business to make the world a better place.

Let’s Create Jobs for USA is very much in the spirit of Net Impact. [click to continue…]

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Campbell’s Doug Conant: “How can I help?”

October 27, 2011

Douglas Conant

Ten years into his career in the food industry, Douglas Conant was fired from his job at General Mills. He had two small children, a big mortgage, and a feeling of bitterness. Then he called an outplacement firm where the man on the other end of the line answered as he always did: “Hi, it’s Neil McKenna. How can I help?”

That moment–in a new book, Conant describes it as a “touchpoint”–shaped his approach to leadership. “Leadership isn’t about you,” he says. “It’s about them.” McKenna became a mentor and friend, and Conant saw how seemingly small interactions can have a deep impact on people. He went only to a long career at Kraft, Nabisco and as CEO of Campbell Soup, where he led an impressive turnaround before retiring in July.

I met Conant this week in Washington to talk about his 10 years at Campbell and about the book. In Touchpoints: Creating Powerful Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments (Jossey-Bass), Conant and his co-author, consultant Mette Norgaard, argue that “the daily interruptions that leaders face in nearly epidemic proportions are actually the moments where the greatest leadership opportunities lie.”

They write:

Each of the many connections you make has the potential to become a high point or low point in someone’s day. Each is an opportunity to establish high performance expectations, to infuse the agenda with greater clarity and more energy, and to influence the course of events. Each is a chance to transform an ordinary moment into a Touchpoint.

“The soft stuff is the hard stuff,” Conant likes to say. [click to continue…]

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Big Sugar, free markets and Monica Lewinsky

October 25, 2011

Next time I unwrap a candy bar, I’ll think about sugar, free markets, the Florida Everglades and Monica Lewinsky.

Why? Because although the sugar in that candy bar may be natural, its price is entirely artificial–depending, as it does, on government trade barriers, price supports and subsidized water, as well as the fact that the sugar industry is paying only a fraction of the costs of cleaning up pollution in the Everglades.

Put simply, crony capitalism is alive and well in the sugar business.

“The sugar industry doesn’t make its money from agriculture,” declares David Guest, a lawyer with Earthjustice and an outspoken critic of Big Sugar. “They make it from government.”

That’s an exaggeration, of course. The Florida industry grows lots of sugar, invests hundreds of millions of dollars in new equipment and employs thousands of people, as I learned last week  during a day-long tour of the Lake Okeechobee region of south Florida, as part of the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Miami. We met Guest from Earthjustice (“because the earth needs a good lawyer”), officials from Florida water agencies and the Army Corps of Engineers, an Audubon society biologist and, most interestingly, Judy Sanchez, senior director of public affairs for the U.S. Sugar Corp. [click to continue…]

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Sierra Club’s Brune: We’re stopping coal

October 23, 2011

Michael Brune

“We are starting to create the ecological U-turn that David Brower talked about, decades ago. On coal, it’s dramatic. We’ve seen a halt to the coal rush.”

“Primarily because of regulations (from)  the Obama administration, we can now project a future where our oil consumption will decline.”

“It’s not sufficient to address the problem, but it’s a positive trend.”

So says Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. [David Brower, who was made famous in John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid, was one of his predecessors.] Others fret that the environmental movement is on the defensive these days. Mike, an optimistic, sees progress.

Indeed, Mike argues that the effort by Republicans in the House to roll back a slew of environmental regulations as a sign that the enviros are winning.

“Republicans in Congress and their corporate benefactors are worried about the threat to the status quo in the energy industry,” he says. “That’s the reason this is happening. We’re making progress.” [click to continue…]

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Google: Why the cloud is green

October 20, 2011

Google’s Gmail spells trouble for the U.S. Postal Service and, if you’re not careful, it can be a risky place to store your data. Aside from that, Gmail is good for the rest of us—and, importantly, for the planet.

Indeed, cloud-based computing—the way Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Facebook and others provide you with data storage and software from their servers—turns out to be a great way to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions…if those companies run their businesses right.

That’s because in computing, as in so many other industries, scale drives efficiency. Bigger is greener.

Urs Hölzle

That, at least, is my takeaway (as they say in the tech world) from a conversation this week with Urs Hölzle, a top Google executive who oversees company operations, particularly its data centers.

Urs (rhymes with Coors), who is 48, left an academic job in 1999 to become one of the first 10 people hired by Google. Smart move. He did so, he told me, because after meeting founders Larry Page and Sergie Brin, he decided that “they were very clue-ful.” Huh?  “Most of the people starting Internet companies then were clueless,” Urs explained.

A computer scientist with a Stanford PhD, Urs wasn’t an energy guy. But he had  worked on processor architecture and understood engineering and operations. “My first job was making Google scalable,” he said. Google’s  first servers, which the company leased, were terribly inefficient, he found. “The manufacturer had saved a few cents and it was costing us tens of dollars per server,” he said. Buildings housing the servers, which need constant cooling, were wasteful, too.

Since then, energy use has become an obsession for Google, Urs says. The company designs its own servers and data centers. “We’ve saved, easily, over $1 billion for Google,” he says. [click to continue…]

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Do green groups need to get religion?

October 18, 2011

Peter Lehner

“Americans actually do care about their health. They don’t want their kids have to be poisoned in order for them to get a job. They value their natural heritage.”

“One should not read what’s going on the House of Representatives as an indication of where America wants to be.”

That’s Peter Lehner talking. Peter, a 52-year-old environmental lawyer, is executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of America’s most important environmental groups. The NRDC has a $95 million budget, about 400 employees and about 1.3 million members. They’re big and they represent a lot of people.

And yet the NRDC and its allies are getting nowhere in Washington.

They’re struggling to protect the EPA against unrelenting Republican attacks.

And, as Elizabeth Rosenthal wrote the other day in the Times, climate change–arguably the biggest problem facing mankind–has devolved into a non-issue. The “fading of global warming from the political agenda is a mostly American phenomenon,” she wrote.

Why?

That was the question on my mind when I met recently with Peter, who is thoughtful and smart, to talk about the politics of climate. That’s not my  specialty, but I came with an idea: The green groups that try to persuade Americans that environmental protection is good for their jobs and pocketbooks–that is, that green is in our self-interest–have missed opportunities to frame the environment and especially climate as moral issues, in ways that would appeal to our higher and better selves. Put another way, the big NGOs that focus on policy are not as comfortable talking about culture and religion.

So I wondered what the NRDC had learned from the failure of cap-and-trade—the scheme to regulate greenhouse gas emissions that was rejected by Congress—and whether its leaders are rethinking their message.

[click to continue…]

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Recylebank: It’s not just trash to cash

October 16, 2011

Recyclebank is on a roll.

The New York-based company that rewards people for recycling their household garbage last week announced a $20 million strategic investment from Waste Management, the nation’s largest trash hauler.

As part of the investment, Waste Management said it expects to provide access to Recyclebank’s green rewards program to its nearly 20 million customers in North America.

Currently, Recyclebank has about three million members, so this is a big deal.

Jonathan Hsu

But there’s more to the story, as I learned last week when I interviewed Jonathan Hsu, Recyclebank’s CEO, at the GreenBiz Innovation Forum in San Francisco.

Recyclebank has bigger ambitions than turning trash to cash. It’s seeking to become a Internet marketing platform that will reward people for engaging in more environmentally friendly behavior. Its members will be able to earn rewards points by using energy more efficiently at home, reducing water usage, by buying greener products, even by walking to work instead of driving.

This makes Recyclebank a very interesting company to watch, because it is betting big on the green consumer–a risky but promising strategy. [click to continue…]

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Can Brazilian agribusiness create prosperity in Africa?

October 15, 2011

A soy plantation in BrazilToday’s guest post comes from a writer I’ll call Paul Gayle. Paul is an American journalist who lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with a strong interest in sustainability. (His employer would prefer that he not blog under his real name.) He maintains his own blog, called Lungs of the Earth, about environmental issues in Brazil. Here, Paul reports on an unusual deal between the government of Mozambique and Brazilian farmers, who have been given the use of 6 million hectares – an area equivalent to two thirds of Portugal – to farm.

Brazil’s booming agribusiness may have found greener pastures. The government of Mozambique has offered a 50 year concession to Brazilian farmers to plant soy, corn and cotton in the northern part of the impoverished African nation.

This follows Mozambique’s launch last year of a $13.4 million program called PROSAVANA, in conjunction with Brazil’s agricultural research group Embrapa and the Japanese government, which is meant to promote industrial farming for export together with small family farming.

Brazil’s agricultural industry sees Mozambique as a being a potential new Mato Grosso. That’s the sprawling Brazilian state almost as large as Venezuela that is the country’s biggest producer of cash crops.

Driving through Mato Grosso is a bit like driving through Iowa — flat terrain with crops as far as the eye can see (I have to admit I found folks a bit friendlier in Iowa). The region is far more productive than the US farm belt because farmers can produce two harvests per year compared to one in North America.

So will the people of Mozambique benefit from the expansion of Brazil’s agricultural frontier into eastern Africa? Or will big agribusiness run roughshod over local farmers as foreigners have done for centuries in Africa? [click to continue…]

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GreenBiz: Innovation is alive and well

October 12, 2011

Despite policy gridlock (or worse) in Washington, despite cheap abundant natural gas (which threatens the development of renewable energy), despite Solyndra (which highlights the risks of crony capitalism), there is good news in the world of business and sustainability.

Innovation is alive and well in companies big and small.

That’s my takeaway after spending the last 36 hours at the GreenBiz Innovation Forum in San Francisco. I’m a senior writer at GreenBiz and let me tell you, it’s been great to get outside the Beltway bubble this week (and not merely because the weather here in SF is spectacular). Here’s are four reasons why:

Nike goes for gold: While she was tantalizingly skimpy on details, the always dynamic Hannah Jones of Nike made clear that the company’s drive to become more sustainable is causing people inside the company to ask ever bolder questions–including how to generate sales without necessarily making and selling more shoes and apparel.

“How do you think about the world of sport and the athlete and human potential in terms of services?” Jones asked. “Could one create revenue streams that are decoupled from any material?”

“Our mission statement isn’t ‘make lots of stuff,” she said. “It’s ‘inspire and innovate on behalf of the athlete.” [click to continue…]

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Wendy Schmidt does damage control

October 11, 2011

Wendy Schmidt

The Schmidt Family Foundation, which was established in 2006 by Wendy and Eric Schmidt—he was the longtime CEO of Google—has taken on a very big job: It wants to help transform the world’s environmental and energy practices in the 20th century.

In the meantime, there are messes to clean up.

So in July of 2010, as the BP Deepwater Horizon continued to spill oil, Wendy Schmidt joined forces with the X PRIZE foundation to create the $1.4 Million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE, a competition to find better, faster and more efficient ways to capture crude oil from the ocean’s surface.

Today (10-11) in New York, they announced a winner—a private company from Illinois called Elastec that specializes in oil spill recovery. Team Elastec won the $1 million first prize in the competition by developing technology that sucked up oil at a rate of 4670 gallons per minute – more than three times the industry norm.

“The point here is to have a better first response,” Wendy Schmidt told me by phone last week. “We can keep the immediate damage from the next oil spill from being so damaging.”

I spoke to Wendy Schmidt last week because I was curiously to learn more about the Schmidt Family Foundation and its mission. The foundation reported assets of about $168 million, as of December 2009 and it has made about $13 million in grants in 2011.

Why focus on energy and the environment?, I asked Schmidt. She replied:

We look at the world and say we have a 150 year old energy infrastructure that can fail. It’s not designed well enough not to fail, catastrophically. We look at how we can commit our creativity to help safeguard the living systems of the world, to protect them and protect us, from the failures of a system of extraction and combustion that we know will have to end anyway.

To that end, the 11th Hour Project, which was started by Schmidt and is financed by the foundation, makes grants to a long list of  advocacy and educational groups including The Regeneration Project, Green for All, the Rocky Mountain Institute and Annie Leonard’s Story of Stuff project. All are designed to help people better understand their connection to the planet.

But changing attitudes takes time, and Schmidt said she felt a sense of urgency to do something as oil gushed during the summer of 2010 from the Deepwater Horizon spill. [click to continue…]

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