NGOs

Fixing older buildings…and market failures

September 20, 2011

Markets promote efficiency and drive out waste…

Except when they don’t.

A glaring example of market failure in the U.S. economy is the energy wasted in buildings. When the Empire State Building renovated its heating and cooling system, upgraded its lighting and installed new windows, the owners cut their energy bills by 40%. Think about it—a 40% cost savings. That’s big.

Today, at an event called Business Climate 2011 in New York, a group of cities and companies and a nonprofit called the Carbon War Room announced a plan to curb wasted energy and unecessary pollution—importantly, at no taxpayer cost.

Jigar Shah of the Carbon War Room, which put the group together, said this is a very big deal. “I think this is the most important climate announcement in the last five years,” he said.

“Building retrofits have been a colossal failure,” Jigar said, and that’s about to change. [click to continue…]

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How you can help end malaria

September 7, 2011

I’m a lover of books and I’m guessing you are, too.

So you know that books can lead you to think differently about life, perhaps improve your life, maybe even change your life.

Today, I’m writing about a book that will quite literally save lives. Indeed, that’s why it was created.

The book is called End Malaria: Bold Innovation, Limitless Generosity, and the Opportunity to Save a Life. It’s the brainchild of a writer and editor named Michael Bungay Stanier, and you can buy it here. End Malaria is published by The Domino Project, a Seth Godin book publishing venture with which I am loosely affiliated.*

End Malaria  is a collection of 62 essays–some inspirational, others practical–from a wide range of business thinkers and doers. They include personal-finance guru Dave Ramsey, productivity guru David Allen, Premal Shah of Kiva [See my blogpost, Kiva: pushing the envelope on green),  wine guy and social-media maven Gary Vaynerchuk, Wired magazine founder and author Kevin Kelly, pursuer of excellence Tom Peters, and authors Patrick Lencioni, Dan Pink and Tony Schwartz. An impressive group, to be sure.

Like most compilations, this one is a mixed bag. There's a bit too much breahtless inspiration for me, but I'm someone for whom a little inspiration goes a long way. Dream big dreams! Pursue your passion! Believe in yourself! Speak out! Just do it! (Some of the contributors might want to think about switching to decaf.) Having said that, even as someone who's not a bigtime reader of self-help writing or business advice, I found lots to value here--ideas that were worth well more than the $20 price tag of the Kindle edition or $25 cost of the paperback.

A few of my favorite nuggets:

To tackle something most productively, you must begin in clear space. Physically, you need all your tools in order, plus an open table for spreading your raw elements and assembling structures. Psychically, you meed an empty head, clear of distractions and unfinished business, holding your attention hostage. - David Allen, The Strategic Value of Clear Space

Researchers have found a surprising link between daydreaming and creativity--people who daydream more are also better at generating new ideas. - Jonah Lehrer, Don't Pay Attention

There are countless hours scheduled for operations, sales, reporting, finance, efficiency gains and human resources--yet very few people actually schedule time to think, create and invent. -- Josh Linkner, What's Your Idea Schedule?

There's a major cultural shift happening. Because people are more connected than ever on the Web, we're going back in time and living under small-town rules....This is a monumental shift--we're now in a marketplace where every whisper about your business gets heard. - Gary Vaynerchuk, The Best Marketing Strategy Ever

These are just my own favorites; you'll discover others. The real genius of this book is the generosity behind it, and a business model that delivers the overwhelming majority of the revenues--that's revenues, not profits-- to charity.

Michael Bungay Stanier

Michael Bungay Stanier, the editor, says $20 from every sale will go to Malaria No More. ** That’s 100% of the Kindle price, and 80% of the print copy. (The remaining $5 covers production costs.) All the writers wrote for free, to their credit. The Domino Project isn’t taking any money from sales, either. Michael isn’t taking any money, and Amazon is a supporter, too, which is one reason why End Malaria is only available through Amazon.

“It’s an amazing business model,” Michael said, on a call yesterday, one that couldn’t have been arranged with a conventional publisher. He took on the job without pay, he explained, in order to live up to the message of his last book, which was called Do More Great Work.

Michael has also raised about $100,000 from corporate sponsors, including Ashley Sleep and HubSpot, all of which goes directly to Malaria No More. Media sponsors ranging from Huffington Post to The Onion have agreed to promote the book. So have the authors.

Very cool.

 

 

 

* I don’t get paid to be park of what The Domino Project calls its “street team.” The publisher sends me a free book, and when I am so inclined, as I was here, I help spread the word about the books.

** Another member of The Domino Project “street team” checked out Malaria No More on www.givewell.org, a website that assesses charities, and they are not rated. I emailed them and they told me that 84.7% of the money they raise actually goes to fighting malaria. That satisfies me.

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Let’s do away with CSR

July 10, 2011

Maybe it’s time t0 do away with corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Not merely the words and the idea but the infrastructure: CSR departments, CSR reports, CSR conferences and CSR executives.

And, as long as we’re at it, let’s think about ditching the triple bottom line, the pursuit of shared value, corporate citizenship and especially, yuk, the idea that stakeholders deserve a say in how to run a business.

All of these are, at best, distractions and, at worst, ways of thinking about business that create a separation between a company’s core business and its impact on the world. Both ought to be life-enhancing. No more and no less.

I’ve been thinking about CSR and how to talk about it for years.  I wrote my first article on corporate responsibility for FORTUNE in 2003. It ran under an odd headline — Tree Huggers, Soy Lovers and Profits — because my editors knew that  words like corporate social responsibility turn off readers. I grappled with the meaning and terminology of CSR again in my 2004 book, Faith and Fortune, which explored connections between religion, faith, values, spirituality and business. The language of faith and values, I subsequently decided, wasn’t the best one to use when speaking to corporate executives about business and its impact. I’m now inclined to talk about sustainability. For all its vagueness, corporate sustainability is an idea that is both practical–no one wants to kill their company–and radical, because no company  is truly sustainable, at least as defined by the Bruntland Commission as promoting development in a way that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”

But the here goes beyond language. I was reminded of that when reading an excellent new book by Carol Sanford called The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success (Jossey-Bass, 2011). No, I don’t love the title or even her terminology. (One chapter is  called, yikes, “Stakeholders as Systemic Collaborators.”) But Carol’s arguments and insights (and the title wasn’t her idea) are spot on. Carol argues that the most successful and profitable businesses, over time, will not be those that “practice CSR” but instead those that rethink their purpose, reorganize themselves to draw upon the creativity and passion of all, and integrate responsible behavior into the way they do everything they do.

As Carol writes:

Responsibility isn’t a set of metrics to be tracked or behaviors to be modified. It is central to both the purpose and prosperity of a business and must be pervasive in its practices.

This may sound obvious but it leads her (and her readers) to new ways of thinking about business. Businesses, she says, should strive not just to minimize the harm they do, but to do good, to become restorative, to “improve and evolve healthy systems.” She explains: [click to continue…]

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The business of conservation

July 6, 2011

Traditional conservation is simple. Governments or nonprofits buy land, and preserve it. It works, as you know if you’ve ever visited a national or state park.

But, as Lawrence A. “Larry”  Selzer told me last week, traditional conservation, by itself, won’t protecting America’s vanishing forests and farmlands. “The traditional funding sources are being stretched,” he says. “We need additional strategies.”

That’s where The Conservation Fund comes in. A nonprofit based in Arlington, Va., The Conservation Fund was founded in 1985 by Pat Noonan, a former president of The Nature Conservancy and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award winner, who wanted to harmonize environmental protection and economic growth. He wanted to start a business-friendly group that was nimbler and more focused.

Selzer, who has been CEO of The Conservation Fund since 2001, says: “We want to be the entrepreneurial, risk capital group, and be able to make decisions quickly. We’re small. No members. No advocacy. No litigation. Entirely project focused.”

So, while The Conservation Fund engages in the traditional practice of buying and protecting land–nearly 7 million acres nationwide since 1985–it’s also deep into what Selzer describes as “the business of conservation.” Its Land Trust Loan Program looks like a bank, lending money to local land trusts to buy valued land. It is an investor in forest land, which will be protected (but not untouched) by sustainable timber practices. It also manages the Natural Capital Investment Fund, a federally chartered Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) that invests in environmentally-friendly businesses in distressed rural areas in the southeast. [click to continue…]

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Stewart Brand, Peter Kareiva and 21st century conservation

June 29, 2011

Stewart Brand

Several days ago, Stewart Brand, the longtime environmentalist and author–please read Whole Earth Discipline: An Eco-Pragmatist’s Manifesto if you haven’t–hosted a talk by Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy, in San Francisco. It was called Conservation in the Real World, and Stewart summarized it on his blog. I liked Stewart’s account, so I asked him for permission to reprint it, which he kindly granted. Here goes:

Peter Kareiva began by recalling the environmental “golden decade” of 1965-75, set in motion by the scientist Rachel Carson.  In quick succession Congress created the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act—which passed the Senate unanimously.

Green influence has been dwindling ever since.  A series of polls in the US asked how many agreed with the statement, “Most environmentalists are extremists, not reasonable people.”  In 1996, 32% agreed.  In 2004, 43% agreed.  Now it’s over 50% who think environmentalists are unreasonable.

Kareiva noted that as the world is urbanizing, ever fewer people grow up in contact with nature—current college freshman have less than a tenth of the childhood experience of nature as previous generations.  And there’s a demographic shift toward multiethnicity, with whites already a minority in California and soon to be a minority in the whole country.  Asked to describe a typical environmentalist, current grade school students say it’s a girl, white, with money, preachy about recycling, nice but uptight, not sought as a friend.

In general, environmentalists have the reputation of being “misanthropic, anti-technology, anti-growth, dogmatic, purist, zealous, exclusive pastoralists.” [click to continue…]

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Why we can’t shop our way to sustainability

May 19, 2011

Can we shop our way to sustainability in the supermarket aisle?

Eco labels are cluttered, confusing and unreliable.

Organic food gets a tiny slice of the market.

Most shoppers don’t pay much attention to environmental factors. Perhaps understandably so. They’re busy, or  ignorant. Or they don’t care.

Which makes me believe that we can’t count on consumers to bring about a sustainable food system.

So, like it or not, that it’s going to be up to business to fix the food system.

That’s my takeaway from today’s discussions at the Sustainable Food Institute, part of Cooking for Solutions, a great event on food/ag/sustainability organized by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’m here for a couple of days of good talk, good food, good wine, shared by reporters, chefs, people in the food business, scientists, activists and a farmer or two.

In several panel discussions–one on eco-labels, another about the popular but nevertheless limited Seafood Watch program run by the aquarium, and also during my own interview with Louise Nicholls, a sustainability executive from the British food and department store Marks & Spencer–it became clear to me that the dizzying complexity of food and agriculture systems, including as they do health, environmental and economic concerns, will make it very difficult to communicate simply to shoppers what’s “good” and what is not, even assuming scientists can reach consensus on that.

Persuading shoppers to then change their habits is even tougher. [click to continue…]

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Mickey Mouse, ravager of rainforests?

May 18, 2011

Those pesky activists from the Rainforest Action Network are at it again.

RAN protestors at Disney HQ

Today (May 19), four activists including a couple costumed as Mickey and Minnie Mouse were arrested outside the Burbank headquarters of The Walt Disney Co. They accused Disney of printing children’s books with paper that is driving the destruction of Indonesia’s rainforests after after lab test results found that paper used in Disney’s kids books contained fiber from Indonesia.

Disney is the largest publisher of children’s books in the world, producing over 50 million books and 30 million magazines a year. RAN has been critical of Disney’s paper buying policies for more than a year, saying that [click to continue…]

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Jonathan Lash is leaving World Resources Institute

May 11, 2011

Jonathan Lash, one of America’s most respected environmental leaders, is leaving the World Resources Institute to become president of Hampshire College, a small liberal arts college in western Massachusetts.

Lash, who is 65, has been president of WRI for 18 years. Only two people have led the Washington-based nonprofit: He succeeded Gus Speth, who ran WRI for 10 years.

WRI is often described as an environmental think tank, and, in fact, it is trusted as an independent, nonpartisan, science-based organization. So when General Electric’s Jeff Immelt announced the company’s EcoMagination initiative back in 2005, Lash was by his side.

But WRI also gets involved in the nitty-gritty of environmental problems around the world. Its work on establishing the value of ecosystems helped the nation of Belize protect its coastlines. Its expertise in public transport has helped build bus networks in India and Brazil. It helped developed the protocol used by U.S. government agencies to manage and reduce their emissions. WRI’s got a dozen people in China. This isn’t glamorous work, but it matters.

In an email to staff, Lash wrote: [click to continue…]

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Facebook’s coal problem

May 8, 2011

You’ve heard about the cloud, right? This blog comes to you from the cloud. The cloud is where the bank keeps your money. YouTube, Gmail, Twitter and iTunes live in the cloud. So does a record of all my runs in 2011. The cloud, in essence, is the millions of data centers where information and software are stored and can be accessed by gazillions of computers.

Unfortunately, the cloud is creating problems for the planet.

Which bring us to Facebook and its coal problem. By some accounts, Facebook is the world’s most visited website. Greenpeace, as a result, has made Facebook the target of a campaign called Unfriend Coal, which has its own Facebook pages (of course!) with more than 700,000 fans. (Another 500,000 orFacebook recently opened a big new data center in Prineville, Oregon, where electricity is generated mostly from burning coal.   Greenpeace is asking the social media giant to power its services with renewable energy instead of coal and nuclear power.

In response, Facebook–like the rest of the IT industry–mostly talks about efficiency. The Prineville data center is super efficient, by all accounts. What’s more, to its credit, Facebook is sharing much of what it has learned about making data centers more efficient in its Open Compute project.

The trouble is, efficiency is a necessary, but insufficient response to the threat of climate change. [click to continue…]

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Stephen Viederman: Foundations don’t practice what they preach

May 7, 2011

Today’s guest post comes from Stephen Viederman, the former president of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation and an expert on sustainable investing. Steve, who has worked in the foundation world for more than 25 years, defines sustainable investing is “future-oriented, risk-adjusted and opportunity-directed.”  This is also called socially-responsible or green investing.

Here’s the problem: Even foundations that aim to promote sustainability or social justice with their grants don’t see their investments as another tool to achieve that end. They don’t, in other words, put their money where their mouth is, or where their values are. Steve, by the way, is also the father of Dan Viederman, executive director of Verite, a human-rights nonprofit; evidently, working for the public good runs in the family. This essay was originally published by Inflection Point Capital Management, a new sustainability-driven asset management boutique led by the estimable Matthew Kiernan with offices in Toronto, London, New York and Melbourne.

Philanthropic foundations are like old-fashioned slot machines. They have one arm and are known for their occasional payout.

Although the term “mission-related investing” found its way into the lexicon of philanthropy decades ago, the finance committees of most foundations continue to manage their endowments like investment bankers. Their portfolios give no hint that they are institutions whose purpose is the public benefit. There is a chasm between mission – grantmaking – and investment. The logic of a synergy between the two has yet to take hold. [click to continue…]

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