So outdated has the EHS job title become that when you Google those three letters, the words “environmental, health and safety” appear just below the Electronic Health School in Utah and above an Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va.
Even less fashionable is the “S.” Given the enthusiasm in much of corporate America for all things green and sustainable, it’s easy to forget about workplace safety.
That’s a mistake, as last year’s dramatic headlines about the BP oil spill and the Massey energy mine disaster should have reminded us.
Next week, the Sustainable Business Forum — a website which carries stories from my blog, along with many others — will present a webinar about safety and sustainability. You can register here for the webinar, for a free e-book about safety and sustainability or for both.
The webinar, to be held Wednesday, March 2 at 1 p.m. ET, 10 a.m. PT, will bring together experts from the National Safety Council, from a consulting firm called AHC Group and from DuPont, a company that got so good at workplace safety that it turned its knowledge into a consulting business. My former FORTUNE colleague Richard Murphy will moderate. [click to continue…]
“I chose that name because it’s hard to spell and hard to pronounce, and most people don’t know what it means,” he jokes.
Despite the name, Chip has made Joie de Vivre a big success because he focuses relentlessly on hiring the right people, and creating a workplace where they can grow and thrive. He’s the author of Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, an excellent management book based on the well-known hierarchy of needs of psychologist Abraham Maslow. (See my 2007 blogpost, Peak Performance.)
“The most neglected fact in business is that we’re all human,” Chip says.
Chip, who is 50, started Joie de Vivre right after he graduated from Stanford Business School. Joie de Vivre is now the 2nd largest boutique hotel company in the U.S. (behind Kimpton). It employ 3,500 people in 35 hotels, 19 restaurants and five spas. Last year, Chip sold a majority interest to a private equity firm run by John Pritzker of the Chicago family that used to own Hyattt.
I’ve known Chip for years. He’s always full of ideas Last week, he gave a talk in San Francisco to the board of Net Impact. (Great organization, by the way: check it out here.)
Chip argued, as he does in Peak, that great companies succeed by meeting the highest expectations and desires of their workers and customers.
For workers, the base of the pyramid is money. That’s about survival.
Above money is recognition. That’s about listening to people, giving them opportunities to grow, applauding their accomplishments.
At the top of the pyramid is meaning. That’s about giving people the sense that they are making a contribution to the world, that they are part of something bigger than themselves.
“Your goal (as an employer) is to help people move up the pyramid,” Chip says.
You need to start with the right people. So, for example, when Joie de Vivre interviews job candidates who want to work at the front desk a hotel —they’re called hosts—they’re asked to talk about a time in the last month when they did something for someone else that made the other person happy, and made them happy, too.
It’s obvious why, right?
If making other people feel good makes you feel good, you’re going to like working as a front-desk clerk. You’ll greet every guest who approaches the desk with a smile, and genuinely look forward to helping them in any way you can.
If you don’t much like helping people, you’ll see the job as eight hours of drudgery and the guests will notice.
For the hotel, that’s the difference between repeat business and a disappointed guest.
For the desk clear, it’s the difference between a calling and a job, Chip notes.
…Howard Schultz found that people liked hanging out in Italian coffee bars
As for Kim and Jason Graham-Nye, they were living in Sydney, Australia when their first child, a boy named Fynn, was born. They didn’t want to throw his diapers into landfills. They discovered a small Tasmanian company with a better idea–flushable, compostable diapers!– and moved halfway round the world to Portland, Oregon, to try to sell these new “green” diapers to American moms.
Improbably, their six-year-old startup company, gDiapers, is doing very well.
Sure, Procter & Gamble’s Pampers and Kimberly-Clark’s Huggies still dominate the diaper biz. But gDiapers has been growing by 50% a year (including during the recession), it’s making money and the upstart brand has a growing army of fans—24,000 on Facebook alone—who are helping to spread the word.
There are at least a couple of things to say about this.
First, never underestimate the power of story-telling in business. People want to do business with companies that are authentic.
Jason never tires of telling stories. He’s got an entertaining blog and spends lots of time communicating with customers. “We grounded the business in this Australian idea called fair dinkum, which means being genuine and real with everybody,” Jason says.
Second, the disruptive power of the Internet is affecting even businesses like gDiapers which wouldn’t seem to be web-friendly. Virtually all of the company’s marketing unfolds (no pun intended) online, much it by word of mouth. What’s more, roughly 60% of its diapers are sold online through companies like diapers.com, whose parent company Quidsi was acquired last fall for $545 million by Amazon. On the web, a little company can look like a big company.
True confession: When I heard that I’d be interviewing Mike LaRocco, the ceo of Fireman’s Fund Insurance Co., at the State of Green Business Forum in San Francisco, I worried that we wouldn’t be able to engage an audience for 30 minutes. What, after all, could be more boring than the insurance business?
No worries. Fireman’s, it turns out, is a pioneering company, and Mike is an unusually thoughtful CEO. A unit of the German financial services giant Allianz, Fireman’s, which is based in Marin County, California, is leading the way when it comes to “green insurance.” What’s more, guided by Mike, Fireman’s is rebuilding its corporate culture to put employees first, customers second and shareholders third.
The thinking behind that is simple: If Fireman’s can attract and engage the very best workers, they will deliver great customer service, satisfied customers will stick with the company, new ones will join and all of that will drive long-term shareholder value.
This helps explains Fireman’s commitment to all things green.
“The next generation of employees, this current generation as well–they want to work for companies that care,” Mike told me. “I really do believe it’s important to have a strong social conscience about the way we run Fireman’s Fund.”
Fireman’s has a storied history. The company began in 1863 in San Francisco, and got its name because it paid 10% of its profits to the widows and orphans of firefighters. While rival insurors were bankrupted by the Great Chicago fire (1871) and the Great San Francisco earthquake (1906), Fireman’s paid all claims and endured. It wrote the first policies for “horseless carriages” and planes. Making promises and keeping them is what the company is all about, Mike said. [click to continue…]
A rug factory in Nepal, photographed by Robin Romano for GoodWeave
When confronted with a big, hard, seeming insoluble problem — today’s topic is the practice of child labor, in which an estimated 215 million children around the world are engaged —it’s helpful to recall the words of a rabbi cited in a Jewish text known as the Pirke Avot, or Sayings of the Fathers:
It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.
This is the approach that a nonprofit called GoodWeave USA is taking when it comes to child labor in the carpet industry. Since its beginnings in 1994, GoodWeave has rescued more than 3,600 children from rug-making factories, helped educate another 5,000 to 6,000 to keep them out of the workforce and, most important, developed a trusted label that assures retailers and shoppers that the carpets they buy and sell were not made by children.
These are modest gains, to be sure, but meaningful accomplishments for a non profit with a budget of just $3.5 million a year and staff of about 35 people.
What’s more, GoodWeave is gathering momentum.
“The goal is to transform the industry—to end child servitude,” says Nina Smith, the group’s executive director. [click to continue…]
Today’s guest post comes from Randall Davidson, who is the lead project manager at Audio Transcription, an eco-friendly transcription service based in San Francisco. Clients send audio files to the company, which are parsed into smaller clips, digitally distributed to a network of trained transcribers and returned as a complete, quality-assured transcript. In addition, the company offers online transcription services, which are the greenest form of transcription available because no CDs or flash drives need to be shipped through the mail. Randall, who is 28, has introduced a number of the green practices outlined below into Audio Transcription’s marketing operations.
Small businesses employ more than 52% of working Americans, according to the Small Business Administration, and comparable percentages in other developed countries. It follows that small businesses generate a substantial portion of the business world’s environmentally harmful waste. To help small business owners and employees minimize their environmental impact, here are 20 simple ways to more sustainably market a small business. I hope that you’ll contribute your thoughts – what I’ve gotten right and wrong and what I’ve omitted – in the comments.
Print all marketing materials on recycled paper. Whether you’re going to send out flyers, pamphlets or other marketing literature, make sure it’s on recycled paper.
Hold your meetings remotely. As you meet with your colleagues, including external vendors, try to hold as many meetings as possible over the Internet. Try tools like Skype, TokBox and other free videoconferencing technologies.
Send email instead of paper newsletters. Not only will you save money by switching to an email marketing service, but you’ll also do far less damage to the environment. Even better from a business standpoint is that email marketing provides huge insights into how your marketing efforts are being received that printed flyers cannot. For instance, email marketing services can generally tell you what percentage of your emails were opened, how long they were opened and which links were clicked. [click to continue…]
Here’s a futuristic notion: Windows that darken on hot sunny days to block heat and glare, clear up on cool or cloudy days to allow in sunlight and warmth, save lots of energy, eliminate the need for blinds or shades and, most important, allow people indoors to be connected all the time to the natural world.
This may sound like magic, but electrochromic windows are here today. You can see them, above, at the student center at Chabot College in Hayward, CA. They’re made by a small Minnesota-based company called SAGE Electrochromics, which is about to get bigger: This week, SAGE announced that it sold 50% of itself for $80 million to Saint-Gobain, a global building materials firm based in France.
The partnership is a marriage of new and old–SAGE is a privately-held high-tech company founded in 1989, while giant Saint-Gobain (EU37.8 billion in sales last year, 190,00 employees) traces its beginnings to the 17th century when it manufactured mirrors for the Chateau de Versailles. Until they worked out their deal, SAGE and Saint-Gobain had been competing to develop windows that would electronically control the sun’s energy that flows through them. [click to continue…]
What kind of company is 3M? Yes, I know that 3M is a 108-year-old manufacturing company, based in St. Paul, Minnesota, which brought in $23 billion in revenues last year from a range of products including abrasives, adhesives and, famously, Post-it notes. Remarkably, 3M makes 55,000 different products.
But what’s the core business of the company? What is its unique advantage? What is its purpose?
When I visited 3M last month to prepare a story for FORTUNE, George Buckley, the CEO, waxed enthusiastic about the firm, as you would expect a chief executive to do. “There is no company like it in America,” he told me. “There is no company like it in the world.”
That sounds like hype, but I think he’s right. 3M is not a conglomerate like GE or United Technologies, which own a variety of industrial businesses that operate, for the most part, on their own. Nor, like Apple or Sony, is it a technology company that focuses on a single industry or two, i.e., consumer electronics and entertainment. Instead, 3M — a supplier to all of those companies– is a set of businesses organized around a big, busy and intellectually productive R&D lab which researches new technologies and processes and then develops them into products. The company’s purpose, as best as I can tell, is to invent useful new things. Its unique competitive advantage is a culture that fosters innovation.
My story, 3M’s Innovation Revival, is in the current issue of FORTUNE. Here’s how it begins:
3M is everywhere. That’s the point George Buckley, the chairman and CEO of 3M, is trying to make as he talks about his favorite subject, inventing things. Last year, he says, “even in the worst economic times in memory, we released over 1,000 new products.”
As if on cue, Buckley’s new iPhone rings, showing a photo of his daughter. “Daddy’s in a meeting,” he says, and hangs up.
“I’m told there’s some 3M inside that phone,” I say. Buckley replies, “There’s lots of 3M inside.” He can’t say exactly what 3M (MMM, Fortune 500) gadget is in the iPhone; Apple’s skittish about such things. But point well made: 3M is everywhere.
Apple–and many other companies–couldn’t do what they do without 3M. The St. Paul company produces a mind-bending 55,000 products. Some of them you know — Post-it notes, Scotch tape, Dobie scouring pads, Ace bandages, Thinsulate insulation. But most you don’t, because they’re embedded in other products and places: autos, factories, hospitals, homes, and offices. Scientific Anglers fly-fishing rods? Nutri-Dog chews? They also come from 3M.
The story goes on to argue that 3M’s ability to innovate slipped some under its prior CEO, Jim McNerney, who came from GE and went on to Boeing. McNerney is, by all accounts, a great leader and he brought needed discipline and cost controls to 3M. But Buckley, an British-born engineer, better grasped the 3M culture and its importance, and the company has become more inventive since he was hired at the end of 2005. [click to continue…]
Yesterday was my last full day before taking off on vacation. It was a busy day, as usual. I wrapped up a story for FORTUNE, hosted a webinar for Greenbiz, wrote a blogpost, pushed through my email, which now arrives at a rate of 100-200 a day, and ran a couple of errands.
In between, by coincidence–or perhaps not–I stumbled across a couple of NPR interviews. Diane Rehm talked with Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School about his new book, Relaxation Revolution, and Terry Gross of Fresh Air interviewed Matt Richtel of The New York Times about his excellent series of stories, called Your Brain on Computers, which explores how digital media is changing our lives, our culture and, yes, our brains. The interviews were so compelling, and so timely, that I listened to both programs, in full, this morning. (They’re available on iTunes.)
Both were, in a way, about the same thing: how stressing the brain affects health. And while many things are more stressful than being “always on,” facing tight deadlines and being nagged by that feeling that you haven’t checked your email, oh, in the last 45 minutes, most of us will never go to war or perform surgery, so these are the of stresses that touch us every day. They can literally be deadly–Richtel won a Pulitzer Prize this year for his terrific series of stories, Driven to Distraction, about the risks of talking and texting behind the wheel. (One of my very top pet peeves is people who talk on the phone while driving.) [click to continue…]
In 1897, a farmer in Orrville, Ohio, named Jerome Monroe Smucker began selling stoneware crocks of apple butter from the back of a horse-drawn wagon. He signed the lid of each one, to vouch for its quality.
The J.M. Smucker Co. still sells apple butter with the family name on the label. It also sells Smucker jams and jellies, Jif peanut butter, Folger’s coffee, Crisco shortening, Pillsbury cake mixes, Eagle condensed milk, Hungry Jack pancakes and R.W. Knudsen juices — 2,100 products in all, which brought in $4.6 billion last year.
This is noteworthy but hardly unprecedented. Some of America’s biggest companies took root in the 19th century as family businesses selling a single product—DuPont with gunpowder in 1802, Procter & Gamble with candles in 1837, General Electric with the electric lamp in 1892.
What makes Smucker unique is that, more than a century later, it remains a family-run business. Still headquartered in rural Orrville (population: 8367), the company has had five chief executives, all named Smucker—J.M. (1897-1947), his son Willard (1948-1960), his son Paul (1961-1987) and, since then, Paul’s sons Timothy and Richard Smucker, who currently share the job of CEO.
Fifth-generation cousins Mark Smucker and Paul Smucker Wagstaff are being groomed to succeed them. “We would like that, but it’s not a fait accompli,” Richard Smucker, the boys’ uncle and their boss, told me when I visited the Smucker Co. last month.
I’ve got a story about J.M. Smucker in the current (Aug. 16) issue of FORTUNE; it’s one of a series of profiles of FORTUNE 500 companies that I’m writing for the magazine. While working on the story, it struck me that the Smucker offers a interesting and little-known case study in sustainability: Why has this company, which for most of its life has focused on the prosaic business of making jellies and jams, lasted for 113 years? [click to continue…]
So outdated has the EHS job title become that when you Google those three letters, the words “environmental, health and safety” appear just below the Electronic Health School in Utah and above an Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va.
