thestoryofmeaningfuluse
A Magazine Capturing the Story of Health- For People, Environment, Economy & HabitatArchive for March, 2011
Lesson Learned: After the Fall – Joe Sibilia’s Sustainable View of Riding a Bike
Publisher’s Welcome: Welcome, Joe Sibilia, CEO of CSRwire.com. Joe offers his point of view on bike safety after a personal experience being hit by a SUV riding his bike. This will be indexed with other reports tied to Frederic Page’s first report on If Road Safety is Relevant?
Can a bike be primary transportation and a sustainable practice?
by Joe Siblia
Springfield MA
Sustainability takes discipline and commitment. Part of it for me is riding my bike to work and around town. I don’t own a car.
Late afternoon, on St. Patrick’s Day, after a long winter of snow, cold and ice, the sun was shining, spring w…as in the air, the temperature was warm and my bike was calling me for some attention.
As I was riding home, clad in a short-sleeved shirt, a green sweatshirt (it was St. Patrick’s Day afterall and Oki demanded I wear green), my dad’s pants and some hiking boots, a speeding car on Wilbraham Road in Springfield, Mass. hit me hard on my left side and sent me flying.
They kept going. My friend Doug commented that most people would stop, even for an animal. They must have been in a hurry.
As I was flying in the air, I noticed the speed of the black SUV, with tinted windows, before I crashed into the pavement, slid over the tree line and landed on the sidewalk, headfirst.
It wasn’t the first time I’ve been hit. The other two times were skirmishes on ice and snow and a slow race for position at a traffic light – minor bumps. This time it was different.
Since the blood was flowing freely from my head, arms and leg, I thought it best to stay put for a moment and gain my composure. I removed my sweatshirt and wrapped my head in the t-shirt and pushed the sweatshirt on my arm and leg, closed my eyes and began to pray.
The first thing that came to my mind was the need to get a really good, cool looking, helmet (I’ve foolishly stayed away from safety gear, as a result of my own ignorance and ego).
The first comment I heard was, “Dude, are you dead?” Since I heard the enlightened concerned citizen, I knew I was not.
As the rubber necking took hold and the crowd gathered, I took the time to begin a meditative practice. I thought it a great opportunity to remove myself from my body and watch the process unfold as a witness to events.
The cops arrived before the ambulance and made sure I was not an escaped criminal and any warrants for my arrest did not exist. I was cleared to remain in my present state.
Further up the street, some onlookers found the mirror and some parts from the hit and run car. My bike was behind me and my goggles, bag and reflector were strewn about.
Trying to integrate sustainable living practices in a fast paced business environment requires constant daily attention.
Riding a bike, taking public transportation, using recycled materials, recycling, composting, and giving value to that which has been abandoned, takes a lot of energy. It’s distracting from the pursuit of making money.
Some may say the costs are too high. I offer another point of view. Friends I haven’t seen in a while have visited me. People have contacted me to extend their regards.
I’ve watched some movies I wanted to see and I’ve been served meals in bed. Maybe next week I’ll get hit by a truck and really have some luxuries.
Let us not be distracted by the conventional view of the costs of sustainability. Let us look at all the advantages – cleaner air, water, land and a more caring society.
Let us look at all our challenges as a time to grow and experiment with a new beginning. I’ll start with a new helmet, more sidewalk riding and greater advocacy for bike paths on and off the roads.
Sustainability has some costs, but the benefits are far greater. Live well, do good things and stay in touch.
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Authors Bio:
Joe Sibilia is a visionary of the socially responsible business movement, he is founder and CEO of Meadowbrook Lane Capital (MBLC), described by the Wall Street Journal as a “socially responsible investment bank” specializing in turning values into valuation.
Joe is also the CEO of CSRwire, the social responsibility newswire service that distributes and archives corporate social responsibility/sustainability news to journalists, analysts, investors, activists, academics, public relations and investor relations professionals worldwide.
Publishers Note:
Thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com community wishes Joe good healing and recovery from his broken bones; and we welcome his voice to the hall of people in our community, who understand road safety is so much more than driving and road conditions. Road Safety is about creating a new infrastructure and understanding so bikers can commute along side drivers safely.
thestoryofmeaningfuluse – Celebrating a Successful Launch!
A letter from the publisher…..
Boston, MA
Dear Readers,
A recent 10 day bout with the flu, gave me opportunity to sit quietly and take stock of the incredible experience I had over the past month, launching this e-zine…. thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com.
In between tending my symptoms, I was able to get into the data of the initial few weeks of reporting to find out what articles people liked the most…
My findings came as no surprise—the most popular articles were anything related to Dave Wann’s “New Normal” and health …. Our magazine readers enjoy reading about health here from the perspective of what I see key to capturing the story of meaningful use….
When I first began to think about the concept of “meaningful use” last year and why meaningful use can only be reported in the context of story……I did so as kind of tongue and cheek in response to the President Obama’s program for adoption of electronic medical records to serve “meaningful use.
As part of this program, Obama offered a financial incentive program that could total up to $44K to each doctor, who adopt use of electronic technology”
My dry humor made me wonder what would happen we gave every American$44K+ bonus to live their life in health. To me real “meaningful use,” is about changing the way we think of health so that we put less burden on the health care system to fulfill the promise of health. Why? Health is part of everything we do.
How we live, take care of ourselves, where we live and work and with whom….this ultimately is the place in which we find our health, restore it when it is not working or learn to live with a glitch that we cannot recover from.
And it has everything to do with how we work, earn and spend our money and the way we relate to an economy.
If our economy is not healthy, it becomes that much more difficult for us to retain our health, recover from illness or live with others adapting our ways to whatever our health condition includes.
Years ago, I recall in the “Economist,” someone wrote that Americans are always seeking the fountain of youth as its drive for health.
At this time, given the depth of challenge to any form of assuring health for the environment, economy, person and place—- I believe Americans and people all around the world are coming to a realization that health is something we have to create out of living and working cautiously and respectfully with others.
The initial popularity and testimonies for the value of this magazine has created a challenge for me to grow into in order to make this a sustainable enterprise. And I am doing just that! Phase 2 contains some great plans that are already in production.
- a series of articles from Dave Wann describing the “New Normal,” and stories that describe the actions of people living this way;
- missives from other countries translated into English from French, Spanish and Portugese;
- Some of our editors write for CSRwireTalkback.com post on CSRWire.com; we will be linking these editorials to articles that contain the research and stories that led us to formulate our editorials;
- Mercadio Etico has joined our media partnership and we will be bringing you stories their editors source in Brazil.
And more going live this week……..
Watch this week for the first “Life Lessons”; authored by Joe Sibilia, CEO of CSRWire.com.
Life lessons are stories that describe challenging experiences, members of our network have encountered that have inspired them to do something differently. I am personally excited that Joe Sibilia is the first person to contribute int his way.
I will follow with a second column related to the Japanese radiation disaster and my personal life lessons regarding radiation toxicity.
Just imagine, all this took shape while I was ill. The ideas came back to me in email from my amazing network that are making this magazine the value it is today!
Let me take a minute to apologize for the disruption to our service, while I was ill. Please know, we are doing the best to respond to your wonderful attention that our data aggregation shows and report to you on a daily basis as much as we can Monday- Friday (EST).
Our mission is to inspire anyone who reads us to create the work that nourishes them for life by bringing you inspiring stories of how people, companies and learning communities work wisely to live well.
Now for a few matters of business:
Software Glitches
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Cheers,
Lavinia
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Lavinia Weissman is an sustainable market leadership coach, journalist, and publisher of thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com. As a speaker she describes the new emerging patterns of markets shaped by sustainable market leaders and the social networks they work with and employ. As a coach, Lavinia works with all her clients to inspire professional development that assures a person the opportunity to embed sustainability as a leader into the network and culture of people they work with.
Publisher’s Note: Please be patient while we figure out if Twitter can repair our @workecology id and recover our network. By Friday 4/1, I hope twitter will resolve this and I will know by then what I have to do.
CEO Pay , Corporate Taxes- One Woman’s Think!
Do We Protest or Change to Sustain?
@workecology (twitter system problem has not yet been repaired: please be patient)
Boston, MA
Everyday there is a sensational headline or more, protesting CEO Pay. This topic is complex and far more complicated relative to industry and sector. In Massachusetts, where I live – advocates from government, industry and non-governmental organizations are getting active in the analysis and scrutinizing the need for change.
CEO pay seems to seep into many other complex issues, e.g. rising cost of health care, CEO performance and ethics, and legislation that protects major corporations from paying taxes.
Yet, I don’t believe we will get out of the squalor and mess government is in financially that is complicating the global economy and stripping citizens of their ability to sustain, if we keep perpetuating the same discussions about corporate greed or tax dodging.
As the US Government continues to face a shutdown because our politicians cannot agree – is compliance, scrutiny and protest going to be our only tools to spark change.
As I read the news over the past weekend, I was reminded to two notable observations from my own research,
1. Jared Diamond, winner of the Pulitzer Prize wrote in Collapse: How societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Historically, Diamond has been chastised by environmentalists as “being in bed” with corporations Diamond reminds us that when he visits a corporation, he writes honestly and factually.
On some properties he has seen destruction and on others he has seen caution and he wrote his book, Collapse with this value in mind,
“My view is that, if environmentalists aren’t willing to engage with big businesses, which are among the most powerful forces in the modern world, it won’t be possible to sole the world’s environmental impact problems.”
2. Tyler J. Elm, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc, Former Senior Director of Corporate Strategy and Finance, identified a new form of perspective in th examination of global companies; Of the 100 largest world economies, 42 are corporations (not countries).
This argues for the merit of looking at a corporation that is an economy, e.g. Wal-Mart and General Electric from different filters and questions than companies that are not performing to the scale of a large global economy.
This also provides an interesting perspective from the view of transparency and analysis about forming a new generation of activity to reform taxes, compensation and CEO performance in my my mind.
In my mind right now the tradition of how NGO’s protest and debate and how media reports is limiting. This is the case particularly in the United States to where the value for sustainability conflicts with a diverse input from outside the corporate sector that argues for scrutiny, compliance and legislation to change the problems we perceive as sole focus for solution.
Based on the recent press that GE paid no taxes in 2010 after posting profits of $14.2B, I had a citizen’s reaction of “What?” Given conditions of our schools, health care system and more: I was torn about the degree to which corporations do not pay taxes. But hidden in my story is a strong view I have that US government of all levels, Federal, State, City do not perform.
Do I focus my time on protesting corporate tax dodging? How do I deal with my stress that government in my country is focused on spending rather than focused insuring our spending carries us forward into a future and that all sectors align with this value in action, not just government?
If GE paid taxes, how much of this money now would be wasted in a time where our government is not performing for a majority of its citizens. I have become mixed in thinking about taxes, since US government is not performing?
I am disappointed on the corporate side as to what they can do with profits to create new jobs, increase access to health insurance and over haul their compensation and benefit schemes to recognize the rise in chronic illness, stress and the average American’s inability to insure the 4 pillars of sustainabillty – a job, a doctor, a home and education.
The Latest Focus for Protest – Corporate Tax Dodging.
From the corporate perspective, wheels are spinning about corporations who do not pay taxes. Political activist, Chuck Collins, Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC is one of the quality voices in the NGO movement questioning why corporations do not pay taxes.
Collins lives with his family in a neighborhood of Boston, known for its grassroots and political advocacy, Jamaica Plain. He has become one of the leading voices documenting, analyzing the complexity of the issue fills the blogSphere with a quality of advocacy journalism that is exceptional.
Chuck’s personal page on Facebook, provides a look into that complexity, why there is no easy solution and why it is so urgent to lead change in this arena as corporations that include GE, Bank of America, Verizon, and Federal Express.
Collins editorial on Huff Post Business is candid, factual and maps out the full agenda in a brief editorial, General Electric King of the Tax Dodgers.
And yes, General Electric heads this list of tax dodgers and some facts I know of that would not be posted to a tax analysis with regard to Jeffrey Immelt’s compensation over the past few years.
General Electric the Corporate Citizen Change Agent
As I indicated to Chuck Collins on his Facebook wall over the weekend, I think the fact that General Electric is what he describes as the “King of Tax Dodgers” is dedicated to Corporate Citizenship and all that implies to its governance and has embedded sustainability into its culture.
In review of my own research archives and identification of these facts, I wonder how the CSR practice of transparency will apply to GE’s filing a return of $0 on its Federal IRS return?
With Obama appointment of GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt’s to the Federal Economic Advisory Panel this sets a stage for more controversy related to GE’s lack of tax payments and a need for transparency.
For naysayers, it is easy to take the position that Obama has made a mistake appointing a registered Republican to this position who heads a corporation that delivered $14.2B in global profit and $5.1B in US profits in 2010. GE claimed a tax benefit of $3.2B based on federal tax qualifications.
Last year, I covered a story on a meeting at the Paley Center called the #CSRdebate. At the time, I attended this meeting, I felt that the success of this conversation reflected more a progress report on accountability, performance and success of embedding sustainability into a corporate culture.
General Electric has done all that leading globally initiatives that are impacting climate change, health and energy through their internationally respected initiatives of Ecoimagination and Healthmagination.
Within that story, George Kell, Executive Director of the UN Global Compact pointed out
George Kell pointed out that the American tendency to shape conversations that are generalized does not work for construction of complicated issues that involve CSR. Generalizations cannot empower what is needed to have a constructive CSR conversation.
Kell’s final remarks offered related to reporting on the membership of the UN Global Compact response of 20% interest to climate change that he anticipated would grow to 30% next year represented an indicator of importance.
It is still unclear of the 7700 members of the UN Global Compact how rapidly more than 10% of its members are actually embedding sustainability. Yet, General Electric is a leader of that in forum and within the top 1% of performers.
Also represented in this event, was Bob Corcoran – Vice President, Corporate Citizenship, President & Chairman, GE Foundation. Bob outlined how GE’s core business strategy to embed sustainability into its culture is driven by its corporate citizenship program.
Ecomagination and Healthyimagination were driven by General Electrics’ innovation of sustainability venturing.
Immelt himself authored his plan, A Blue Print for Keeping America Competitive and published it in the Washington Post. The plan focuses on trade, export of US goods and job creation.
Over the last two years, GE has created over 6,000 manufacturing jobs in the United States as well as stepped up to investing in energy and health related businesses that create new companies and jobs.
In 2008, Immelt gave hope to a group of students at UC Berkeley Hass School of Business when he
In 2008 in forum to UC Berkeley Hass School of Business, Immelt gave hope and direction for a future to these students, that so few know how to give at these times, shortly after the September 2008 financial market meltdown.
Immelt has described himself as a banker with “deep pockets, who also invested in people. Immelt differentiates himself from an investment firm because he devised and put into practice a sustainability framework that defined how General Electric could lead the world into the building of a sustainable economy.
Outside of GE, Immelt announced and carried through on plans to invest in new ventures that are not entirely owned by GE. In some cases these small enterprises are competitors to GE divisions and businesses; creating a social network of coopetition as part of the GE Culture.
Immelt’s Compensation and How It is Managed
GE Directors and Immelt have align Immelt’s compensation based on long term strategy and current financial performance. In reviewing articles regarding his compensation; I have decided to begin to look at other companies closely in terms of ratio of profit, total sales and CEO salary. But doing this analysis was a good beginning.
While reports show that Immelt”s compensation for 2010 doubled, within the report were some explainations of adjustments from past years and a modification to how Jeffrey Immelt used General Electric resources of personal use. Directors viewed that Immelt performed well. In this context,
- He compensation doubled to a total of $15.2M based on profits of $14.2B.
- Shares offered in 2006 were cancelled because the company did not meet its performance expectations at that time.
- During 2 years of reduced financial performance, Immelt received no bonus. The $4M received for 2010 was the first bonus he received in two years.
- In 2010, Immelt received $389,809 of other compensation by using the GE jet for personal business. He has a new agreement to lease the jet for personal use and reimburse for the cost of its use.
What does the US need – Corporate Taxes, Lower CEO Pay or a Sustainable Economy
While I would not identify myself as a ‘libertarian,” I have to ask what would I prefer? That a profitable corporation pay taxes ? Or create a tax systmee for sustainable economy? Is there a simple answer to these questions. I think not.
For a company that is leading performance in the top 1$ for sustainable value, there is a real advantage to not protesting the problem, but opening a dialogue with this company to find out what change would benefit stakeholders and how.
And a real dialogue is not based on protest, argument and debate–a dialogue begins with briefing sessions and gives the players opportunity to learn and absorb in an educational forum.
This kind of initiative is then structured in a setting where participants can focus and think and ask question from which to generate questions that direct the participants in a new direction of thought that can be formed into a action strategy.
Embedded in this issue are issues of leadership, CEO performance, global versus local economy, size of company and a new view of a size of company that merits being defined an economy,
thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com readers what do you think? Is the world ready to redefine the GDP and spark new economic thinking that is sustainable and not about corporations or government and political feuds?
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Lavinia Weissman is an sustainable market leadership coach, journalist, and publisher of thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com. As a speaker she describes the new emerging patterns of markets shaped by sustainable market leaders and the social networks they work with and employ. As a coach, Lavinia works with all her clients to inspire professional development that assures a person the opportunity to embed sustainability as a leader into the network and culture of people they work with.
Publisher’s Note: Please be patient while we figure out if Twitter can repair our @workecology id and recover our network. By Friday 4/1, I hope twitter will resolve this and I will know by then what I have to do.
Sanofi-Aventis & Genzyme Conspiracy
Note from the Publisher:
The development plan for thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com is to archive meaningful story capture in a format that assures the a daily story can be archived with other related stories. We are building a program to provide our readers a long view of our story capture for educational purposes as we observe the stories to weave into an activity of sustainable impact.
This week we will be featuring a series of stories related to Sanofi-Aventis’s acquisition of Genzyme drawn from a 3 post series, originally published in
Sanofi Aventis was an early adapter and contributor to the UN Global Compact Community. Lavinia Weissman selected to follow this story of Sanofi’s acquisition of Genzyme as a way to report on the story of how Sanofi Aventis will embed responsible a framework of sustainability into the Genzyme culture and its performance, moving forward.
Let the story begin……………………………………………………………………………………..
Hostile Take Over or Sound, Sustainable Business Strategy? – Post 1 of a 3 Part Series.
Search on Category: SanofiAventisStoryCapture to find all related articles.
By Lavinia Weissman
Boston MA
original date of publication in CSRWireTalkback 07 October 2010
The Boston Globe published an article on Monday, October 4, 2010, titled “Sanofi-Aventis launches take over battle with Genzyme.”
On July 29, 2010, Sanofi-Aventis offered a fair price bid price for the purchase of Genzyme. On August 30, Genzyme confirmed it received an unsolicited bid of $69.00 per share. The bid was turned down by Genzyme’s CEO Henri Temeer.
Mergers among the Fortune 500 are increasing; for example, Pfizer acquired Wyeth and Merck acquired Schering-Plough. Acquisitions and mergers usually involve some form of workforce reduction, management of corruption and, of course, higher profits. Is there something different about Sanofi’s bid for Genzyme?
CEO Christopher A. Viehbacher came to Sanofi from GlaxoSmithKline in December 2008. His priority was to respond to declining profits occurring with the patent expirations of key drugs in 2013.
Viehbacher chose to accelerate CSR as a core strategy with a mission to improve the health of the world’s 6.8 billion citizens. Sanofi-Aventis’ 2009 Sustainability Report outlines an overview of programs in research and development that have a patient-centric focus.
Sanofi is now an emerging leader in global markets in Latin America, Africa, Russia, India, China and South Korea. Annual global sales total € 29.3B (euros), making Sanofi the 3rd largest pharmaceutical company. Sanofi-Aventis has strengthened operations and organized itself to take innovation and research to market, drawing on its active participation in the UN Global Compact since its establishment in 2000.
While Genzyme is innovative in regards to research and development for cancer and other illnesses, it has proven to be weak in sustainability. A viral outbreak, a plant shutdown, low inventories and a $175M FDA fine disrupted Genzyme’s operations and reduced its share value to as low as $45. Bid rumors added value to a shaky year for Genzyme and increased its value per share to $71.
This invites the question:
Is Sanofi-Aventis’ bid for Genzyme simply another hostile take over or a bid for a sustainable core business strategy?
As of 20 March 2011 -The merger is still in process and moving forward in a positive way, what do you think now? What have you learned? Post 2 will be posted Monday, April 4, 2011. Stay tuned.
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Lavinia Weissman is an sustainable market leadership coach, journalist, and publisher of thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com. As a speaker she describes the new emerging patterns of markets shaped by sustainable market leaders and the social networks they work with and employ. As a coach, Lavinia works with all her clients to inspire professional development that assures a person the opportunity to embed sustainability as a leader into the network and culture of people they work with.
Judy Wicks, a Philadelphia Restauranter, Redefining the Global Economy Locally
by Dave Wann
Golden, Co
For twenty-six years, restaurateur Judy Wicks poured her energies into the White Dog Café in Philadelphia. Though the restaurant started and remained relatively small, there have been many other ways that Wicks has measured growth. She’s never bought into the dominant paradigm that growth is defined solely by increased profits.
Judy does not believe that economic exchange can be one of the most satisfying and meaningful ways that humans interact. As Wicks sees it, growth is also about increasing knowledge; expanding consciousness; developing creativity, deepening relationships, increasing happiness and well being – and having fun.
“Money is simply a tool, she emphasizes. “Business should really be about relationships – with everyone we buy from and sell to, everyone we work with, and with the Earth itself.” Wicks made a conscious decision to stay small; to be one special restaurant rather than a chain. She hung a sign in her closet that she’d see each morning: “Good morning beautiful business.”
The sign reminded her of the farmers who were already out in the fields picking fresh organic fruits and vegetables; and the pigs, cows, chickens that were out in the pastures, enjoying the morning sun and fresh air.
She would think of the restaurant’s bakers coming early in the morning to put cakes and pies in the oven, and she’d even remember the growers down in Chiapas, Mexico, growing the organic fair trade coffee beans that made her restaurant so fragrant each morning.
The relationships and beauty she’s after have been reflected over the years in various programs, activities and spin-offs. For example, her decision to pay staff a “living wage” was the result of her realization that the people she worked with were very important to both her and the business.
A living wage is a voluntary commitment by a business owner to pay employees the minimum amount needed to cover the cost of living in a particular location. It’s typically far above the federally mandated minimum wage, and at first Wicks refused to consider it.
Then one day she stood in the kitchen with three of her kitchen staff as they chopped vegetables and sliced meat. “Looking at their faces, I had an instant realization,” she recalls. “Of course I wanted to pay Brian, Tyrone and James enough to live on – to buy food, clothes, pay their rent and other expenses. How could I not pay people working at the White Dog enough to cover basic needs?”
Another epiphany came when she drove to a favorite hiking location, a forest north of Philadelphia. “The beautiful ferns that I loved were crumpled to the ground like brown tissue paper because of the drought we were having,” she recalls. “And the creek, once rushing waist-deep, had no water at all, only dust-covered rocks.
‘This is what it will be like, I thought, when global warming brings drought and fire to some parts of the world and storms and floods to others.’” Her personal connection with nature prompted a commitment to purchase 100 percent of the restaurant’s electricity from renewable sources.
The White Dog became known for serving healthy food from local sources. It was worth the extra effort to her for several reasons: the direct relationships with farmers and growers build community and provide transparency about quality; local food reduces “food miles” and carbon emissions; and the much fresher food is superior in taste and nutrition.
She was especially concerned about the drawbacks of standard factory and feedlot farming of livestock, so she made an effort to find local sources of grass-fed beef and pasture-raised pork. Still another chapter in her business evolution followed an “aha” realization that she was part of a much wider food system.
Judy became as much an activist as business owner, sharing her hard-earned market niche with other restaurants throughout the city. “I had to move from a competitive mentality to one of cooperation in order to build a local economy based on humane and sustainable farming.”
The White Dog soon became an education and support center. When the farmer who supplied the restaurant with organic pork needed a refrigerator truck to expand his business and supply other restaurants, Judy Wicks lent him $30,000, which he has since paid back.
Every year, Wicks staged a Green Dog Day to talk about green business practices and launch new green initiatives, which included a compost project that supplied compost to inner city school gardens; a solar hot water system to heat dishwasher water, and a ban on bottled water.
Judy Wicks’ overall vision – a sustainable global economy based on a worldwide network of sustainable local economies - has now spread to many other communities. She co-founded BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, in 2001, which now includes 80 or more local networks and over 20,000 locally owned businesses.
One of the best examples of BALLE’s mission is Sustainable Connections in Bellingham, Washington, which now has 600 independent businesses in its membership. Recognizing the need for a new generation of farmers to provide locally grown food, that program has offered apprenticeships to 30 or more new organic farmers in the past three years.
Choosing a place and taking responsibility for it is the first step in building a local living economy, she asserts. Ten years ago, she sold her stocks and put her life savings into The Reinvestment Fund, a Philadelphia community investment group that loans money to support things like affordable housing, local businesses, and community centers.
“I soon discovered that the wind turbines producing renewable energy for our region, including my own home and business, were financed by The Reinvestment Fund,” she recalls.
“From my local investment, I receive not only a modest financial return (which has recently outperformed the stock market), but also a ‘living return’ – the benefit of living in a more sustainable community.”
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Authors bio:
David Wann is an author, filmmaker and speaker on the topic of sustainable design and lifestyles. He is the author of The New Normal: An Agenda for Responsible Living (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011) and contributing editor to thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com.
The Tug of War between Capital Expenditures and Care
Boston, MA
Yesterday, I had a delightful lunch with someone to work on our business plan for a launch of a new capacity building organization that combines all our talent. There will be more on this through many many posts to come.
What made our conversation shaped with ease is a value we share – both of us have an understanding of how so much of what is implied by a need for “care,” in this complex world is the implications of the rapid spreading harm that we are now learning about in Japan.
The Earthquake, e.g. Haiti and Katrina was a natural disaster. The BP Oil Spill was a man made disaster to health of the environment, earth, economy and people.
Now Japan is a combination of all of that a natural disaster complicated by man made harm; radiation exposure. This harm is beyond an immediate danger, this harm like the BP Oil Spill will lead to generations of modified human genetics and natural mutations that lead to a rise in chronic systemic and neurological illnesses, cancer and more. 
This will change the health of the entire region through which toxins of any kind blow into the wind. It will challenge health of environment, people, earth and economy.
It moves the world into a state of uncertainty and building a response to a need for care we cannot define let alone imagine and view an accelerated response. The March 16, 2011 column In Good Company: @vaultcsr’s blog – The Japan Crisis: What is the Role of Business in Disaster Response? tells the story of a Japanese man rumbling through the piles in search of people he employed out of care; care and respect for those who serves his business and clients.
Claire Mumford, CEO of the International Business Leaders Forum, gives this example in the context of examining business role in disaster response? This is a value that I believe was the original focus in many ways of CSR Frontier Leaders, e.g. Ben and Jerry, Jeffrey Hollender and Anita Roddick.
It is a value I hold dear.
Yet there is another value even more critical at this time. This value relates to how we regard health for the world and all beings who reside on earth. It is my belief we need to reshape how we think of capital expenditures that related to developing science and equipment to counteract global warming.
We need to formulate a new system of thought that values raising the resources we need to respond to a disaster or simply the accelerated response we need now to the harm that has been building for years.
Implied in this view is the need to foster a change through cooperation between competitors. 
Eric Lowitt and I, recently
shared a conversation in which he described his plan for BOOK 2 . Book 2 is leveraged from Eric’s first book, The Future of Value. share an understanding of how the cost of research and science to generate new drugs, cures, accelerated response to harm of natural resources has become an obstacle t0 change for sustainable value.
We are both interested in building a new forum or education and all that implies. The mission of this forum is to insure the accelerated action research of to accelerate sustainable change.
It is my belief that the Japanese business man searching through the piles for people he cares about is a metaphor for the kind of attention we need to give to what so many want to deny because of the rising cost of investigation to generate research into applied learning for systemic impact.
Reader what do you think? Do you believe we need to give the same care and attention to how we organize capital expenditures as much as we do to people in the first stage of response to a disaster whether natural or man made?
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Lavinia Weissman is an sustainable market leadership coach, journalist, and publisher of thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com. As a speaker she describes the new emerging patterns of markets shaped by sustainable market leaders and the social networks they work with and employ. As a coach, Lavinia works with all her clients to inspire professional development that assures a person the opportunity to embed sustainability as a leader into the network and culture of people they work with.
GE and the Three Models of Sustainability Venturing
by Eric Lowitt
Boston, MA
GE announced the next phase of its $200 million Smart Grid Challenge at last week’s 2011 CES. This phase, focused on crowdsourcing “ideas for harnessing and managing energy at home,” is the latest in a line of entrepreneurial efforts used by market leading companies to accelerate their sustainability efforts.
In fact, since the beginning of 2010, GE and several other companies turned to the venture playbook to connect capital and know-how with ideas to further pursue sustainability.
While sustainability venturing is en vogue, the tactic isn’t right for every company. My review of companies with sustainability venturing efforts underway — GE, Nike, Marks and Spencer, Vodafone, 3M, GM, and Virgin among them — suggests two large steps must be completed before venturing can be effective.
First these companies made powerful connections between sustainability and corporate and competitive strategies. Specifically, they’ve adopted the view that sustainability is a means to grow, not solely a source of new risks to be managed.
Second these companies adjusted business processes to improve their processes’ environmental and social impacts. These adjustments have been very well covered elsewhere.
The completion of these steps increases the likelihood that venturing efforts will pay off. The next step is to be precise about the goals of your sustainability venturing plans. Are you looking for ideas to grow into new businesses?
Are you looking to fund potentially disruptive sustainability innovations in your value chain? Or are you seeking access to start-ups that could provide a range of benefits for your company?
These three options have led to the creation of three sustainability venturing structures.
- Crowdsourcers engage the open public to provide ideas to solve a particular challenge and ultimately lead to business growth.
- Amplifiers are developing networks of venture capital firms, value chain partners, public sector partners, and even competitors to bring about systemic change in an environmental or social issue.
- Investors place an investment in either an incubator or similar firm that funds start-ups in a sustainability related market.
Crowdsourcers. These companies look to the open public to help solve a particular challenge.
The best ideas are provided with a modest to significant level of funding. Perhaps the most prevalent example is the GE Smart Grid Challenge. GE sees the development of a smart grid — a network that delivers electricity using digital technology — as a massive growth opportunity.
The company has long been lauded for its ability to scale great ideas into successful businesses. By partnering with four preeminent venture capital firms to bring its Smart Grid Challenge to life, GE is turning to the open public to provide ideas to accelerate the development and adoption of a smart grid that the company can then scale.
Amplifiers. These companies have internal captive funds focused on sustainability. Nike and Marks and Spencer are examples of companies in this category.
Nike’s Sustainable Business and Innovation (SB&I) function created an “Innovation Lab,” called the SB&I Lab, to identify and fund disruptive technologies that can provide sustainability solutions.
The SB&I Lab works with a range of partners to increase the impact of its investments. Similarly Marks & Spencer launched a 5-year, £50 million fund, called the Plan A Innovation Fund, to bring sustainability solutions to life. Like Nike’s SB&I Lab, the Plan A Innovation Fund develops partnerships to maximize their investments’ sustainability impact.
Investors. These companies invest in start-ups focused on bringing new sustainability solutions to market. At least two methods for these investments have emerged. The first method is an investment in a sustainability focused incubator. In January 2010 3M New Ventures invested in Germany based MAMA Sustainable Incubation AG.
MAMA, which opened in early 2010, invests in “green entrepreneurs” to bring innovations to market. The second method is the establishment of a branded investment firm. Associated with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, Virgin Green Fund is a private equity firm “investing growth capital in the renewable energy and resource efficiency sectors in North America and Europe.”
As companies transition from internally focused sustainability initiatives to investments that can bring about systemic change, sustainability venturing efforts are likely to become more prevalent. Companies will increase the likelihood of success by choosing the right structure for their sustainability venture efforts.
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Is Road Safety a Relevant Issue?
Barcelona, Spain
The Commission on Road Safety, a Non-Standing Committee of the Spanish Congress of Deputies, has approved unanimously a motion urging the Government to include road safety as part of Corporate Social Responsibility, in an effort to involve companies in the prevention of work-related traffic accidents.
The initiative calls for the Executive to make appropriate amendments in the Law on Prevention of Occupational Risks to include the assessment and the prevention of traffic accidents that occur as a result of work activity or commuting. According to the Committee’s recommendations, companies would have to report on their progresses on the prevention of work-related accidents and carry out studies and evaluations to identify – and fight – their causes.
The Committee also calls for the registration of work-related traffic accidents, a better coordination between the private and public entities involved, and security improvements in work-related travel. Finally, it asks for the creation of a “quality label”, awarded by the competent institutions and agencies, which would support the company’s commitment in preventing accidents among their employees.
As an incentive for the employer, the Committee recommends the creation of an annual prize that would reward best practices in the field of occupational health and the quality of the inclusion of road safety plans in the Corporate Social Responsibility strategy of the companies.
This news has been received with mixed feelings in Spain, both by companies and the CSR community alike. One of the reasons, as stated by Professor Antonio Argandoña in his blog , is that this type of initiatives is a distraction from the “really important” CSR topics and that an “award” won’t change anything.
According to other comments, it is the role of the Government to deal with road safety. I don’t agree at all with those points of view. I do believe that road safety is a valid material issue for businesses, a clear area of concern for their internal and external stakeholders and has potentially a huge impact, economic, social and environmental on the companies themselves and the society in general.
In Spain, businesses lose thousands of working hours each year due to medical leaves of absence related to road accidents, that also cost thousands of lives. Industry research shows that typically workplace injury costs are met 40% by the employee, 30% by the employer and 30% by the community as a whole. The human cost is high, the financial cost as well.
Corporate reputation is also affected by employees driving behaviour. Did it ever happen to you to observe a dangerous driver in a company car, or truck, bearing the logo of their employer? What was your reaction? The impact on environment is high too, not only due to bad driving behaviours, generating huge amounts of CO2, but also because of accidents involving dangerous goods or substances.
In a recent post, CSR expert and author Elaine Cohen, writes that she believes that, in the next generation of GRI indicators, “G4″, “other issues that are not specifically covered in G3, should be considered, such as the issue of road safety and how companies manage employees who spend a lot of time on the road for work purposes, a significant source of fatalities and other accidents which endanger not only employees but the general public“.
I couldn’t agree more. Many companies already include road safety in their CSR plans and strategy. Some of them because they are directly or indirectly, related to the transportation industry, or vehicle manufacturers such as Ashok Leyland. Others, because they realize that there’s an opportunity for them to improve their workers well-being while impacting positively other areas such as the environment and public safety.
It is much better for an organization to be promoting a good news safety story such as winning an award, than it is to have to react to and suppress the outcomes of a major incident. Those companies also realize that their initiatives directly impact their bottom line and that they can gain a competitive advantage by being ahead of more reactive organizations.
World Health Organization data suggests that approximately 1.2 of the 5 million global injury deaths each year are road crashes. It’s clear that road safety is a major social issue. I believe that it is also a business issue. What do you think?
For our readers? What of these issues are relevant to you, where you work and reside? I wonder what impact reduction of accidents would have on health care costs for every country? and the increase in chronic episodes of care for the victims of these accidents. Whose job is it, to convene all the stakeholders?
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Frederic Page is a media associate with thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com from Barcelona, Spain. Frederic’s passion for sustainability grew out of a very eclectic background in industry and subject matter expertise. He is fluent in french, spanish and english. As a result he is able to integrate a sustainability agenda into his coaching and educational programs from understanding the perspective of culture, expertise and innovation.
Are Employment Traditions a Signficant Obstacle to Sustainable Value?
Part 1 – Designing the next generation of employment.
Boston, MA
Last years buzz in social media about jobs in CSR and Sustainability and the prospect of work for graduates of MBA programs was dim.
The news was filled with descriptions of meta system issues and statistics about the state of employment. I found the basis for most reports perpetuated a view that work equates with a full time job that carries with it benefits. The harsh reality became the number of full time jobs continues continued to decline.
Related to this harsh reality is the implosion of a gap between what people want for employment and what they value; and the lack of jobs creation focused on responding to this need. Most job descriptions and organizations for human capital and talent have not structured to accommodate the social network of engagement inspired by sustainable market leaders.
Is this changing, where and how? Future articles here will look at this question from the view of companies who have formed the new sustainable marketplace.
Do companies really manage talent? Or are people in the workforce actually learning to self-manage their talent and ongoing development, so when they are employed they provide value and build “a story of meaningful use,” that can be a story capture for their professional portfolio.
You can give some new thought and build imagination on what is possible by making a study of a new position that has grown out of the sustainability movement, the job of Chief Sustainability Officer. Your study should include a study of the career portfolio of people, who have earned these positions through their past accomplishments.
How did they get those job? Was it a result of a graduate program, skill development in a technical competence or something more strategic?
Early last year, Aman Singh, Vault.com Editor for CSR, Sustainability and Diversity profiled Kathrin Winkler, EMC’s Chief Sustainability Officer and her View from the Top, 
Kathrin works in a company where the agenda for sustainability is very clearly supported by the CEO and entire C-suite and board. Kathrin views the CEO, Joe Tucci as the real instigator and she views her job a person who with a very small team works across the company to embed sustainability agenda and translate that agenda into actual operations, product development and response to all stakeholder needs.
Aman called me after the interview for my opinion about Kathrin Winkler’s performance in the context of how to embed sustainability in a culture during an era of dowsizing.
My key observation about Kathrin’s job at EMC at that time was this:
“Kathrin’s skill of engaging the EMC workforce into the vision of sustainability is based on a simple premise: ‘corporate sustainability is really about business survival: Take the long view, or your business won’t survive in a failing global society or environment. Long-term sustainability affects customers, employees, suppliers, neighbors, partners, governmental bodies, and civil society. If we make our business choices based on how we interact with those stakeholders, then we are promoting sustainability.“
Since those articles were published, like most journalists in the sustainability space, I follow other Vice Presidents of Sustainability, e.g. Jeffrey Hogue, Danisco and Dave Stangis, Campbells Soup. I had to ask myself what was unique to Kathrin’s success as a sustainability strategist and practice leader based on what I have gotten to know about her this year.
Like me, Kathrin comes out of an era of workforce success turned sour, when she worked for Digital Equipment Corporation. There is something most unique to having worked at Digital; in the years that Digital Equipment thrived, anyone who had success there mastered a form of network unrelated to anything most people practice when searching for a job.
What was unique to Digital is how people leveraged their careers based on their technical expertise to build an audience in network and influence adoption of real practical strategies. It was unfortunate that the company CEO, Ken Olsen never actually learned how to work in this way.
Olsen’s lack of ability in this way led to a company reduction of 160K employees to fewer than 35K when Digital was merged with Compaq.
Basic to the understanding of working in network, Katherin’s core competence is her capacity as a sense-maker . As I noted to Aman,
She builds a web of inclusion and outreach based on the value she provides as a sense-maker. She provides us with the perfect example of a corporate citizen who has a form of outreach that is aligned with the principles of the Earth Charter and the Principle of Exercising Precaution to do no harm.“
There are still challenges to this format of work emerging to be a sustainable form of employment. My plan this year is to leverage my research on this trajectory of thought through the student internship program I am now leveraging through this magazine and our future portal development for WorkEcology.com. What I learn will be reflected and linked to this article and formed into a series.
This is a very different than preparing for a career based on job descriptions and how the dominating practices of HR in years past.
Let me know what you think of this line of thought as a reader. Our editorial board really would like to hear from our readers to build a relevant series of articles that makes a difference.
Authors bio:
Lavinia Weissman is an sustainable market leadership coach, journalist, and publisher of thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com. As a speaker she describes the new emerging patterns of markets shaped by sustainable market leaders and the social networks they work with and employ. As a coach, Lavinia works with all her clients to inspire professional development that assures a person the opportunity to embed sustainability as a leader into the network and culture of people they work with.
THE NEW NORMAL: An Agenda for Responsible Living
An Excerpt from THE NEW NORMAL
by Dave Wann
Golden, Co
Life has seemed effortless in our times for one simple reason: we have been mindlessly spending our natural endowment as if we’d won a Powerball lottery. Since 1960, global consumption and metals production have grown six-fold and oil consumption, eightfold.
Meanwhile, human population and water consumption have doubled, and in 2008 alone, global consumers bought 69 million vehicles, 85 million refrigerators, 297 million computers, and 1.2 billion mobile cell phones. How can this excessive economic paradigm possibly survive in an age of dwindling resources?
Renowned physicist and systems thinker Donella Meadows believed that the creation of sweeping change involves the scrapping of one paradigm and putting another into service. “There is nothing physical or expensive about paradigm change,” she wrote. “In a single individual, it can happen in a millisecond.
All it takes is a click in the mind, a new way of seeing. It is in the space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, bring down empires and have impacts that last for millennia.”
I think many people would agree that the time has come for such a paradigm shift. We have worn nature out (and ourselves, too) trying to comply with mandates for constantly increasing profits, productivity, speed and mobility.
It is time for a restorative era, rich in nature-friendly, ingenious design and ways of enriching and redirecting our most valuable achievement of all – human culture. It is time for a renaissance of human values.
Grimm Fairy Tales
There are at least a billion people on the planet right now worrying about getting enough food, while another billion worry about eating too much; a billion who can’t find clean water and another billion who drink bottled water at least sometimes, even though their tap water is just as pure.
We in the industrialized world are overfed but undernourished in many ways. Socially, psychologically, physically and spiritually, we are not fully meeting human needs. We’ve become susceptible to a virus of dependency, passive consumption; working, watching, waiting, and wasting.
Although the TV commercials would have us believe that every itch can be scratched with a trip to the mall, the truth is, we’re consuming more now but enjoying it less. According to surveys taken by the National Science Foundation for the past 30 years, even with steady increases in income, our level of overall happiness has actually declined.
Why? Many believe it’s because a lifestyle of over-consumption creates deficiencies in things that we really need, like health, social connections, security and discretionary time.
How can we expect a money-distracted culture to create trust, loyalty, inspiration, calmness and meaningful traditions? Frankly, the evidence indicates that the quest for ‘more’ at both the personal and commercial scale often strips these essential qualities away, leaving us borrowing, buying and selling rather than being.
The current lifestyle is designed for maximum consumption and ‘tolerable’ amounts of waste and destruction. It’s considered shameful to have a below-average income or a beat-up car, unless one is actively struggling to acquire more. This cultural story is now so woven into our psyches that it’s hard to imagine how else it might work.
So ingrained is the story that we rarely question its overall meaning and implications: the faster the global economy grows, the faster the world’s fragile living systems decline. Each American now requires an average of 30 acres of prime land and sea to satisfy both the needs and wants of our excessive lifestyle – a national total of roughly nine billion acres.
This is more than three times the acreage of the United States, which is a primary reason the U.S. is currently more than twelve trillion dollars in debt. To continue consumption at current levels, Americans will have to be aggressive and opportunistic with other countries’ rightful wealth.
We’ll have to allocate more to the military, work even harder and longer at jobs that often don’t stimulate us; carry more stress, debt, doubt, and shame. That is, unless we decide to simply change the story we live by; to change what we mean by the word ‘success’.
One of the primary mechanisms for maintaining social cohesion is status – the relative standing of an individual within the group, and that individual’s ability to obtain and retain respect. Individual status helps organize the group and makes it more functional; however status as a social mechanism developed in small, relatively stable, face-to-face groups, in which people knew each other over the course of a lifetime. Now our social world is shuffled, fragmented, in constant flux.
The evolution of our brains and instincts hasn’t kept pace with sweeping changes in our way of life over the last five hundred generations.
Author Jim Rubens characterizes our current lifestyle: “unceasingly fluid relationships, constant challenges to our status within new groups, the geographic dispersion of extended family, the message that only we are responsible for our life’s outcome, the barrage of status comparisons we see in mass media, and the incessant modeling of unattainable, stratospherically high goals.”
All these conditions pit the individual against the group, resulting in an epidemic of depression because of what Rubens terms ‘social defeat’.
Yet, to make collective, world-changing decisions, we need social coherence, organized by networks of trust and respect. In other times, status has been awarded to hunters, fighters, storytellers, healers, elders and priests – not just the person with the most tools, furs or cars.
Sociologists have proven that status is critical to our health, because lower social status correlates with higher stress levels, mortality rates, low birth weight, obesity, heart disease, lung disease, incidence of smoking, asthma, cancer, diabetes, number of sick days taken on the job, accident rates, suicide, exposure to physical violence, and compromised mental health.
No wonder we are status seekers! We literally need recognition and respect to be healthy. However, this recognition doesn’t have to center on material symbols. A cultural shift to other ways of earning and rewarding respect is a central theme in creating a sustainable future.
It’s clear that in the U.S., possessions and consumption have become a shortcut in the communication of status, and it’s also clear that in our headlong pursuit of goods and services, we’re making an unprecedented mess.
Why not just change the way our civilization achieves and confers status? To meet an urgent need – to reduce the volume of consumption and accompanying destruction – why not confer social rewards in place of material rewards?
Instead of honoring bank CEOs who fluff their own pillows with fairy-tale bonuses and take catastrophic risks with our money, why not respect and reward people of service, people who have gained our trust, people intent on making the world safer and more sane?
Why not agree – via cultural mechanisms like art and innovative policy-making – to think about personal worth in a different way?
Really, what must change are the symbols of success. It’s not large, expensive, hard-to-maintain houses we truly want, but large lives that contain enough discretionary time and generosity to share with those we love and respect.
In an era less obsessed with status through consumption, it’s not exotic vacations we’ll cherish but rather a contentedness that makes life an adventure no matter where we are. In the near future, there can be less energy-intensive travel and more focus on creating great communities where we want to be, rather than flee. Instead of accumulating just monetary wealth, we will accumulate calmness and wellness as our lifestyle becomes less confusing, more equitable and more affordable.
Authors bio:
David Wann is an author, filmmaker and speaker on the topic of sustainable design and lifestyles. He is the author of The New Normal: An Agenda for Responsible Living (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011) and contributing editor to thestoryofmeaningfuluse.com.
