Another chance to meet sustainable business pioneer, Ray Anderson

You know me, I never pass up the opportunity to wax lyrical about Ray Anderson and his company, Interface Inc.

And I’ll make no apologies for it. When it comes to examples that destroy the myth of either/or (i.e. that business can be both sustainable AND profitable – indeed MORE profitable), I can’t think of any stories to top it.

Of course, you can read his excellent books. You can take a look at the fabulous presentation he gave at TED. But there’s really no substitute for meeting the man himself and hearing the story first-hand.

If you’d like to do that, then you need to get on to the guys at Tomorrow’s Company, as he’s delivering their annual lecture on 3rd March. Places are going fast, so book now!

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More pearls of wisdom from Ray: an aside

I first became aware of Ray and the Interface story, when he was interviewed in Joel Bakan’s 2004 film, The Corporation.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a new 2-disc special edition of the film, which features over 8 hours of additional material, including further video footage of Ray.

In it, he makes some characteristically simple but very profound observations, most notably (given the recent failed talks in Copenhagen) on the role of governments.

He rightly rubbishes the role of regulation – all that does is encourage businesses to be “as bad as the law allows” (great phrase!).

Instead, he suggests that the most powerful lever of behavioural change is the taxation system which, right now, is totally arse-about-face (my words, not his!) when you consider what we want to be encouraging and discouraging – particularly in the current climate.

Most sensible people would agree that we want to be encouraging job creation and discouraging the whole linear “take, make, waste” system of industrial production – basically digging stuff up out of the ground and, ultimately, converting it into waste and pollution.

And yet we tax businesses on labour (e.g. in the form of National Insurance contributions here in the UK), whilst applying no taxes on the plundering of natural resources.

Just think of how it would change things if that was the other way around.

Hmmmm…

Filed under: Uncategorized , Interface, profitability, Ray Anderson, regulation, sustainability, sustainable business, Tomorrow's Company, Joel Bakan, The Corporation, taxation

In praise of brevity

Probably the biggest insight guiding the 55-minute guide series is that busy executives will gladly pay for brevity.

Too many business books start with the false premise that providing meaningful insight requires exhaustive (and frequently exhausting) levels of detail. They demand a huge investment from readers to wade through all the information provided and draw out what is relevant to them. In a rapidly changing, time-starved world, that’s an approach that’s getting wronger and wronger.

I’ve just been watching the 10 o’clock news on the Beeb, and if anyone needed proof that you don’t need a lot of words to pack a serious punch, then they need look no further than Elizabeth Wilmshurst’s testimony to the Chilcot Inquiry today, looking into the legality of the war in Iraq.

When asked by Sir John Chilcot if it made any difference to the decision that home secretary, Jack Straw, was himself a lawyer, her response was all the more withering for its brevity – and it earned her a round of applause from the gallery:

“He’s not an international lawyer,” she said.

OUCH!

Filed under: Uncategorized , 55 minute guides, brevity, Chilcot Inquiry, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, Iraq, Sir John Chilcot

55-minute guides launch at the IoD, Feb 11

It’s taken a while, but we’re finally there!

Next month sees the launch of the first two 55-minute guides, under the auspices of an Ashridge Business Briefing at the IoD.

Under normal circumstances, these briefings involve a single, hour-long session, but when you’ve written a series of books that people can read from cover to cover in significantly less than that, what would be the point?!

So patrons will be actually getting two sessions for the price of one, as co-creator Kevin Keohane and I share the platform, and the insights from our respective books.

If you fancy coming along, click here to book your place.

Here’s the blurb…

Live Long and Prosper: Six Simple Rules for Building Sustainable Brands

A lot of people are talking about sustainability these days. Still more talk about brands. Yet few people truly understand either. In the first part of this session, Dan Gray will offer fresh insights and must-knows on the really big questions when it comes to sustainability:

• What does it really mean to be sustainable?
• Why is that critical to long-term brand and business success?
• And what does it take to establish it as a meaningful source of differentiation?

The aim? To get you thinking and talking in a completely different language about sustainability – less about soft principles, values and ethics, and more about hard business logic and the value to be created from pursuing more sustainable strategies.

With his six laws for building sustainable brands, Dan provides a simple yet powerful argument why CSR is dead and ‘design for sustainability’ is the next competitive advantage.

The Talent Journey: A Systems Approach to Brand and Employee Engagement

It is 15 years since Heskett et al first wrote of the Service Profit Chain, evidencing the causal link between employee engagement and improved business performance. Why, then, is it that so many organisations are still so bad at doing it?

Kevin Keohane believes that the primary reason is businesses’ failure to join things up and, in the second part of this session, he illustrates the benefits of adopting a whole systems view of the employee life-cycle – from attraction and recruitment, through on-boarding and engagement, to the employee’s eventual departure:

• Why “joining it up” is no longer an option, it’s mandatory
• How it helps to keep things simple and avoid information fatigue
• Why that should matter to everyone in your organisation, from the C-suite down

By the end, you should have some powerful ideas, tools and examples to help you create far more effective engagement strategies – clear, consistent and compelling.

Filed under: Brand & Engagement, CR & Sustainability , 55 minute guides, Ashridge, Dan Gray, Institute of Directors, IoD, Kevin Keohane, Live Long and Prosper, The Talent Journey, Verb Publishing

Farewell to the “voice of rugby”

It was 2002 when the brilliant Bill McLaren – the nonpareil among sports commentators – hung up his mic, and yet his is still (and I suspect forever shall be) the “voice of rugby”. Sadly, he died today, and I’ll miss him.

Although I never met him or knew him, he was undoubtedly one of the most influential people in my decision to take up rugby almost 30 years ago. He introduced me to the rivalry, the passion and (above all) the sportsmanship of the game through the medium of his rich and distinctive commentary.

Maybe it’s just that rolling Borders brogue. Or his unique brand of similes that most novelists couldn’t match if they wrote till they were 90 (“He’s like a demented ferret!”). Or the unerring ability to make what can be a very complex game incredibly simple for the layman to follow.

Whatever it was, he was an extraordinary commentator and a great communicator.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Bill McLaren, simile, voice of rugby

CommScrum II – Death to internal communications?

Following on from a great response to our first post – Making sense of complexity: why we all need to be T-shaped – this week’s iteration of the Commscrum takes a swipe at the purely inward-facing, productivity-focused bent of most internal communications.

Kicked off by Mike Klein (with Kevin Keohane, Lindsay Uittenbogaard and me chucking in our tuppence ha’penny worth for good measure), the debate centres on its viability in the face of the ongoing convergence of communication disciplines, and the increasing importance of employees as an externally-facing communication channel – a vital cog in building authentic brands.

Check it out and join the conversation.

Filed under: Brand & Engagement , authenticity, brand, employee engagement, Kevin Keohane, CommScrum, internal communication, Mike Klein, Lindsay Uittenbogaard, employee communication

Announcing the launch of CommScrum

Mocking the extra-polite culture pervasive within the employee communication industry, and recalling the varied rugby careers of several of its participants, four leading comms pros have joined forces to launch The CommScrum — a cooperative blog dedicated to “Full Contact Communication”.

Joining me and Kevin Keohane (head of MS&L’s global brand and talent practice) on the team are leading internal comms pros Mike Klein and Lindsay Uittenbogaard — a group including co-authors of the Gower Handbook of Internal Communication, all of whom are known for strong opinions, international experience and innovative work.

The initial effort leads off with a familiar refrain for readers of this and Kevin’s blog, raising the question of whether internal comms practitioners need to take on a more multidisciplinary orientation — and whether IABC as the leading professional organisation is likely to help or hinder that process.

CommScrum aims to publish at least twice monthly and can be found at:  http://CommScrum.wordpress.com

Filed under: Brand & Engagement , employee engagement, IABC, Kevin Keohane, CommScrum, internal communication, Mike Klein, Lindsay Uittenbogaard, Dan Gray

Loving Renault’s new sustainability ad

Yesterday, I caught my first sight of Renault’s new TV ad trumpeting its action on sustainability and, I have to say, I was hugely impressed. Amidst all the other ads of the ilk of the “new, more fuel efficient Audis” and BMW’s “efficient dynamics” it really stood out, and here’s why…

Asking the really big question
It’s an oft-quoted line on innovation – Henry Ford’s observation that if he’d asked his customers what they’d wanted, they’d have asked for faster horses. If Renault’s ad and their new Sustainable Mobility website are anything to go by, they’re looking way beyond simply producing less polluting, more fuel efficient cars. They’re actually asking themselves whether the car, as we know it, has a future as a sustainable means of transportation and what might replace it.

Systems thinking
The messaging is also spot on when it challenges the exclusive focus of many manufacturers (and indeed many customers) on vehicle emissions. It points to the need to evaluate and address environmental impacts right along the value chain and at every stage of the product life-cycle – from design and manufacture right through to end-of-life recycling.

Balancing short- and long-term objectives
The ad closes with a sight of Renault’s new mass market electric cars, available from 2011 – all-electric vehicles with zero CO2 or pollutant emissions. Take a look at the Building the Future segment of their website, and you see that this is not the be-all end-all of their strategy; rather it’s just their response to the requirements of the immediate future, balanced by longer-term objectives including the development of hydrogen fuel cell technology.

Renault may not be alone in all of this (indeed I posted over a year ago on Top Gear’s feature on the Honda Clarity), but it’s the first auto manufacturer I’ve seen that’s really nailed what it means to be sustainable in an ad campaign. In so doing, they may well have leapfrogged to the head of the pack in terms of public perception.

Filed under: CR & Sustainability, Design & Innovation , CO2 emissions, electric cars, fuel cell technology, hydrogen fuel cells, innovation, life-cycle management, Renault, sustainability, sustainable development, sustainable mobility

Copenhagen: it’s up to us now

As you may have gathered from previous posts on sustainability and design thinking I am, by nature, an essential optimist.

That said, I never held out a great deal of hope for Copenhagen. It all seemed destined to play out like the prisoner’s dilemma, and so it has – narrow self-interest drawing leaders away from binding agreements, even though the rewards are infinitely greater if we all collaborate.

But, you know what? I’m not down about it. Indeed, in some respects I think Copenhagen has done us a huge favour.

To borrow from Johann Hari’s fantastic editorial in yesterday’s Independent, it’s simply thrown into sharp relief the fallacy that we need politicians as some supranational group of mummies and daddies legislating for our safety.

They had the irrefutable evidence in front of them and still they couldn’t agree. As a result, the message is now loud and clear – if you believe something has to be done about climate change, don’t bother waiting for politicians. It’s up to us now to do what we already know needs to be done.

In any event, change, in the order of magnitude required, is never going to be achieved by beating recalcitrant CEOs over the head with a big regulatory stick. It will only be achieved when they recognise that it’s in their own commercial interest; that sustainability-led innovation and transformation actually provides a better route to bigger profits.

In that sense, whether politicians reach agreement or not is largely an irrelevance. What matters is business leaders getting their heads round the business value of sustainability, and that’s an entirely independent process.

Filed under: CR & Sustainability , climate change, COP15, Copenhagen, global warming, innovation, Johann Hari, politics, prisoner's dilemma, sustainability, The Independent

Your business can be better by design

It’s well worth checking out this great article from yesterday’s Times. Tim Brown of IDEO offers his thoughts on Design Thinking, innovation and leadership. If you like what you see, and would like to dig a little deeper, then take a look at his latest TED talk and his new book, Change By Design, too. Top stuff.

Filed under: Design & Innovation, Strategy & Competitive Advantage , Change By Design, design thinking, IDEO, innovation, leadership, TED, Tim Brown

Goodbye Six Sigma, hello Design Thinking!

Here’s an extract from another brilliantly thought-provoking speech Bruce Nussbaum’s just given at the Singapore Design Thinking Symposium (you can find the full text on his NussbaumOnDesign blog).

I post it, not only because Bruce’s closing thought (on the essential optimism of Design Thinking) picks up neatly on my previous post, but also because I think it provides a fantastic précis of the approaching tipping point – a sort of fin de siecle which will see the death of our 20th century obsession with homogeneity and efficiency as a meaningful basis of lasting value creation and competitive advantage.

“[T]hree global forces—the rise and fall of nations [the economic rise of Asia vis-a-vis the West], the rise and fall of generations [the demographic rise of Gen Y vis-a-vis Baby Boomers] and the spread of digital social media—are combining to transform our world and especially our global economy. We are on the cusp of a New Normal. This New Normal situation in the world will need a new paradigm and fresh tools and methods to generate economic growth and prosperity.

Which brings me to Design. During the time that big political, demographic and technological forces of change have been reshaping the global economy, the field of Design has been evolving into a serious discipline that can help us navigate today’s economic uncertainties and generate value for tomorrow’s products and services.

Design has made a revolutionary journey in the past decade from a narrow field able to focus on the making of stuff to the design of social systems and the transformation of healthcare, transportation, supply-chain, education…

How so? Building on the user-centric roots of industrial design, Design has an ethnographic core that allows businessmen and others to connect with any and all cultures, real and digital, anywhere around the world. And Design’s ability to learn from these cultural connections and translate that data into new concepts for products and services gives it the power to generate revenue and profits in a global economic environment of deepening uncertainty.

If Six Sigma and management thinking were our guides to efficient choice-making and profit maximization in yesterday’s era of global hegemony, stability and homogeneity, then in an era of global heterogeneity, instability and diversity, Design Thinking can be our guide to deep consumer understanding, visualization of possibilities, generative option-making and strategic brand finding…

Technology used to dominate innovation. Today, technology is everywhere and accessible to all. Design Thinking is far more important to innovation than technology. Finding relevance and meaning to people living in a multiplicity of real and digital cultures is the new key to success… Empathy. Connection. Engagement. Interaction. Options. That’s Design…

The challenge ahead for Singapore is to add a new competency, a Design Thinking competency, to its excellent model of efficient engineering. The challenge is to learn to understand cultures all over the real and digital world in order to deliver what people want, wherever they live, and on their platform of choice. This is where economic value is created today.

I would like to end on a philosophical note. One reason why people are turning to Design Thinking today is that it is essentially optimistic. Design has a future-facing perspective and a tool-using core competence. The whole purpose of Design is to make the new. We live a life of constant beta, a place of uncertainty and cascading change. In this new world, Design Thinking can be our navigator. We should embrace it.”

 

Filed under: Design & Innovation, Strategy & Competitive Advantage , Bruce Nussbaum, competitive advantage, culture, design thinking, diversity, ethnography, innovation, NussbaumOnDesign, tipping point, value creation