Sustainable Business Resources

I was recently interviewed by Jennifer Woofter, the Founder and President of Strategic Sustainability Consulting, for the free podcast series they offer on sustainability. In my interview, we discuss a number of issues including how accounting fits into the sustainability field.

Strategic Sustainability Consulting is building a very nice library of bite-sized podcasts on a wide variety of topics pertinent to sustainable business, including renewable energy options, carbon regulation, sustainable design and more. I’d especially like to direct you to the podcasts on Green Business Travel with Kim Allen and Green IT with Jessica Vreeswijk, both Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI) alumni. Jennifer and the team at Strategic Sustainability Consulting add a new podcast every week or two so check back frequently for new topics from sustainability experts.

As you know, sustainable business is the new and emerging paradigm. The folks over at ISSP (International Society of Sustainability Professionals), of which I am a member, are offering a Professional Certificate in Sustainability. You can take the individual courses ala carte, or select the appropriate courses to obtain the certificate if you’d like. Many of the instructors are top professionals in their field. People like Darcy Hitchcock, Marsha Willard and Tom Gloria, to name a few of the ISSP instructors, are both practitioners and teachers. I bring this up because there is a course on Life Cycle Assessments beginning in August that one of us from TriLibrium will be attending.

Water for Humans

Water for Humans is a non-profit social venture created and launched by fellow Bainbridge Graduate Institute colleagues Stan Brown and Rick McKenney. Their mission is to provide low-cost, clean water solutions to underserved populations while ensuring that water remains a local, public resource. They have two communities in Mexico where they will begin their fieldwork in early July.

Water for Humans has been working for over a year to get everything lined up. They are seeking $25,000 over the next four weeks to help fund and support their work as they ramp up their operations.

Water is expected to be the next scarce resource as we pollute and overexploit the very limited fresh water we have. It is predicted that 21st century wars could be about water. I'm proud of Stan and Rick for their efforts, commitment and vision. Check out their website and help Water for Humans with a contribution if you are inclined.

If you want to know more about the water issue, check out the following movie trailer.

Random thoughts

David Korten will be on KBOO Monday morning at 8am PST.  David Korten’s most recent book is Agenda for a New Economy, which I highly, highly recommend.  KBOO is a community radio station in Portland located at 90.7fm on the FM dial.  You can also find them here.

David Korten will be in Portland, Saturday, May 30^th at the First Baptist Church (12^th and SW Taylor) starting with a 5pm celebration and a 7pm lecture.  More information is here.

Congratulations to my friend Joel Garbon, and his co-author Jeane Manning, for winning the Silver Award by the Independent Publishers in the category “Most Likely to Save the Planet.”  Their book is entitled “Breakthrough Power: How Quantum-leap New Energy Inventions Can Transform Our World” which you can learn more about here.

Finally, I’ve been invited to join the BGI faculty next year to teach accounting and finance.  I’m honored and excited at this opportunity and look forward to helping the incoming graduate students learn the language of business.

Return on Sustainability

Kudos to my Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI)colleague Kevin Wilhelm, for the publication of his new book Return on Sustainability.  Kevin shows the clear business case for sustainability and dealing with the climate crisis proactively.

Kevin highlights the risks and opportunities climate change poses for business.  As I've stated in previous posts, there are opportunities for companies that 'truly' embrace sustainability and Kevin digs into the details including:  enhanced brand value; improved customer, employee and shareholder relations; and better climate performance all at the same time.

As Kevin points out, climate change touches on every aspect of a business: Energy; transportation; innovation; waste; supply chain; employee retention and morale; investor pressure; brand value; customer loyalty; market opportunities; cost savings; tax; regulatory; carbon trading; and leadership.  

Given all that, don't you think a comprehensive strategic business plan should address climate change is a serious manner?  What we learn at BGI, and what I teach my clients is how to address sustainability and climate change in a comprehensive way.  Kevin's new book helps bring that understanding to a wider audience.

Treating climate change as an ancillary issue creates mostly costs for business whereas addressing sustainability comprehensively allows a company to capture the opportunities.

Think of the technological revolution back in the 80s.  Companies that embraced technology in a strategic and comprehensive manner left their competition in the dust.  Those who were slow on the uptake were forever relegated to playing catch up.

Real solutions? - Perhaps

I'm an idea guy.  That is one of my core strengths so I always find myself looking around for ideas that can help solve the world's problems and create a place that works for all.

I have two things to share this morning.  First, is a link to Chris Martenson's Crash Course.  The first sentence on the home page reads, "Ready to learn everything you need to know about the economy in the shortest amount of time?"  

This is an entertaining and highly informative 20 chapter video course offered in very digestible 5-10 minute segments.  I'm on Chapter 14 so I don't know how it concludes but I recommend you check it out.  I was hooked after watching the first 10 minutes.

The second item is a link to Common Good Bank.  Their goal is to create a new type of institution for a sustainable economy and to provide the "social agenda with a bank", rather than a bank with a social agenda.  You can visit their site to get more information but on the surface it looks like a good idea and I've signed up as a supporter.

I will remind readers that where you bank matters.  Not all banks are created equal.  A scholar (forgot his name) gave a lecture while I was at BGI and asserted that the most powerful leverage point for a consumer to bring about sustainable change was the decision of where to bank.  

I can't recall the entire list but I do recall where you buy your gas was #2 (Exxon Mobile = BAD) and that where you get your food was somewhere in the top 5.

Do you still keep your money in global corporate banks?  Aren't they part of the problem?

TriLibrium and our GHG Reporting

Yesterday I mentioned that a TriLibrium stakeholder requested information about our GHG claims.  Here is our response.

TriLibrium will use the GHG Protocol developed by World Resources Institute.  We will include both direct and indirect emissions in our footprint and will report on the scope of our boundaries at that time.  We intend to include all employee travel.  We will probably exclude customer travel.  We will probably exclude embedded carbon in purchased items due to the cost/benefit of gathering that data.  We intend to offset 150 percent of our measured GHG footprint and believe this buffer is more than sufficient.

Our company began operations October 1, 2008.  Our current office uses 100% renewable electricity purchased from Pacific Power and we pay additional money with each bill for Salmon Habitat Restoration.  We recycle 100 percent of materials that can reasonably be recycled in Portland including glass, metal, cardboard, plastic, and paper.  We buy in bulk and reduce, reuse and recycle where we can.  We currently put out just one small garbage can per month of solid waste.

Since inception, we have logged all employee travel whether by car, bike, train or bus.  Based on our experience, this is likely to be 80 percent or more of our GHG footprint. 

We will include natural gas consumption in our footprint inventory and will offset that accordingly.  We have not selected our offset provider.  I have personally used The Climate Trust to offset my personal GHG footprint.

We intend to do an annual CSR report complete with a GHG inventory sometime this summer and then each subsequent summer.  We will select an offset provider at that time based on best practices.  Colleagues at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute developed COPEM (Carbon Offset Provider Evaluation Matrix) which we will use to guide our selection.

As noted above, we will not include customer travel in our GHG footprint.  We have excluded it from our inventory because it is hard for us to capture this data and believe it is primarily our customer’s responsibility and not ours.  We are aware of this issue however and provide our customers with ways to reduce their travel when engaging with us through the use of secure, electronic data sharing portals, mail, fax and other means. 

What We Measure Matters

The most important number to the powers that be is the GDP. The GDP is how Wall Street and the government measure the health of our economy but this number is seriously flawed for two important reasons.

First, it measures negative events as positive additions to GDP - Car accidents, divorces, and oil spills all add to the GDP.

Second, it fails to include or account for positive activities if money doesn't change hands - taking your neighbor to the doctor doesn't count while hiring a stranger to drive a cab does. Which do you think makes a better society?

As an accountant, I'm keenly aware that what we measure matters. In my MBA program, I really appreciated the work of Mark Anielski, an Adjunct Professor at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute and the author of The Economics of Happiness. Mark has developed a "Genuine Wealth Indicator" that can help any community measure its wealth across a number of indicators in order to measure those things we actually want.

We need new measurement tools if we are going to achieve sustainability. It is high time we stopped using GDP as a tool to measure our economic progress.

Transparency and tough decisions

The Bainbridge Graduate Institute recently found it had to cut $1 million from its budget due to declining foundation support in these tough economic times. Rather than approach this problem from a top-down secretive approach, the leadership chose another path. You can hear the short news report here.

What isn't mentioned in the story is how they shared the problem with our entire community (students, faculty, staff, donors, vendors and more). This open process brought forth a ton of great ideas and allowed us to change the budget almost overnight.

Because it was transparent, the buy in and acceptance was unbelievable. We all were saddened by the decisions to cut staff but the open process made it palatable. A closed and secretive process would have created nothing but dissent, distrust and disharmony. Instead we are moving forward leaner and using our creativity to adjust to a new reality.

Perhaps the biggest problem was that the process generated so many good ideas that one could almost become paralyzed with too many options. This was not the case however as we sorted the ideas into a variety of pools opting for the low hanging fruit first before working our way up the tree.

More Than Money

I was at BGI this weekend where I help teach accounting and finance. Mark Albion, the former Harvard Business School professor, best selling author, and founder of Net Impact was there. I had met Mark before and found his book True to Yourself — Leading a Values-Based Business, and personal life story, inspiring as I ventured out into the real world with my MBA.

Mark's new book is called More Than Money: Questions Every MBA Needs to Answer and he was again talking about the importance of a creating a life of meaning. As an MBA, I have a lucky lottery ticket and the question is, what should I do with my lucky ticket? The cultural expectation is to cash it in for money and status, but is that really fulfilling? To me the answer is no.

Mark told the story of how he used his MBA skills to help a small scale fisherman. You can see that story here in a 3-minute video I hope will prompt some discussion and thought about sustainability, business and life.

Health, Happiness and Sustainable Business

BGI Founder and President Emeritus Gifford Pinchot will be giving an address at the Green Festival in San Francisco next week entitled "Health, Happiness and Sustainable Business: The Happo/Dammo Ratio." I bring this up because Gifford's Happo/Dammo ratio is onto an important aspect of sustainability. Here is what Gif has to say:

The purpose of the economy is to support our health, well being and happiness. Unless we find ways to produce substantially more happiness with far less stuff and damage, our civilization is doomed. But this is a happy task, a joint project of sustainability experts, entrepreneurs, consumers, citizens, corporate innovators, academics, legislators and policy wonks. Given that most happiness comes from relationships and most of our consumption uses stuff symbolically rather than for its intrinsic value, it won’t be hard to make 1,000 fold improvements in the ratio of happiness to stuff. These innovations will often be very popular, cost-effective and profitable. In this direction lies hope and true prosperity.

Our current economy is driven by a take, make, waste consumption cycle and as long as we stay in this paradigm the future looks bleak. However, as Gifford correctly points out, we have an incredible opportunity to expand our economy by figuring out how to increase happiness while decreasing stuff. We have an unlimited and endless supply to provide comfort, joy, laughs, smiles and support. These have no environmental or social costs.

The cycle of giving support/getting support/giving support is an endless human cycle that has been around as long as humans have walked the earth. It was the basis for tribal economies. Maybe we can learn something valuable from an economic system that has been around for 100,000 years.

BGI Pride

Kevin Maas, a Bainbridge Graduate Institute colleague, and his brother Daryl, are the founders of Farm Power Northwest. Tomorrow they break ground for an anaerobic digester (shit composter) up in the Skagit Valley. The digester creates energy from manure by burning the methane and thus preventing the release of this dangerous greenhouse gas. It also reduces runoff and odor usually associated with dairy farming “waste.” This particular digester will handle the waste from two farms.

Some of the dignitaries on hand for the groundbreaking include Congressman Rick Larsen and representatives from the US Department of Agriculture to present a $500,000 federal grant; state senator Mary Margaret Haugen and "First Husband" Mike Gregoire will present a $500,000 state grant (joined by representatives of Skagit County and the Washington Department of Community, Trade, and Economic Development). Shorebank Pacific is their lender.

Kevin developed his business plan while attending BGI and I just wanted to give he and Daryl a huge thumbs up for their continued success and for the achievement of this important milestone.