by leaptbl on April 29, 2011
Maslow is credited with the idea that when all one has is a hammer all problems look like a nail. This quote has come to mind often recently. I have been working hard to expand my toolbox to include more than just a hammer. It is disappointing that all around hammer and nail thinking continues to be so insidious.
A couple examples to this truism have been evident recently. The first is the fixation with tax cuts. They are the cure to all that ails society. Just cut more taxes and the forthcoming growth will cause budgets to fix themselves. The narrative of tax cuts being magic elixir for all of society’s woes has become so pervasive that most people believe that taxes are currently too high. The reality is that tax rates are the lowest they have been in many decades. The total wealth of the top 400 families in the US exceeds that to the bottom 50% combined. Politico’s have the nerve to suggest that higher taxes would be a hardship to the top earners while their marginal rates slip to all time lows.
Our dependence on fossil fuels, namely oil, is another hammer. The solution to increasing prices is to drill more or dump oil from the strategic reserve. This seems a simple solution on the surface, but it is short-sighted and does not consider just how little control any single country has on the price of a global commodity like oil. The simplistic view that oil production in the US can significantly impact oil markets is quaint. We long ago passed the point where production in the US is more than a blip to the total world supply. Political turmoil in oil producing regions, real or imagined, has far more impact on pricing. In addition, the growing world population and increased living standards in places like China and India have the greatest impact on world oil prices.
It is time to put those hammers back in the toolbox and try different tools. There is plenty of money to fund the workings of government and society. The vast majority of American’s have not enjoyed any growth in income. The upper income levels have enjoyed income growth and decreased taxation. The imbalance needs to be remedied and government properly funded.
We are going to be using fossil fuels for many years. That however, does not excuse us from the need to explore new ways to generate energy for use in transportation and powering our homes and businesses. Doing what we have always done, drill for oil, will not help create a better future. It keeps us tethered to a carbon powered world that does not have a bright future.
What new tools to you have? Are you ready to call the hammer users on the carpet for excessive hammering?
by leaptbl on March 24, 2011
| A friend and associate, Laura Steinbrink, whose firm specializes in LEED consulting, wrote this column and put it in her latest newsletter. Companies and organizations really need to look at how their people can carry them forward. Check out Laura’s work at |
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| Humanities Loom.
A lion share of the talk about sustainability in business revolves around two P’s of the triple-bottom-line: planet and profit. Receiving less attention is the “people” aspect of sustainability, yet people are the one resource that thinks of and implements the sustainable practices. After all, businesses are formed for the purpose of allowing people to come together to provide for themselves. |
Sustainable decision-making involves making decision today that preserves future generations’ ability to prosper. Sustainable business decisions take into account the health and well being of the people in them, and touched by them. Without people, there is no business.
Businesses that use sustainable decision making often find it easier to be more profitable. For instance, check out the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexto find the leaders in each sector and see how those traditionally leading in sustainability are out performing their peers. Research shows a direct link between profitability, socially responsible business decisions and people. Among the connections are:
- Higher levels of employee loyalty and commitment
- Better employee retention rates
- Higher employee productivity
- Happier customers
- More respect within the community
- Increased attractiveness to potential recruits
The question a business can start asking itself is: Have we have fully leveraged our first investments in sustainable decision making (often waste management, energy efficiency, building improvements or product development) to forge sustainable culture and practices among our people? If the answer is no, some first steps include:
- Creating a common language and purpose around sustainability
- Developing understanding of sustainable principles and practices
- Providing skills and knowledge to implement sustainable principles and practices
- Developing ability to articulate costs & benefits of new technologies, processes and practices
The way a company can start creating a common language is through communications that create awareness and passion. Common language will allow people to call upon their strength to question what “has been” in the past and shift towards the future as a “to be” phase.
Through learning programs, employees can develop understanding of sustainable principles and practices, and those that need skills or knowledge to implement, can dive deeper into learning. Tying sustainability to career procession ladders helps to embed principles into culture. When teams are taught how to articulate costs and benefits in terms balance between people, planet and profit, sustainable change becomes easier to implement. |
| The important element for businesses to remember is that sustainable decision-making should touch everyone and be not something people feel they “have to do” because the c-suite says so. When employees are passionate and engaged, businesses profit. |
by leaptbl on February 24, 2011
I was listening to NPR the other day and a number that was quoted blew my mind. Yum brands, the spin-off from Pepsico that includes Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC, is aiming to open a new outlet every 18 hours in China. China has become their biggest market outside the US and is more profitable. The story noted that they got to China before McDonald’s and have done a very good job of localizing their menu.
What does this mean for sustainability and business in the US, China and the planet. For me, it points to further tightening of food supplies and the commodities that create a supply chain for pizza, tacos and fried chicken. Yum will demand cheap CAFO produced raw food inputs. This continues the radical changes in China as they move away from being an agrarian society. A small shift in demand in China creates a ripple that is felt world-wide because of the shear numbers.
For those of us in the US that are not tied to a multinational company, it points out the need for local businesses and organizations to be vital drivers in recreating a healthy economy. The multi-nationals have tapped out the US. They are moving on to cultivate new opportunities. That is what their shareholders demand.
It is up to entrepreneurs here to grab the mantle of sustainable growth and help communities understand why it benefits them to “shop local”. The local stakeholders that can see beyond return per share can help drive rebirth all over our country.
by leaptbl on October 18, 2010
The shift away from manufacturing and toward a service based economy has been going on for a number of years. It has forever changed places like Detroit and Cleveland, where hundreds of thousands of square feet of buildings stand empty and decaying, never to be used again.
The latest revelations about the fraud in the mortgage industry shows how making something out of nothing is pretty much impossible. The feeding frenzy that drove conservative financial institutions to throw aside their scruples and loan money to anyone, no matter how fake the paperwork, has not gone away. It is just constantly changing form. Like some old Star Trek episode, we are hurtling through space chasing an enemy that is always ahead of the authorities and leaves a trail of destroyed people and institutions in its path.
What is the way out? One way is to start making some things again. Real tangible stuff. A wind turbine plant is about to open in nearby Hutchinson KS. It is being built by Siemens as they want manufacturing closer to their markets. This plant will create 900 manufacturing jobs as well as some spin off supplier work.
The growth of alternative energy products and projects could provide all sorts of jobs where we are actually producing something. Real tangible things that also need people to install them and maintain them. The added bonus is they produce clean power.
Wall Street is not the solution, Main street is! We all have to be vocal about the need to kick our fossil fuel addictions. It is going to be hard to change. It is so easy now to fill the tank with gas or just move the thermostat at home. However, it can be just that easy with alternative energy sources, we just have to make the switch.
by leaptbl on August 9, 2010
Grassroots action is always the best way to start a movement. The monumental shifts in society have been driven by people of action. Is sustainability and climate change going to be different? People are having a tough time understanding the complexities surrounding multi-faceted sustainability and climate change issues. Other social change shifts have been a little easier to explain and visualize, civil rights for minorities and women for example.
Sustainability, climate change, being green, whatever one wants to call it, is hard to paint a picture with. The consequences of our actions are still unknown and exactly how to fix it is the topic of hot debate. Can the people in a local community, state or country rally together to make the change needed to turn back the dial on climate change?
The proactive actions of consequence have been taking place in the business world. Granted some have been driven by government legislation as well as consumer interest, but the majority of efforts have been internally motivated. There are proactive organizations that understand a competitive advantage based on sustainability is the only way to survive in a carbon constrained world.
I was a part of a conference call last week where a potential client was looking at an application in a large rail yard to monitor the quality of the diesel fuel moving in and out of storage there. This single rail yard, of which there are hundreds of similar ones in the US, uses around 15 million gallons of diesel each month. Multiply that a few hundred times and one can see why so much is in the hands of business when it comes to a carbon constrained planet. Granted they are working to meet our demand, but it is still up to them to improve their numbers. CSX has aggressively worked at being more efficient and over ten years they moved nearly twice as many tons of freight with the same amount of fuel.
This type of improvement sets up CSX to be an industry leader when the price of diesel doubles or triples. Those railroads with old equipment and inefficient practices will disappear when fuel spikes.
Like it or not, business is a key part of sustainability. Businesses and consumers are so deeply intertwined that we need each other to work hard at making the planet a good place to live for the next millennium.
by leaptbl on August 3, 2010
Recently, the US lost a #1 ranking it held for many years. There was no loud outcry at our loss of status or sigh of relief as we slipped from the top spot. The ranking was for overall energy usage and for the first time China surpassed the US in total energy used.
This news was on buried on page 4 of the Wichita Eagle the day it came out. I did not see much analysis of this subtle shift in the energy usage landscape.
How could you blame us in the US. We were worried about the oil well gushing in the gulf and we were moving toward primary season which around here means the GOP trying to out conservative each other.
While I am pleased that we are no longer number one, the ascension of China to the top spot is another indicator to me that we are speeding toward a severely carbon constrained world. There is no preparation and no plan for how to deal with the consequences of population centers like India and China using just a bit more energy as they try to attain some semblance of the US middle class lifestyle we dangle in front of them.
So is this ranking a dire indicator of what is coming or just blip on the screen? I fear that it is something to ignore at one’s own peril. Businesses and organizations that start working now toward operating in a carbon constrained world will be far ahead when that time actually comes.
by leaptbl on July 9, 2010
Driving across Missouri and Illinois today was depressing. There was nothing wrong with my family or vehicle, etc. It was what I became aware of on the other side of the highway. Travelling to the lakes on Missouri were many large speed boats. They were pulled by large SUV’s getting I would guess about 12 mpg.
The sight of these big vehicles and boats depressed me. I thought about how hard I work to avoid driving too much. I ride my bike around town. I got my daughter a used Civic to use a college because of the good mileage it promised. My extra efforts as well as the efforts of many others to use less fuel helps keep prices down.
Those low prices only encourage the people with big trucks and boats to take them out and use them. I can well imagine that some of these SUV’s and boats use more fuel in a day than I use in a month.
So what to do? Without laws to make us pay the real cost of carbon, is there any point in conserving and keeping prices low for others to waste? My crazy counter idea that we need to start using as much fuel as we can thereby driving up the price and leading others to conserve.
What a twisted world we live in. In the US, we have cheap fuel/power unburdened from real costs to society. The only way to drive up the cost is to use more or wait until worldwide demand pushes up prices.
Tough talk, but I just can’t do it. I will keep riding my bike around town when I can and combining trips to save fuel. It is simply programmed in me. I would happily pay the real cost of carbon to fuel my vehicles and my life. Are you ready for the true price of carbon?
by leaptbl on April 21, 2010
The grapes looked pretty good. The price was right. We have some guests coming and were filling the fridge up a bit in anticipation. Then we saw the bag said “Product of Chile”. My wife and I looked at each other and decided to pass.
“Why?” you ask, would not take chance to put more “fresh” fruit in our diet. The food Americans eat travels an average of 1500 miles before it makes it to your plate. Our food travels far more than we do, albeit in the back of a refrigerated semi trailer.
Again one might ask “So what?” There are a number of reasons to take a moment to think about the travels of your food.
- Each trip your food takes makes it harder to trace back what might have been going on during each step. The recent scares with food borne illness have illustrated this challenge. It has taken weeks to find out what the culprit really is in which time much of the food has already been distributed far and wide.
- Taking the grapes as an example, what assurance do we have that the grapes were raised in a reasonable manner using fertilizers and pesticides approved for food use? One can put a bit of trust in Dillons/Kroger, but they in turn are putting trust in a supply chain that circles the world with little verification.
- The travels of your food have a negative impact on the environment from noise of all the trucks on the road to the pollution they produce.
- Our relentless pursuit of always the lowest price and the influx of low cost imports have negatively impacted agricultural producers. Regions of the United States formerly known for being large scale producers of vegetables and fruits have disappeared.
So what can we do to reduce our food’s travels.
- Buy local produced food products. The supply in central Kansas can be a little thin, but once we start demanding it, people will come forward with a supply.
- Plant a garden. I know many of you are gardeners and it is the best kind of local food. Just remember to take it easy with the synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. It is easy to overdue it and have run off.
- Seek out local basic products. We use Hudson Cream flour which is milled in Stafford KS. Ken King sells many grass fed dairy and meat products from their farm south of Hutchinson.
- Go to your local farmers market. The local one will get going here in a month or so. Stop by and pick up some fresh food. I was stunned by the diversity I saw at a farmers market in Vermont were eating and buying local has been encouraged for a number of years. I hope that can be the case all over the country in the years to come.
The way each of us makes our food choices each day has multiple impacts. It is very easy in our society to mindlessly eat our way through the day without giving any thought to where our food came from. A little thought and planning can go a long way toward having food that is better for you and the planet.
by leaptbl on April 5, 2010
Around the country groups are forming to help support the work that needs to be done in sustainability. My friend, Steve Martin, has been part of the formation of The Sustainability Coalition in Elkhart County Indiana. Aimed primarily at the decimated RV industry, this group is working to assist companies in changing the way they imagine, design and build RV’s. They have created a year long program where companies join together and working with facilitation struggle with what it means to move toward sustainability. http://thesustainabilitycoalition.com/
Maddock Douglas is a large consulting firm working with organizations to transition them toward sustainability that does good. In early 2010, they wrote a powerful column about Conscious Capitalism that ran in Business Week as well as on their blog. They have an illustration that provides a powerful representation of how conscious capitalism takes companies beyond green and sustainability to having doing good infused in its DNA. http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/dec2009/ca2009128_264955.htm
Maddock Douglas Conscious Capitalism
I am attending a meeting of Green Biz Wichita this week. It will be interesting to see where this organization is coming from and where it hopes to go. I hope it can get to where the Sustainability Coalition is or where Maddock Douglas moves its clients.
by leaptbl on February 23, 2010
What will end the current recession? The outlook is bleak for jobs. The unemployment rate in the US is around 10% with another 10% underemployed. It also appears that it is going remain at a high rate for some time as businesses have chosen productivity and profits over greater employment. Economists are predicting a slow grind to rebuild the US workforce to the pre-recession levels.
A place where new jobs are there for the taking is in the new sustainability economy. Jonathan Kim wrote in Huffington Post about the positive impacts that jobs linked to sustainability and greening up our planet can make. Kim points out the fallacy of the arguments from those vested in the carbon economy that shifting toward sustainability will only cost jobs. A Pew study found that the growth in clean energy jobs was over 9% per year from 1998 to 2007 while overall jobs grew at just 3.7%.
The jobs that can come along with a sustainable economic model are not a slam dunk. They are up for grabs with the whole world. The longer the US sits on the sidelines and argues about nonsense like what the snow in Washington this winter means, the less chance we have of being innovative leaders in green technology and capturing the jobs that go with that.
Thomas Friedman put it well this week.
“Indeed, I suspect China is quietly laughing at us right now. And Iran, Russia, Venezuela and the whole OPEC gang are high-fiving each other. Nothing better serves their interests than to see Americans becoming confused about climate change, and, therefore, less inclined to move toward clean-tech and, therefore, more certain to remain addicted to oil (Friedman, 2010).”