Interconnected World

Blocking & Tackling: integrating environmental thinking into business processes

At the highest level, my mission is to have the interdependencies between our business, the environment, and society are identified and explicit in our strategy, and to integrate consideration of the opportunities and risks from environmental and social developments into our day-to-day decision-making.

Lots of books on environmental strategy. Lots on why we want to engage employees. Tomes on corporate culture abound. Read all about setting goals and reporting. But how the heck do you instill environmental considerations into every operation of the company?

Innovating for Sustainability

Last Wednesday, I had the privilege of attending the EMC Innovation Conference. It was EMC's third, my second, and the first to offer an Environmental Sustainability Innovation Award.

The conference itself was inspiring for a host of reasons explored better than I can by fellow bloggers Polly, Stu, Dave, Steve, and others. But what particularly captivated me was not just the creativity in the submissions for the Environmental Sustainability award, but the extent to which the teams embodied the underlying principles we need to move forward.

Sustaining Relevance

The juxtaposition of several events last week had me dwelling on that most current of challenges - how to define what "sustainability" means to people in a corporate enterprise. 

If you've ever attended a talk, panel session, or conference on the subject of "sustainability", you know that sometime within the first hour, someone will provide a definition of the word.  They'll usually start with the famous Brundtland definition "Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs".  People who haven't heard that definition usually find it pretty compelling, underscoring sustainability as a moral imperative. But it's not always obvious what that means to a company. Some also find it too pessimistic, focusing on not doing harm rather than making the world a better place.  I think of this as the "abstract imperative story". It's about why the global community has to do it.

For the more hardcore business folks, I've been inclined to use language from Dow Jones that is getting more popular - "mitigating risks and leveraging opportunities presented by economic, social and environmental developments".  Business people certainly relate to mitigating risks and leveraging opportunities.  The presentations at the Women's Network for a Sustainable Future last Tuesday, as well as those at the GreenTech & Sustainability conference at the UN on Wednesday, highlighted the evolution that corporate sustainability has made from "good for the future" to "good for the bottom line" to "good for the top line".  I think of this as the "concrete desirable story".  It's why we as a business want to do it.

What I want is to tell the "concrete imperative story" - why we as a business have to do it. And the word that popped into my mind (and, alas, out of my mouth as I was on a panel at the time) was "relevance".

Green Clouds

A couple of weeks back, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra announced the White House Cloud Computing initiative.  Cloud computing, he said, was the "green computing option". The presentation video concluded with the phrase "lower cost, faster, greener."

Twice in the past few weeks I have been asked, "What is Cloud Computing and why is it green?". I expect - hope - to get this question more often. So let me practice an answer here - and I'd appreciate any suggestions you have to offer.

Half-empty or Half-full?

Last week, EMC was ranked as #74 out of 500 in the Newsweek Green Rankings.  I received quite a few congratulatory emails, as well as one or two from folks puzzled as to whether this result warranted celebration

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. I'm glad we're in the top 100, of course - plenty of people in EMC have been working hard and making progress, and the recognition is well-deserved. But we're not satisfied with what we've accomplished so far - nor should any of us on the list be.

Oh, I get that rankings create competition, and competition raises the bar. And I'm not so disingenuous as to claim that market perception doesn't influence our environmental programs. We also appreciate the press (see EMC Commended for Leadership in Climate Change Disclosure for Third Consecutive Year, for example).

But I do wish we had deeper insight into the ranking algorithms so we could understand what the raters (KLD Research, Trucost, and CorporateRegister.com) believe is most material to our business. We could compare it with the priorities we've set,  engage in discussions about why our priorities differ (if they do),  decide if they should be adjusted, and set expectations about how we might do in future iterations of the ranking.

Even more to the point, we need to remember that  - at least for most companies - these rankings are only indicators; they are not goals in and of themselves. Because at the end of the day, what's going to matter is how good a job the entire set of companies is doing as a group to transform to a low-carbon, cradle-to-cradle world. And the rankings don't tell us that.  Looking at economy-wide indicators are GHG emissions, waste production, and consumption of non-renewable resources, it's pretty clear we're not doing anywhere near enough. And it won't matter who's in the top 100 if we don't all make some pretty major changes to how we work and live.

So is the glass half-full or half-empty? As the joke goes, it's neither: it's twice as big as it needs to be. And we are all going to have to work to cut it in half.

Innovation, Brand, and Partnering with Non-Profits

We have entered an era of unprecedented public/private partnership. So say the pundits and so it appears to be. It makes the utmost of sense. If the future wellbeing of the planet and society depend upon alignment of their interests with those of business - and vice versa - then we have to bring the experts in all three together in one room.

One of my jobs is to build the appropriate partnerships between EMC and environmental organizations.  We are not out to build the world's largest logo collection, but rather to collaborate with organizations that can help us transform ourselves and our industry. Since we don't have unlimited resources (duh!), we're after just a few, high-quality relationships.

"Green" software?

I got an email last week that asked  about the future directions of "green software", how it will change and how it will impact the way we do business.

Now I've encountered many different of applications of the word "green". (Perhaps one of the most dissonant was its use to describe ornamental trees being kept alive in the desert by pumping water from afar. But I digress…) I can usually infer from the email what writer had in mind, but this was in a list of questions with no real context.  I took my best shot, and enumerated all the things I thought might have been meant by "green software".

Chronicling the IT journey

One of the ways we're reducing our energy footprint at EMC is by applying our own products and best practices in our data centers.  What really got me pumped this week is that our CIO has decided to chronicle the IT organization's journey publicly. 

When we talk environmental sustainability at EMC, we often describe a sequence of expanding scopes of impact first from our own operations, then more broadly over the lifecycle of our products, then to the use of our technologies in creating the efficient data center (and especially the private cloud), and  finally, contributions to building sustainable businesses and solutions for a sustainable information economy.

No function in EMC better illustrates this than our IT organization. We count on them heavily to improve our operations by supplying everything from virtual meeting technology to the infrastructure for remote service offerings.  They are counting on our products to make more efficient use of electricity, and to help them get more out of all of their IT assets. No, not just for environmental purposes (though it's much appreciated), but to save money, gain agility and be more responsive to the business. (See Green Saves Green on EMC.com).

And now, they're charting their journey publicly to share lessons with our customers as we learn them .  Check out the first installment with our CIO Sanjay Mirchandani!

And a note to all of you vendors who call me weekly wanting me to tell Sanjay and his team that they need your product or service:  IT does not report to the Office of Sustainability, nor we to them. We are partners, for sure - we cooperate to make sure we're marching to the same strategy, we collaborate in engaging stakeholders, we work together to bring the perspectives of the end user to engineering, engineering to the end user, and both to industry forums such as The Green Grid. Occasionally I may ask a question that will inspire a useful idea for them; more often, it will be the other way around. But I'd never presume that I could tell them how to do their job. Ditto Facilities. Ditto EHS. And so on...

But if you do have a suggestion that can help, do what they're doing: get on-line and share it with the rest of us!

Do things better or do better things? Keeping our eye on the ball.

Energy Efficiency, or "EE", has become the catchphrase in climate mitigation discussions, as well it should be. Energy efficiency is the  easiest and cheapest way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  In fact, it's more than cheap - it's a money-maker. According to McKinsey's latest report, a comprehensive approach to energy efficiency in the U.S. save over $1.2 trillion, could eliminate almost a quarter of projected demand, and has the potential to abate 1.1 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions.

But let's not lose sight of what we want to accomplish with that efficiency - reducing emissions.

Efficiency is a ratio of input to output. When we talk about energy efficiency, we usually mean finding a way to do more with the same amount of energy, or doing the same thing with less energy. 

Do more or do the same. What about doing less?

Obviously, it depends on doing more or less of what. If it's generating revenue, or feeding the hungry, or getting educated, more is clearly desirable.  But we need to stop taking it for granted that more is always better, and remember that the objective here is to reduce our energy consumption, preferably without diminishing quality of life.

For example: I was in a (virtual) meeting the other day discussing residential building efficiency and the need for standards. One metric that was under discussion as an indicator of efficiency was "energy intensity", or the amount of energy used per square meter.  Obviously, making any given home more efficient is better - assuming nothing else changes.  But what if we were to reduce its size?

Think of it this way. Do you have any rooms in your house that are seldom or never used? What if you were to lop it off? Your energy consumption (and bill) would almost assuredly go down. Yet your energy per square meter would just as assuredly go up, since odds are that the space you got rid of didn't contain your fridge, washer/dryer, TV, home PC, etc.  Ask yourself really - in your heart of hearts - would your quality of life suffer dramatically without that room?

Or think of it this way. Suppose you're building a new house. Is it better to build a really efficient 5,000 sq ft home, or a slightly less efficient 2000 sq ft home?  Once again, the smaller is almost guaranteed to be less efficient since what you're going to give up is excess space that's unlikely to house most of your appliances. But it's also going to consume less, because all that space won't need to be heated or cooled.

"What about quality of life?" you say. "Won't I be happier in a big house?" I don't know - maybe not.  My husband and I are big fans of Sarah Susanka's book "The Not So Big House."  Ms. Susanka makes a very compelling - and beautifully illustrated - case for why a smaller home can often provide an even higher quality of life when it's been designed to truly live in.  Check it out.

Full disclosure: we are having exactly this problem at EMC.  Our Climate Leaders commitment is for an emissions reduction per square foot. But we have been taking actions in the company to reduce our physical footprint. The result should be reduced energy consumption, reduced cost, reduced greenhouse gas emissions - but a higher energy intensity.  Meeting our goal is going to be a challenge. But eye on the ball - it should reduce our emissions and that, after all, is the point!

Going for the Tipping Point

There's a tipping point in climate change that we need to accelerate.

I don't mean the one where the Greenland ice sheet melts or the ocean conveyor shuts down. I mean the one where a critical mass of our leaders and of the public wake up and decide to take serious action to adjust to and avert the worst of climate change.

The more I learn, the more I struggle with the thought fact that we - society at large - are simply not doing anything like enough to address the magnitude, scope, and immediacy of this crisis.

I've been asking myself a lot of late: does it make sense to be worrying about the 2% of emissions from information technology when we need to cut globally by 80% in the next 40 years?  Should we really invest in efficient light bulbs and compostable cafeteria trays while the world increases its burning of fossil fuels?

Well, I say yes. The small steps may not be are not sufficient, but they are necessary.