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Wednesday, 3 March 2010
Time for a change...
... if you've squeezed every efficiency out of a system, but you still aren't where you want to be, then you need to change the system!Secret No 3 of The Three Secrets of Green Business is about making a series of huge leaps to align your systems and processes towards sustainability while making continual incremental improvements in between. The latter will only take you so far before you have to make another huge leap.
The key is in making sure each leap will lead to the goal and not up a cul-de-sac. I use 'backcasting' with clients to make sure all leaps forward take you in the right direction.
Backcasting will help you decide what to do. Another big strategic question is what are we not going to do? The best organisations kill off products, services and processes which are holding them back. That takes real guts.
Labels: backcasting, environmental strategy, sustainability strategy, three secrets of green business
# posted by Gareth Kane : 11:17
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Monday, 15 February 2010
Beautiful Monday Morning
I'm on a fast train to Glasgow, streaking up the Northumberland coastal plain. We've just passed Holy Island, its castle and monastic remains beautifully lit across the bay by early morning sun and as I type we're rolling up to the spectacular viaduct at Berwick (whose claim to fame is being the answer to a hundred pub quiz questions). I'm off to interview Martin Blake of Royal Mail for the Green Executive - I'm now coming close to the number of interviews I need, so I'm having to choose carefully to cover all the main sectors and sizes of business.The book is really coming together and I'm aiming to get a proposal to the publishers by the end of the month. The rationale behind it is that 'green' has now risen from an operational/managerial issue to a core corporate strategy. This angle requires a whole new skill set for corporate leaders and business owners. For example, the current section I'm working on is about complementing innovative new green products by killing off old non-green products - even if they are popular. Decisions like that have to made at the top and may go against traditional thinking. But if you are going to do 'green' you've got to do it properly.
Well I've crossed the border and the train has swung away from the sea, so I'd better get back to my edits.
Labels: green executive, sustainability strategy
# posted by Gareth Kane : 08:25
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Friday, 15 January 2010
The Big Picture (and the one bigger than that...)
I've been writing up my interview with Nick Coad, Environmental Director of National Express, for my next book The Green Executive. He gave a wonderful example of how you need to look at the big picture. National Express started on their sustainability journey by looking internally - risk reduction, eco-efficiency and their branding and reputation management. However it became clear to them that they were part of the solution rather than part of the problem. A shift to public transport use could actually increase the company's carbon emissions, but the net effect would be a substantial cut when you look at the bigger transport picture.So they started engaging with policy makers, other businesses and customers. But they found that the UK Government was more interested in improving the efficiency of each transport mode rather than modal shift - getting people out of high carbon transport modes and into low carbon modes. National Express's paper "More is Less" was proclaimed as visionary in the trade press and shifted the debate several steps forward to look at modal shift.
There is of course an even bigger picture to this. Why do we travel? The broadest definition of the reason is I can come up with is "to experience something that is geographically distant". But technology allows us to experience some distant things (conversations, sights, sounds, data etc) without moving. So the ultimate modal shift in this sector is towards teleconferencing and telecommuting.
And before anyone says it, I know there's yet another, quite enormous picture which is why do we want/have to do these things, but that's going a little too far into the realms of philosophy on a cold Friday morning in January!
Labels: carbon emissions, sustainability strategy, transport
# posted by Gareth Kane : 07:00
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Monday, 19 October 2009
Telling Tales
Story-telling is a powerful way of creating a compelling vision for the future. When doing backcasting exercises in strategy workshops, I used to get participants to draw their vision of their organisation in 20-whatever, but I've recently found it much more effective if I get them to tell a story about it. Not a sitting-round-the-campfire story, but something like "write the CEO's foreword to your 2020 CSR report summarising the six headline achievements you would like to have made by then". This keeps the vision on the right side of science fiction and, it appears, is an easier ask of participants.You read it here first!
Labels: backcasting, environmental strategy, storytelling, sustainability strategy
# posted by Gareth Kane : 05:21
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Tuesday, 26 May 2009
More example projects...
We've just updated the projects page on this site to better reflect the kind of work we have been doing in the last 12 months or so.You'll see we've been deliberately shifting away from 'heads down, long report' type projects to working in collaboration with our clients and their stakeholders to develop more strategic solutions as this is where we believe more value lies for those clients.
This extra value comes from:
- Collaboration = stronger ownership of solutions = more successful implementation
- Collaboration = more capacity in the client organisation to implement projects = more successful implementation
- Collaboration = utilising the intellectual capital (employee's nous!) already there = better solutions
- Strategic = longer term solutions = better ROI
- Strategic = higher level staff engagement (typically director level) = stronger leadership
If any of this is of any interest to you, then drop me a line.
Labels: environmental strategy, sustainability strategy, terra infirma
# posted by Gareth Kane : 08:09
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A highly accessible, practical guide to those who want to introduce sustainability into their business or organization quickly and effectively.
