Fear of a Green Planet II
I was fascinated to read that when BMW wanted to develop its new electric car range, they set up an arms length division to prevent “sabotage”. Uwe Dreher, head of marketing for the car, told the Guardian,:
“What would have happened is when technical development has been concentrated for 40 to 50 years on the internal combustion engine, it gives everyone security. It’s a human condition to be afraid when people face new things and have no experience out of their comfort zone.
So we had to create a new platform. We got the power from the board and they told us to come to them if we were having problems, if people in the business wanted to kill it. It has been sitting aside as a separate structure in the company to protect it.”
I heard this concern previously from GlaxoSmithKline when I interviewed their then Vice President of Sustainability, Jim Hagan for The Green Executive:
We have a huge amount of sunk cost in existing technologies – not just the capital sunk cost in physical plant, but also the personal sunk cost – many people in the organization have developed expertise in the technologies that define the company. If we move into innovative approaches, their expertise may no longer be useful and may become obsolete which can make people anxious.
So fear is clearly a real problem if two huge but different manufacturers have identified it as a major risk. While BMW’s approach will work in product development in the short term, it is a bolt-on solution that won’t serve to align the whole company to sustainability – unless they start sacking the “traditional minded” employees en masse – hardly ethical and a great loss of talent. In practice I’ve seen quite a few such arms-length divisions either get closed down or sold off in the name of focus, usually after a change in leadership.
The Green Jujitsu approach would be to tap into the engineering mindset at the company and train up the existing engineers in EV technology and insert them into the emerging EV teams. A mixture of peer pressure and technical curiosity is likely to bring most people along. Above this, clear leadership is required to set the overall direction of travel with the ultimate threat of “this way or the highway”.
But fundamentally, sustainability must be centre stage in the business, not lurking in the wings. That’s where you get stage fright.
3 Comments
Leave your reply.