Something that really bothers me is how many organisations have bland, lookalike environmental policies. Take Boots’ policy above (click to enlarge) – put your hand over the Boots logo and play “guess what business this belongs to” – you’d struggle to identify the company as a retailer never mind in the heathcare/beauty business or Boots itself.

The other game you can play is “nonsensical negatives” – if you invert each sentence, does it make any sense? If not then the original was simply stating the bleedin’ obvious – and can hardly be described as a “policy”. For example, inverting Boots’ resources commitment gives you “we’ll make worst use of resources”, which simply shows how nondescript the original is.

I’m being a bit unfair singling out Boots – similar identikit policies of the <insert company name here> variety clutter the walls of businesses up and down the land. These are so bland as to be meaningless, so what’s the point? What do you learn from reading them? Why not include some long term, concrete commitments from your strategy that your stakeholders can hold you to?