Careers in sustainability: talk to students of Exeter College

At the start of December I gave a careers talk to students of my old college. When I tweeted about it Oxford Careers Service asked me if they could add to their list of occupation areas. Below are my reflections, what it means for occupation areas and then the talk itself. 

I’m glad I’m not looking for my first job.
When I spoke with the current students they were all worried and downcast. One said to me that he’s been rejected from every application he’s made so far – and so has everyone else he knows. Today’s economic stagnation is a massive contrast to the boom times when I left university in the mid-90s. “You’ve got a warm body and you went to Oxford – here have a job!” I exaggerate a little, but it was pretty easy to get one of the  standard milkround jobs of ABC (accounting, banking and consultancy) plus the civil service.

So, it makes complete sense for any of the current students to choose ‘any port in a storm’ – get some time working under their belt, building transferable skills and experiences. I don’t envy their position at all.

Sustainability and occupations: embedding in existing, creating new specialists, and ‘new’ generalists
I sit on the Sustainability Committee of the ICAEW, Europe’s largest accounting institute. It is taking years of persistence from the in-house team, but sustainability is getting into the core of the institute: the exams; the curricula; the post-qualification training; the communications to members; the rhetoric on what business is for; and so on. I know of similar attempts in advertising, engineering, law and management consulting.

There is a process of embedding into existing occupations which goes a little something like this. First some sustainability issues impinge on the existing domain of an occupation. Some pioneering individuals realise it is going to be important, but most don’t know that they don’t know about the issues. There’s a frustrating period where the pioneers are pushing ahead but no one else thinks it is important to follow. Then there are enough people with enough awareness of issues that are relevant enough. Suddenly, things begin to take off. (See the Six Steps of Significant Change for more on this process.)

My 4 years with sat on the sustainability committee of the ICAEW fits with this pattern (except, perhaps, the take off hasn’t quite happened yet!). Also, my experience of leading businesses is that sustainability is taken up / pushed to the people in the important functions around the company (marketing, operations, supply chain etc), and the central ‘sustainability’ function becomes a coordinator of change.

Different occupations are at different places. But pretty much all will need to embed the relevant bits of sustainability over the coming decade.

Then there are new specialisms popping up. These tend to be deep technical skills on a relatively new area – a solar PV engineer, a climate change policy wonk, or a sustainability behaviour change marketeer. (I’m told of one leading company that has a team of at least 10 of that latter specialism.)  We can expect more specialties within occupations to emerge.

Finally, there is my job (and my Forum colleagues). I have specialisms (qualified accountant, sustainability and business strategy). But the focus of my role is using those specialisms to create change for sustainability in the round. So, I’m expected to be on top of a massive range of issues and thinking, and help people understand how the latest developments affect them. This makes me a sustainability generalist. Perhaps Forum for the Future is a unique place, and there are few other roles in the world that require a sustainability generalists (which puts me in both a strong and weak position). I suspect there will always be a need for someone to join the dots on sustainability, even if that need is not always acknowledged or paid for.

The talk to students of Exeter College, Oxford.

Hello and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you! I’ve been asked to tell you  about the work I do and why it’s intellectually/personally/professionally satisfying, so you can avoid falling into the standard ABC of accounting, banking and consultancy. I’m particularly pleased to speak about this because I was involved in the first ever Alternative Careers Fair all the way back in 1996 [Note: can't find any internet links!]. So, a topic close to my heart.

Let’s start with what I do today.
I work at Forum for the Future, a sustainable development charity that works in partnership with companies and government bodies to create a sustainable future. I believe that ‘sustainability’ issues are already huge and will become more important. We will spending the next decades creating a low-carbon world. Sustainability issues are driving the context in which all of us have to forge our careers. They will dominate your working lives.

My story goes a little like this.
I did a Masters in Physics at Exeter College but spent most of my time on what were then known as development and environment issues. I was part of Third World First (now called People and Planet) and of that first Alternative Careers Fair.

Then I had a bit of an alternative careers fail. I didn’t want to be a burden on my parents, and I wanted a solid professional qualification. So I became an accountant with  PricewaterhouseCoopers. My friends accused me of selling my soul; I said I had mortgaged it.

Not surprisingly I didn’t enjoy my time at PwC. I realised that, fundamentally, whoever does the accounts or audit should come up with the same answer. And that means training people to conform, and avoid too much critical thinking or creativity.

I needed a path out, so I did a Masters in Responsibility and Business Practice at the University of Bath. *So many people found the course to be life-changing – generating an invaluable set of skills and connections – that we wrote a book. The course has relocated under a slightly different name to Ashridge – see here).

In the last weeks of that course no fewer than eight people sent me a job advert to be a green accountant at Forum for the Future. I applied and go it. In the last 8 years I have had a new role in Forum every two years – sustainability accountant, Head of Business Strategies and now Deputy Director.

What do I find satisfying.
One quote from someone I worked with PepsiCo can explain:

“I could not be more thrilled with our experience with Forum. It was the first time at PepsiCo that we have taken such a formalized and rigorous long-term view of our business risks and opportunities.

Forum helped us see what we knew in our heart…that the magnitude of the global crises we face cannot be solved in the short-term. Similarly, companies that will be successful in 20 years are those who recognize and respect the long term trends, and who are nimble enough to address them.

The design and activation of Forum’s process is, in a word, comprehensive. They leave no stone unturned during their expert interviews, desk research, and field validation. We now think strategically, LONG term, thanks to Forum.”

I’m satisfied by: making a difference; contributing the sum of human knowledge; and breaking new ground in a vital area.

What does it mean for you?

1. You can mortgage your soul (that is, it is possible to use corporates for training and credibility) but you need to be careful you don’t get sucked in, with ever-narrowing horizon and dependent on the salary.
2. Follow your passion, with an eye to what your future self might want.
3. Sustainability is an immature field, so there is no established career path yet. This is both a blessing and a curse – you can forge something new but the onus is on you to make that new path. There is greater professionalism on the way, with specialisms and associated qualifications.
4. Everyone has a choice about whether to go deep and specialise or go wide as a connector and intellectual omnivore. Your choice will depend on your skills and personality.
5. Internships are common routes for credibility.
6. the normal rules of job hunting and career development apply.
1. what are you good at and what value is that to anyone else?
2. what weakness do you need to make sure you get to a minimum level?
3. how does your next step build the options you want?

Finally… There has always been something to be done. In the last century people fought fascism, rebuilt Western Europe  and saw off communism. Building a sustainable word is the task of our generation. It will be tough, but it will also be a great life’s work for us all. Thank you.

Jeremy Rifkin and the problem with grand narratives

Last Forum co-hosted Jeremy Rifkin as he launched his new book, The Third Industrial Revolution, in the UK. Rifkin paints a grand narrative of human history, with the next phase a revolution to a distribute energy system run like the internet. Much of the content was intriguing, but the overall effect wasn’t strangely dis-empowering. I left realising that I didn’t have a credible way to use his insights because they were too certain.

A few months ago the grapevine said that a truly startling book was on its way. Jeremy Rifkin had finished the Third Industrial Revolution. It proposes that each industrial revolution is a coming together of new energy and new communications technologies, which replace the old order with new economic activity – plus evokes a new, expanded consciousness. The first industrial revolution in the 19th century was steam plus printing (and heightened literacy) for mass production; in the 20th century electricity plus the telephone and television produced mass consumption. Now renewable energy sources and the digital technologies were already combining to produce an ‘energy internet’. This revolution is changing the nature of power,  in his words from ‘vertical’ to ‘lateral’. The greater connectivity will change people’s sense of empathy to create a biosphere-wide consciousness (building on his previous book The Empathic Civilisation). An intriguing grand narrative; I wondered what was in the detail.

Through Forum I got galley copies of the book and tried to read it. Now I like big themed-books; my shelves groan with their weight. But I confess I struggled to get through the foreword of this one. He claimed two things that just made me put the book down: the EU is making lightning fast progress on the Third Industrial Revolution; and it was doing so because he was advising so many leaders. The first claim just didn’t match my experience. If second is true, how come I hadn’t come across this jargon or Rifkin more? Why haven’t I heard about it from newspapers, journals and lots of other people?

So, I went into the lecture at UCL with questions about Rifkin’s credibility as a change agent. His lecture almost overcame those questions. He gave a number of cities which are putting in place the 5 pillars he says are necessary to catalyse the Third Industrial Revolution:

1. Shifting to renewable energy (‘generate’)
2. Converting all buildings into power plants (‘collect’)
3. Hydrogen and other energy storage technology (‘store’)
4. Smart Grid Technology (‘the nervous system’)
5. Plug-in, electric, hybrid, and fuel cell-based transportation (‘convert’)

There’s much to like in these pillars: they feel rounded and feed-off each other. Rifkin claimed that when they happened together there would be a continent-wide roll-out “like WiFi”. It is, he said, a practical plan. There are questions about the details of each – all buildings? really? – but Paul Ekins had the bigger questions. Do all 5 pillars need to happen at once? Rifkin: yes. But Rifkin didn’t have the missing link: what is the plan to make the 5 pillars happen?

Rifkin himself says that the revolution will challenge the status quo. From personal experience, I would say that today’s energy companies can only really think in terms of a huge power station pushing power out at lots of users; they cannot get their heads (or assets or skills) around a distributed energy system. They will resist the 5 pillars a great deal. Without a plan to get the 5 pillars to happen, it is difficult to claim the Third Industrial Revolution is practical. Put it another way, it is like NASA saying their practical Mars plan starts with “When we get to Mars we will…”.  But, how did you get to Mars?

A number of people asked variants of ‘how to do create all the pillars simultaneousness?’ from the floor. His answers were reiterated (or rather, repeated and repeated) the grand narrative that leads to the Third Industrial Revolution. Lots of intriguing insights into the history of civilisation. Just no useful hand holds for a change agent scaling the cliff-face. I didn’t hear no strong tactical or strategic pointers on how to deal with the incumbent energy companies. Do we try to bring them into the new system? Ignore them? Appeal to their emerging global consciousness? Legislate against them?

Rifkin’s answers the second type of question – ‘what about x counter-trend?’ – were also revealing. The examples were sort of squashed under the steam-roller of the inevitability of our changing consciousness.

Now, there is no doubting that we in the UK have a much broader sense of who we care for today than 60-odd years ago. Chamberlain could come back from Munich in 1938 and say that Czechoslovakia was a small country, far away. For a host of reasons – cheap long-distance communications being one – we didn’t treat Sri Lanka or other Asian countries like that when the Indian Ocean tsunami hit in 2004. But anyone who glances through the Daily Mail knows there is a strong current in our culture of saying we should empathise only with those like us, nearby.

Also, the new energy-communications nexus is having paradoxical effects on power. Knowledge is widely distributed, but we are using centralised ‘gates’ like Google and Facebook. As the internet goes into The Cloud, it is simultaneously spreading access to information and narrowing control of the infrastructure. And so on. The broad brush stroke of an emerging global consciousness is like saying Americans are more can-do than the English. There’s a grain of truth but it doesn’t really help you very much day-to-day.

Ultimately, I found that Rifkin’s certainty in his own grand narrative was too much. Let’s imagine he had presented the success in those cities as experiments that proved a distributed energy system was feasible at the city-level and, gosh darn-it, maybe beyond. let’s go find out. Well, I could have responded to that, seen my role in that, had something to contribute to that (through my actions and even adding to the thinking on how to make it happen). But he didn’t do present in that way . Instead he implied the Third Industrial Revolution was inevitable – so why do I need to do anything? – and the only way of understanding all of history.

I hope that something akin to the Third Industrial Revolution happens. If it happens, perhaps Rifkin will be credited. But I suspect such a change will happen because many different people do many things. On Tuesday (and in the book) Rifkin had the chance to help those people understand their role in a Third Industrial Revolution, and feel part of a movement. His certainty in his own ideas gave me no way to be involved, and grated against my experiences.

Ironically, given his enthusiasm for lateral power and the prominence he gives to empathy, I felt dis-empowered by his top-down style. An opportunity missed.

What leading business academics are talking about, from EABIS 2011

Don’t have time for the latest academic conference on sustainable business? Well, I’ve just been to one, so you don’t have to. Below are the rising themes of business accepting the world is changing, partnership as the mode of delivery and the continuing rise of shared value.

I’m on my way back from two days at INSEAD, the gorgeous business school in the Parisian suburbs. The occasion was an academic conference grandly entitled ‘A new era of development: the changing role & responsibilities of business in developing countries’. It was the tenth Colloquium  of EABIS, the main network for business schools and companies around ‘business in society’. Here’s my take on the themes from all the papers, presentations and chatter.

For me, the first theme was an acceptance at the heart of companies and business schools that the world is changing profoundly, and that business would need to change too. A host of senior business speakers – the Chief Executive of Accenture, the Chief Human Resources Officer of Unilever, a VP of IBM and more – all spoke about the shift of economic power to what we’re used to calling the ‘developing world’, but now is being thought of as ‘the growth markets’. Also, there was acceptance that we’re entering a period of resource scarcity, and the most precious resource is people. One startling fact makes plain why: the CEO of Accenture said they added 70,000 staff last year (yes, seventy thousand!), the vast majority in India, China, Brazil, Russia and so on. Nurturing talent that is capable of succeeding in this new world – people who are comfortable across sectors and cultures – is the dominant issue for many businesses.

Two speakers put this shift into historic perspective. The Chief Economist of the French development agency showed that China and India were the dominant world economies five hundred years ago. The Dean of INSEAD claimed that capitalism had gone through stages of colonialism (16-18th centuries), free markets (19-20th centuries), and was now entering a century focused on developing human capital for success.

The main corporate speakers from IBM, Accenture and Unilever said they were fundamentally changing their business in response. They saw business as central to the success of developing economies (as does Forum). The CEO of Accenture went as far as to say that “profit, sustainability and responsibility are the same thing.” I look forward to seeing those words backed up with evidence of making hard choices. That Chief Economist also had a nice line about why people distrust business, “After decades of pursuing profit without a purpose, business needs to work hard to really show it is now pursuing purpose through profit”.

The second theme was partnership as the means of delivering. The vast majority of examples on how business was contributing to development involved some sort of partnership, with NGOs, government or both. Now, Forum is founded on partnership as a way of delivering change. Back in the nineties it was novel; now it is ubiquitous. I have to say that troubled me a bit. Are all of these relationships really partnerships? Do they share enough commonalities that we can bracket them all together, or are we going to find that there are sub-types which are really so different from each other that calling them all ‘partnerships’ actually hinders progress?

What about the very different level of power, the very different interests, and the very different modus operandi of, say, an oil extraction company and a community self-help group? Some people were claiming that we are moving to a ‘convergence economy’, with shared issues, shared interests and shared solutions. While we all have a shared interest in, say, preventing runaway climate change, the different possible solutions will favour different sections of society.

The third theme was the continued rise of ‘shared value’, which cropped up in quite a few presentations. This concept was coined by Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School Professor who more-or-less invented modern strategy management. Shared value is: “policies and operating practices that enhance the competitiveness of a company while simultaneously advancing the economic and social conditions in the communities in which it operates”, that is to say value is created for, and shared between, shareholders and other stakeholders. One of the speakers claimed that Porter had operationalised stakeholder theory, which is indeed a service to the world. However, some of you may have spotted that one of the three sustainability dimensions is missing (hint: it begins with ‘e’ and isn’t ‘economy’). There are also challenges about the boundaries drawn here (why only the conditions in the communities in which it operates?), and whether shared value dissolves questions about power, justice and governance.

Whatever you think of it, there is going to be a book coming out from Porter and his researchers probably next year. And there were a number of academics who used the notion, freely admitting they were opportunistically adopting it to gain credibility. What with Porter’s credibility and the Harvard Business School megaphone, it’s going to keep on rising.

Three more reflections. First, about business schools. They play a central role forming the mindset of executives through MBAs, courses and more. EABIS was set up ten years ago in part to make Corporate Responsibility (as it was then) mainstream in business schools. Many business school academics at the conference were unhappy at the rate of progress, but there hints of patches of really pioneering practice. I hope that EABIS can find a way of bringing those leading practitioners together, supporting them as change agents and diffusing the best practice to a wave of fast followers.

Second, INSEAD knows how to put on events. The staff were amazing (I turned up without booking accommodation, but it was sorted out in a jiffy). However, the French simply don’t do veggie. And I thought the dancing girls were deeply inappropriate (although confirming a particular stereotype of France).

Finally, the real value from the conference was from the connections I made. I have in front of me a stack of business cards, including the Executive Coordinator of Rio+20. There were people who could help Forum’s work on rebalancing fairness in food supply chains, or in disruptive innovation and more. I even spoke to some academics about using our experiences with partners to create cases, teaching modules and research papers, which could in turn influence the next generation of business leaders. That’s worth the ‘slog’ of 2 days in a leafy Parisian suburb…

Wilderness talk on growing pains of capitalism

In mid-August I was asked to take part in a debate at the Wilderness festival  on “Growing Pains: Natural Capitalism and the role of business in sustainability”. I had three messages: 1. Not all growth is ‘bad’ growth; 2. Not all profit is ‘bad’ profit; and 3. businesses must lead by shaping a better form of capitalism.

My full talk is below. In a subsequent post I will reflect on what the other speakers said and the Q&A that followed.

One other piece of context: I assumed the audience was broadly left-leaning and distrusted markets after received lots of negative rhetoric on growth and profit. This is why my main messages seem so defensive; I wanted to speak to where I believed people were starting from. If I was speaking to a business audience I would have had different messages (‘we can’t just rely on markets’). The other speakers and the Q&A confirmed my suspicions – more on that in the subsequent post.

Hello! Thank you for coming to this talk on a sunny Saturday. Thanks to Louise Carver of Blue Bell Tents for inviting me to speak. My name is David Bent and I’m the Deputy Director – Sustainable Business at Forum for the Future. I’m going to start the debate with three messages:

1. not all growth is ‘bad’ growth
2. not all profit is ‘bad’ profit
3. the role of businesses it to lead and shape a better form of capitalism

But first a story. In the 19th century the rapid growth of cities meant poor public health. There were lots of diseases transmitted by touch, especially in the slums. A company called Lever Bros sold a soap – Sunlight Soap - which was part of transforming people’s lives. They washed with the soap with newly-available running water and the waste water could flow into new sewage systems.

Fast forward more than a hundred years and Lever Bros is now part of Unilever. Last year Unilever announced the Sustainable Living Plan (knowns as the USLP) with three goals:

• Halve the environmental footprint of our products
• Help more than 1 billion people take action to improve their health and well-being
• Source 100% of our agricultural raw materials sustainably

(Full disclosure: Forum works closely with Unilever, including on the USLP. This post only contains publicly available information.)

Why am I telling this story? Because it illustrates my three messages.

1. Not all growth is ‘bad’ growth. The incredible growth of the Victorian economy had negative impacts, but it also financed the building of public  infrastructure like a sewage system. Rising household wealth meant people could meet fundamental needs much easier – including buying soap for hygiene. All this was part of improving public health, with lower child mortality and longer lives.

When we’re talking about growth it is important to separate out the different things people mean (following Paul Ekins in Economic Growth and Environmental Sustainability: The Prospects for Green Growth).

There is economic growth – the increasing financial value of paid-for transactions as measured by GDP. Then there is welfare – how satisfied we all are. Until recently mainstream economists and politicians assumed that economic growth automatically increased welfare. We are learning that the picture is more complex. The latest evidence I’ve seen suggests that, once people have the income to meet the basics, financial wealth is not as important as feeling that you’ve done well compared to your peers. Growth is not necessarily good.

Another thing people mean when they talk about growth is energy and material throughput - how much stuff we use to live our lives. Using more stuff is bad for the environment. It takes from sources, driving deforestation, soil depletion and so on. More stuff also means more waste, which the environment struggles to cope with. Carbon emissions are leading to climate change because nature cannot scrub out the carbon dioxide fast enough.

Up until now economic growth has used more stuff. It is true we have become more efficient, using less stuff per dollar (known as ‘relative decoupling’). But these efficiency gains are wiped out by increasing scale of the economy. There hasn’t been the ‘absolute decoupling’, where we have a larger economy without increasing the stuff we use. (See Tim Jackson‘s instant classic Prosperity Without Growth for more.)

But ‘good’ growth is possible. Unilever is an example of a company trying to do absolute decoupling. Unilever is an example of a wider attempt to have ‘green growth’.

2. Not all profit is ‘bad’ profit. At Forum for the Future we believe a sustainable business achieves commercial success by delivering social value within environmental limits. This is exactly what Unilever is trying to do.

At the launch of the USLP Oliver Morgan, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Health said ”Soap is the most cost-effective health intervention. Governments don’t get people to use it; marketing does.” (See my previous post.)

If Unilever succeeds it will have helped people meet their needs, increased public health and made a profit. Surely that would be a good thing?

3. The role of businesses it to lead and shape a better form of capitalism. Finally, Unilever knows that it cannot achieve its ambitious goals by itself. It will need to act, with others, to re-shape many of the systems it is part of. In my post of the launch I quoted the CEO as saying ”We must attract the right investors. If you buy into our approach to long-term value creation… then invest in us. If not, I respect you as a human being, but don’t invest in us.” Clearly, he’s trying to change the financial system. Unilever is also working on consumer behaviour, tea supply chains and more. It is trying to shape a better form of capitalism.

Now, capitalism is the worst system devised – except for all the others (to misquote Churchill). Despite its negatives, democratic capitalism has a better record than anything else in helping people choose how to lead their lives, just compare the record of West and East Germany (as John Kay does in this article from 1997).

We’re in a weird historical moment where a vocal minority have convinced us that there is only one version of capitalism – free markets and hyper-financialisation. But there have been many capitalisms over time, and there are many across the world today.

We all face huge and urgent challenges. A sustainable form of capitalism is the only way to mobilise human ingenuity and institutional resources at the scale and speed required. We don’t have time to speculate about an alternative – while getting no traction in the political realities of today. We have to start from here and now.

Certainly, the capitalisms we have today are not sustainable. Most growth is ‘bad’ growth, much profit is ‘bad’ profit. There are companies preventing a sustainable future, whether deliberately and unintentionally.

There is a ‘societal case’ for action, but that rarely translates down to a ‘business case’ for individual companies. We need markets to be framed by proper regulation and institutions; we need consumers to change behaviour; we need investors to shift expectations; and more. Then there will be more of a business case, and there will innovation at scale.

To recap. Not all growth is ‘bad’ growth. Not all profit is ‘bad’ profit. The role of businesses it to lead and shape a better form of capitalism.

We need to find a sustainable capitalism or at least shift things so that whatever is next can flower and flourish. Creating a better form of capitalism of the task of our generation.

Thank you.

What can we learn from the fourth anniversary of M&S Plan A?

Marks and Spencers are making great progress on Plan A. What can learn from the fourth anniversary event last week? Marc Bolland is committed and wants Plan A to part of how M&S grow globally. The next phase will be about engaging the consumer and getting emotional traction. And, to get a return you must take risk.

Last Thursday 7 July I was one of 150 plus sustainability folk at the Plan A Progress Event. (Full disclosure: I was there because Forum for the Future works closely with M&S. This post contains insights based on what was said in public session.) All the way back in 2007 M&S launched Plan A “because there is no Plan B”. Originally there were 100 commitments, organised by 5 themes: Climate Change; Waste; Raw Materials; Fair Partner; Health. The headline targets were ambitious, being carbon neutral and no waste to landfill by 2012. When launched, M&S didn’t know how they would deliver 30 or so of the commitments, and thought it would cost £200m over 5 years. In 2010, Plan A was revised with more commitments and an ambition to be “the world’s most sustainable major retailers”.

The combination of broad range and ambition makes Plan A part of M&S’s brand positioning with customers “you can trust the quality and value of everything in our shops”. Many other supermarkets have a different positioning with customers – “everything you want is here” – and so tend to have a strategy based on ‘hero products’.

So, what did we learn at the progress event?

Well, at a basic level Plan A is being delivered. They have already achieved 95 commitments, are on-track with 77 and are behind on 7. (More detail in their How We Do Business report 2011.) The presentation from the Head of General Merchandise (I didn’t note his name – oops!) was particularly good. Some 70m items sold last year with at least on Plan A improvement. Increases in wool price because Australian farmers are now breeding sheep for meat for the Asian markets. The use of recycled materials decouples M&S from the volatility and risk of commodity market prices – a big thing as we enter a decade of increasingly constrained resources. Also, Plan A is added £70m to the bottom line last year (which is a bit less than 10% of underlying profits before tax), mainly through energy efficiency savings. So, lots of nuggets.

More fundamental for me was Marc Bolland. He became CEO in May 2010. He could easily have seen Plan A as Sir Stuart Rose’s thing and have quietly killed it. But he’s done the opposite (although he did joke that “Stuart did the plan, now I have to deliver it”). His presentation at the start mapped out his vision for M&S: an increasingly global multi-channel retailer that is trusted. He positioned Plan A as vital to that growth, especially in why consumers can trust M&S but there were also hints about Plan A creating a resilient supply chain. An audience question asked how could M&S take Plan A global when each market has quite different customer expectations. Bolland was clear that Plan A was part of going global, yes it would need to flex. But he saw it as an opportunity.

What he kept coming back to was the need to engage, especially with the consumer. He made it clear that there were a number of plans to get emotional traction with customers. So, I guess we can expect some ‘above the line’ advertising or marketing. As M&S raises its game, I guess others will have to follow.

The other thing we can learn from Plan A is that to get a return you must take risk. M&S launched Plan A without knowing all the answers, and thinking it would cost them. If they had waited until there were definitive answers and a proven business case, well, we’d still be waiting. Many of the companies I work tell me that they find the business case by trying stuff out, and also that the rewards are far greater than they had thought. This matches with MIT / BCG findings that the ‘embracers’ seize advantage. This is a central difficulty for many sustainability change agents: how to get permission to do stuff when you can only prove the business case by doing stuff. For some thoughts on how to overcome this see the Better Decisions, Real Value toolkit.

Innovating sustainable business models: the next wave of corporate sustainability?

When is enough, enough? A group of leading companies that we work with at Forum for the Future tell us that even their substantial progress on sustainability is not enough. And we think they’re right. The next wave of corporate sustainability will be about innovating the fundamental logic of how a company creates value, in short creating ‘sustainable business models’. In this emerging field, what examples and best practice can you suggest that help us all understand what to do next?

We think of a sustainable business model as one that achieves commercial success by delivering social value within environmental limits. Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan commits them to double sales over the next decade while halving the environmental footprint of making and using their products. As CEO Paul Polman says, “That means a new business model”.

Back in 2010, we convened a roundtable with representatives from M&S, Unilever, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Kingfisher and the Shell Foundation to explore the emerging idea of sustainable business models. We learnt two things.

First, the group had already realised that more product and service innovation was not going to be enough. One participant described their world-leading sustainability change programme as “only taking the rough edges off”. In order to secure the future success of their companies, they needed to go further, faster on sustainability.

Second, they are reaching the limits of what they could do in the status quo. They needed their operating context to shift, so they can take the next leadership steps.

So what to do about it? Again, two things shone out.

First, the company can go beyond improving its current products and services – it  can experiment new sustainable business models. Academics define a business model as the fundamental logic of how a company creates value. As an example, Apple’s recent success is down to more than great design. It made downloading music easy, and built a business model around that. While the sustainability benefits are contested, it is clear Apple has successfully changed the status quo in music, media and consumer electronics.

There are already a few examples that stand out. One is ZipCar , the world’s largest car sharing and car club service. Customers meet their need for convenient, cheap urban mobility. There are fewer cars on the road doing short journeys as each ZipCar replaces at least 15 cars.

Second, companies will need to collaborate to shift the status quo. There will be experimentation here too, as businesses try out different combinations of collaborators for particular issues. Sometimes it will make sense to gather together competitors, sometimes only supply chain partners, consumers, regulators, NGOs or some combination of these different groups.

The roundtable gave us plenty to think about here at Forum for the Future. So much, in fact, that we developed a new strategic direction. Going forward we will focus on transform the critical systems of food energy and finance, to make them fit for the challenges of the 21^st century. Our approach is ‘system innovation’, using collaboration to shift the status quo. It is explained in a handy 2 minute animation here.

Our sustainable business work is all about using this approach to enable leading companies to go further – to succeed through sustainability. We will focus on helping companies innovate sustainable business models. In fact, one of the targets we have set ourselves is to help three companies decouple their financial success from environmental and social impact in the next five years. A tall order! Which is why we’re keen to hear your examples of sustainable business models. Do put your ideas in the comments below or by email to d.bent@forumforthefuture.org.

This post first appeared on GreenBiz on 12 July 2011. It was sharpened up by Madeleine Lewis. 

How can we use new innovations and technology to be more sustainable? [Green Fingers]

We face the challenge of meeting the growing needs of a larger, more prosperous global society while not undermining the natural systems on which we all rely. For business, that challenge is an opportunity: to combine profit from creating a sustainable future. New innovations and technologies are one of the ways that leading businesses are grasping that opportunity.

This first appeared as the Green Fingers column in Chartered Secretary magazine in July 2008. The material is based on Leader Business Strategies.

Companies are improving their production methods, up and down the supply chain. With oil and other commodities at record prices, now is a good time to cut costs and improve environmental performance. New technologies allow you to: rethink whether you need a particular input; reduce how much you use per product; and, re-use by-products (either in your own processes, or as a new revenue stream). 3M’s Pollution Prevention Pays programme has initiated over 6,000 innovations that saved a cumulative $1 billion in their first year.

New technologies can be new products and services to clients. The Toyota Prius made green cars cool, and helped Toyota become the largest car company in the world. GE’s Ecomagination uses an environmental lens to improve current technologies (like its gas turbines) and for more radical innovation, for instance in alternative energy, all the while creating revenues of $12 billion in 2006. In both cases, they are innovating to better meet customer’s needs, not just for greenery.

To become more sustainable, leading businesses also to create the right sort of demand in their market, and engage with the wider context, to tackle issues that transcend a single company. But, innovation is the foundation of a company’s competitive advantage. New innovation and technologies will give us the means to be more sustainable.