I have just returned from a weekend participating in the[ Marlboro College MBA in Managing for Sustainability](http://gradschool.marlboro.edu/academics/mba/) program. It was a rich and rewarding experience, reminding me of my past experience at The [Bainbridge Graduate Institute](www.bgiedu.org/) which offers a similar program. These two programs and a handful of others carry the mission to transform business as the creator, not destroyer of sustainability. An ambitious goal, but a critical one. The students at Marlboro and now at many other schools of business are joining hands within [Net Impact](http://www.netimpact.org/) which calls itself “a global network of leaders who are changing the world… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Consultants Relief and Retirement Act
No, this is not a new government program to get us out of the recession. It’s the Walmart plan to create a Sustainability Index. Greenbiz ran an [article](http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2009/09/24/walmart-sustainability-index-means-big-business) discussing the need that this program will create for most of the Walmart suppliers that have yet to carefully assess their footprint and social beneficence. That amounts to some 90,000 firms world-wide. The article estimates that only about 10% of the impacted firms have already done some of the work or have the resources to comply. Consultants are already jumping to get business from these firms. > Walmart’s sustainability assessment offers both… Read More
Continue ReadingRankings Redux
Since I posted the last entry, I have had an interchange with Newsweek that has cleared up some of the mystery. The order of the rankings in the Green Corporations table is determined by something called a z-score, not the raw impact data. The z-score is a measure of the distance a score is from the mean, normalized by the standard deviation.* It’s just something like this that may have triggered Lord Disraeli’s initial outburst about statistics. It is more work that I am willing to do to calculate these scores for the whole set, so I will just have… Read More
Continue ReadingLies, Damn Lies, and Rankings
Lies, damn lies, and statistics is a phrase usually attributed to Lord Disraeli. With the profusion of rating and ranking schemes, the time has come to bring it up to date, as the headline proclaims. Wal-Mart has recently announced its plans to rate all of the hundreds of thousands of products it sells. We have ratings of plain colored colleges, green colleges, corporations in many shapes (Fortune 500, Dow Jones Sustainability Index. . .) and now the [Newsweek list of the 500 greenest big U. S. corporations](http://greenrankings.newsweek.com/). The idea of ranking things of all sorts is an old and frequently… Read More
Continue ReadingWhen Things Bite Back
The headline of this post is the title of a book by Edward Tenner with the subtitle, Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. This theme runs through my book. While driving today, I heard a story on NPR about a device that will prevent texting while driving. Distractive driving has become endemic especially among younger drivers, and has become a major source of automobile accidents. Many states have passed laws making texting while driving illegal. > A nationwide survey this year showed an estimated 45 percent of drivers 30 or younger are sending or receiving texts behind the wheel.… Read More
Continue ReadingLearning About Sustainability from Pigs and Trash
Gregory Bateson once wrote in *The Ecology of the Mind*, “Lack of systemic wisdom is always punished.” Unfortunately for those who might learn from the bad consequences of such failures, the evidence frequently comes much later and escapes notice. The relationship between ill-considered actions and the collapse or serious malfunctioning of the system they perturb is often tenuous and the delay for the response to appear too long to make the connection clear. Such is the case with climate change. It has been excruciatingly difficult to make a convincing case linking greenhouse gases and temperature rise to the general public… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Business of Sustainability
The headline of this post is the title of a[ just released report](http://www.mitsmr-ezine.com./busofsustainability/2009#pg1) published jointly by the Boston Consulting Group in collaboration with the Sloan Management Review. There is much in it worth reading and I will make it the subject of several posts. (Disclosure: I was one of the “thought leaders” interviewed by the Sloan Management Review in the development of this report.) Today I am simply going to dwell on the title, *The Business of Sustainability*. I’ll bet that most of those that read the report or news about it haven’t thought about the title. What is the… Read More
Continue ReadingIndices Versus Meters
A reader asked me about Google’s PowerMeter and how does this compare to Wal-Mart’s Sustainability Index, which I have criticized on several occasions. First, I would be comparing apples and oranges. These two proposals represent very different kinds of ways to inform people. The Google PowerMeter and other similar processes are ways to evaluate energy consumption. The Google system links to a smart meter installed by the power company at a home or office, collects detailed data on energy consumption, organizes the data, and presents it to the consumer via a personal Google webpage. By observing patterns versus some separate… Read More
Continue ReadingWatching Summer Vanish
Summer is not officially over for a few weeks yet, but my personal version ended this weekend when we moved back to Lexington from Maine. This season has been particularly cruel, dousing us with rain and freezing us for the first part of the summer. Then in the middle of a great streak of gorgeous weather we had to pack up and leave. I do have to admit though, the beautiful days have followed us home at least for now. September is my New Year, not January 1st. Not just because the Jewish New Year comes at this time, but… Read More
Continue ReadingSelf Storage–A Growing Way to Consume Even More
Where to put all our solid waste has been a big question for many decades now. Recycling has reduced the amount of stuff being incinerated or dumped into a landfill. We are still filling up big holes in the ground at an appalling rate. Now it seems that we are filling up a lot of above-ground space with stuff that we own, but don’t use and don’t want to throw out yet. Jon Mooallem, writing in the New York Times Magazine about the growth of self-storage dropped some fascinating data and a few stories to liven up the numbers. The… Read More
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