The Sustainability Leaders Workshop

Happy New Year!

With the new year (and new decade) come resolutions and one of those is probably to do with advancing your organization's commitment to sustainability. If that describes you, then consider the Sustainability Leaders Workshop by Esty Environmental Partners. Esty EP has long been a pioneer in corporate sustainability strategy consulting, but this new offering (see the brochure below) takes the Esty framework and makes it available to a broader audience.

Kyle Cahill Joins Viridus' Advisory Board

We are thrilled to announce that Kyle Cahill has joined Viridus' advisory board and will soon be posting here on this blog as well as helping moderate the discussion on the Viridus private network. Now Kyle brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to Viridus, not the least being that he designed, built and launched an online corporate sustainability network for the Environmental Defense Fund called the EDF Innovation Exchange.

Here's a little more about Kyle:

Kyle Cahill is an experienced environmental strategist and business communicator who has worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies on corporate environmental innovations. Most recently, he was Director of Corporate Engagement at Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a leading market-focused environmental nonprofit. While at EDF, Kyle created the EDF Innovation Exchange, a first of its kind knowledge management and network collaboration initiative aimed at crowd-sourcing a comprehensive library of environmental content, best practices, and tools through a peer community of practitioners engaged in environmental initiatives. Kyle is an active spokesperson to the media and at events on the business case for sustainability, climate change solutions, nanotechnology, environmental change management, marketing environmental initiatives, and public/private sector collaboration. He is co-author of the Guide to Successful Corporate-NGO Partnerships, developed the DuPont/EDF Nano Risk Framework and is on the Advisory Board of the NanoBusiness Alliance. Kyle earned his M.B.A. focused in corporate social responsibility from the Isenberg School at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and his B.A. in English Literature from Amherst College.

Welcome aboard!

Newsweek Unveils "Green Ranking" of Large US Companies

When I saw Newsweek's latest "green" rankings out on America's largest companies I was immediately reminded of the US News ranking of universities. The US News report is hugely promoted in the media and most if not all university bound students and their parents are at least generally aware of the top schools on the list. The schools themselves, however, hate the list. Actually I shouldn't say that, the schools who believe they should have a perch atop the list hate it...the little underdogs love it. Trust me, go ask someone at Harvard what they think of the list!

There is definitely truth in the criticisms about the ranking criteria, how performance is measured, etc. but I like Ariel Schwartz of Fast Company who wrote, "...the rankings aren't perfect...[but] as a tool for public humiliation--they can't be beat!"

Read the whole list for more detail but here are the top 20 greenest large companies according to Newsweek.

1. Hewlett-Packard
2. Dell
3. Johnson & Johnson
4. Intel
5. IBM
6. State Street
7. Nike
8. Bristol-Myers Squibb
9. Applied Materials
10. Starbucks
11. Johnson Controls
12. Cisco Systems
13. Wells Fargo
14. Sun Microsystems
15. Sprint Nextel
16. Adobe Systems
17. Advanced Micro Devices
18. Kohl's
19. Allergan
20. Staples

Click here to continue the conversation on Viridus with other corporate sustainability professionals.

US workers greener than their employers

The good news: More than three-fourths of US workers — 77.7 percent — say that working for a green employer is important to them, according to a new study by Marlin Company ("Attitudes in the American Workplace"), while 51% responded that their employers have implemented a significant sustainability initiative. (Only 49% to go!)

The bad news: When US workers were asked, "Who's greener, you or your company?" Their answers made it clear that most employees think that their companies are not doing enough:

>>> 63.4 percent of workers believe that they are greener than their employers.

In addition, many US workers think they their employers are faking green, with only 17% saying that companies are making an effort to be socially responsible:

- 24.1 percent say that companies want to save money
- 22 percent say that companies want the publicity associated with going green
- 14.1 percent say that companies just want to be politically correct

There is clearly a lot of work ahead for employers who want to drive corporate sustainability goals (including critical cost-savings missions), as well as use green initiatives to galvanize and energize organizational culture.

Big Blue Goes Green

You know it has hit the mainstream when IBM jumps in. Well today IBM announced "Green Sigma" a service offered by their consulting group that, according to their press release, "can help clients lower their environmental impact, increase efficiency and reduce costs by applying Lean Six Sigma principles to energy and water usage..."

At the core of the service is a new management dashboard [why IBM chose to put the demo out as an .exe file we'll never know] that captures non-financial performance metrics. With these projects, implementation is key, but if the the demo dashboard is any indicator of what they're selling, it looks pretty slick.


I've always felt that people pay attention to what you measure and sustainability is no different. I look forward to an active discussion inside of Viridus on what actual IBM customers think about this.

Competitor or Collaborator?

Over the past several months, we have spoken with many corporate sustainability professionals (i.e. folks with either "environment" or "sustainability" in their title on their business card) and to a person they have said they personally collaborate with competitors on green issues at work. For example, we spoke with a corporate sustainability engineer at a biotech firm and he related a story about sharing internal ghg inventory spreadsheets with a direct competitor. Similarly, we interviewed a CSO at a large software firm and he mentioned that sustainability was, "the only area we compete with [a large competitor]."

This strikes us as surprising but pragmatic. On the one hand, you might think that companies that compete with each other would want to keep their sustainability programs confidential, but in reality the greater good of helping the environment outweighs what is viewed as a negligible competitive advantage. And much of the perceived value of sustainability initiatives is the press coverage and consumer marketing benefits. You have to look no further than a company's sustainability report to see how open businesses are on this topic. Companies are incredibly detailed and transparent about the initiatives they undertake, the cost of implementing and the expected and actual results. In fact, thousands of companies use standard reports to communicate what they're doing.

The bottom line is that collaborating with other firms, including competitors, is not only good for the environment, it's good for business.

Virid.us Launches!

Today we are thrilled to announce the launch of Viridus, a community for business professionals to discuss and advance corporate sustainability.  

Viridus is a practical "how to manual" for issues everyone faces at work.  Our belief is that everyone has a "green collar" job and it is how you do your job that actually makes it green or not.  An accounting department working on reducing paper billing, an engineering group designing for recyclability, a purchasing department seeking to reduce the ghg footprint of their supply chain, a facilities department looking to reduce energy or water consumption and especially those who work in corporate sustainability will all find value at Viridus.

Viridus is a members-only site with 100% user-generated-content.  We feel that an environment of business professionals who have responsibility for the sustainability of their organization is particularly valuable.  This way members don't have to worry about being solicited by vendors, press, regulators, NGOs, etc.

We are strongly committed to improving the sustainability of businesses everywhere and look forward to building the Viridus community.  We are currently in invite only private beta.  If you would like to request an invite, please sign up here.  In the meantime, please feel free to send us feedback, comments or questions.