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Sticker Shock: Walmart’s labeling scheme will be costly, but will it be effective? Two views.

WorldChanging Team — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:33:12 +0000

Eco-labeling is becoming globally hot, thanks in part to Walmart. Here are two perspectives. The first is from Stephen Stokes of AMR Research, by way of Climate Inc., edited by David Levy, Professor of Management at UMass, Boston.

Addressing climate change and other environmental issues requires real action at the facility and process level – just creating product labels may not be effective

Walmart’s product environmental labeling aspirations went public in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal last month and sent ripples of fear and excitement considerably more widely. Excitement for software and service vendors who anticipate a lucrative business supporting Walmart’s product labeling program. Fear for its 100,000 suppliers who will be required to generate the detailed data needed for Walmart’s environmental labels. Walmart will soon be sending an initial survey to all its suppliers with questions regarding their sustainability practices.

Walmart plans to develop labels based on a standardized index of the environmental impact of every product on its shelves. This ambitious project demands that Walmart’s suppliers develop accurate and defendable estimates at the SKU level of the greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, air pollution, and other measures for all the inputs required to source, manufacture and ship their goods. Walmart’s Chief Merchandising Officer John Fleming made clear that it would require participation from suppliers across the board.

In designing environmental initiatives, there is a need to pragmatically consider what’s achievable, what’s desirable, and what is likely to actually make a difference to the environment. Rushing to force a product labeling agenda too quickly will result in a lack of standards and expectations, and potentially lead to disappointing outcomes and a great deal of consumer confusion.

Transformation from the Grinch to the Gentle Green Giant

Walmart’s sustainability program has been transformational for the organization and delivered huge cost savings and performance improvements. It has created a virtual love affair with previously adversarial environmental lobby groups and a new relationship with the customer. Their programs have been holistically implemented across the global organization. Best practices in logistics, refrigeration, lighting, energy efficiency and packaging have prompted many to consider the Arkansas Grocer’s transformation to be the model of successful corporate sustainable transformation. Walmart’s vast supplier network and huge scale, approaching 8% of US retail sales, means that it has the power to change industry norms and practices not just in retail but also upstream in the value chain, in consumer goods industries.

But even the largest retailer in the world can stick their neck out too far in the confusing and complex world of product labeling. It’s great that Walmart is thinking ambitiously and comprehensively about environmental information, but I forecast that it will ultimately be unpopular and unsuccessful if pursued at a store-wide SKU level as currently planned.

Sacked (and Stacked) in the In(store) Zone

Here are some key issues that deserve evaluation prior to the implementation of product labeling.

Who has their eye on compliance costs?

Pepsico UK told us last year that the cost of carbon footprinting their highly publicized Walkers potato crisps (chips for Americans!) was well in excess of $40,000 and took more than four years to complete – for one SKU. Moving forward they are anticipating costs on the order of $10,000 to $12,000 per SKU. At 20,000 to 25,000 SKUs per typical supermarket that’s a $250M task just for carbon – and Wal-Mart Supercenters carry over 100,000 SKU’s.

What about the full product life cycle beyond the manufacturers control?

The full environmental impact of goods is frequently strongly influenced by consumer actions. More than half of the embodied carbon within an Apple MacBook Air for example is associated with downstream energy usage and disposal. The carbon footprint of Proctor and Gamble’s cold water tide can be reduced by a third if used at 30°C instead of 40°C, and reduced by a further third if used in France where low carbon nuclear electricity dominates grid supply. Should the labeling be based on cradle-to-gate versus cradle-to-cradle lifecycles? How will they change as consumers adapt their behavior with new environmental awareness?

Who will be able to judge environmental claims and performance?

An environmental label is not directly comparable to a nutritional label. A challenge to the accuracy of a nutritional claim can be readily verified via laboratory analysis of the contents concerned. There is no scope for direct back-calculation and tracking of carbon or environmental information once labeled and on the shelf. And the labels are trying to hit a moving target, because environmental impacts change as companies adjust their sourcing and processes. Manufacturing supply chains are dynamic and evolving systems whose impact or footprint cannot be quantified in a singular value.

Lets not forget the consumer.

Most of the more recent European research in this area indicates that significant (c. 44%) and increasing numbers of consumers would switch to greener products even if they carry a higher price tag. At the same time, 78% of consumers indicated an awareness of carbon labeling but only 20% saw it as a positive development – it is hard to make the case that this issue is being driven by pull from end customers. Most report confusion in their attempts to interpret carbon labels at the granulated product level; green branding seem to be more of a market force at the company level – like the Body Shop, Wholefoods, Apple and Dell.

What should be the functional unit for analyzing corporate environmental performance?

With limited budgets should firms spend much or all of it cataloguing and labeling performance on a product by product basis or actually invest in doing something about it? Manufacturers pursuing ongoing process and production improvement can rightly expect that the benefit over time will reach throughout the supply chain and through multiple SKUs. So should we not be tracking, evaluating and benchmarking corporations at the corporate, or at least, facility level? We think so.

At AMR Research we have been analyzing the increasing environmental agenda in manufacturing for some time. Picking a small subset of SKUs to deep dive into full life cycle impact assessment has merit and will deliver knowledge for process improvement. Labeling of all SKU’s is overkill, however. The compliance costs associated with the exercise have been mentioned above. Pepsico were able to reduce energy use (and potential emissions) by more than 11% based on the knowledge they gained in the footprinting exercise. The actions taken by Pepsico depended on this detailed and rigorous knowledge, not a simplified aggregate environmental rating. Moreover, this knowledge can be rolled out where applicable throughout their snack food lines without subjecting each SKU to the same detailed and rigorous analysis.

Forcing portfolio-wide cataloguing at the SKU level may well siphon funding away from reinvestment in efficient technologies and processes. As energy price volatility continues to increase and continuous improvement forces year-on-year searches for waste and resource reduction, we can reasonably assume that all SKUs under some company or process or production line will over time benefit from the process improvement and investment. In any case, labels at the SKU level require estimating and allocating company and facility level environmental impacts, generating data that are not always useful for management trying to reduce these impacts.

Falling Off the Shoulders of Giants – the Future of Environmental Information Should be Where it can be Accurately and Effectively Traced at the Corporate Level

Environmentally responsible products are produced by environmentally responsible organizations. Green brands reside at the corporate level, and only rarely with specific products. Walmart’s decision to drive its supply chains to environmental labels at the SKU level is beyond the level of production utility, of achievable accuracy given limited resources, and of utility to consumers – green or otherwise. What is key for the future is the collection of accurate and transparent environmental information that is not just meaningful for consumers but helps management to take the necessary action.

The smallprint of the Walmart program, which has been less widely circulated, plots a 5+ year course for a green index which migrates from a supplier-based evaluation to a product-based one. There is much merit in pursuing environmental performance at the supplier level. Walmart, like all successful corporations in the newly emerging economy, will wish to do business wherever possible with like-minded, sustainable and environmentally cognizant organizations. They and their supply chain partners should converge on an appropriate and rationally-based level of environmental information – fixed at the corporate and plant level to ensure transparency and ongoing environmental and sustainable performance. SKU-based commitments promise to deliver high compliance costs, out of scope and inaccurate data, and market confusion.

[JR: The second perspective is from the CAP, with a post titled "The Meaning of Eco-Labels."]

Everything we buy has a life story. Our stuff is extracted from the earth, molded into shape, shipped across the world, used, and thrown away. Each step in this process has an environmental impact, whether it’s using natural resources to make the products or emitting pollution by transporting them. Businesses may be responsible for this impact by bringing products to consumers, but it’s consumers that ultimately drive the process. A lack of awareness about these hidden costs, and of useful information at the point of purchase, prevents consumers from becoming agents of sustainability.

Eco-labeling informs consumers about a product’s environmental footprint. In essence, it empowers them to vote with their dollar—rewarding companies that reduce their impact and pushing the rest to do the same. Eco-labels have to the potential to drive innovation in the products we buy and in the processes that make them if they’re properly designed and widely adopted.

So far, most eco-labeling efforts have relied on voluntary certification of particular products. Examples include EnergyStar for electronics, the Forest Stewardship Council for wood, and USDA organic for produce.

But the labels are gaining stream, encompassing ever more products and environmental impacts. Last year, international retailer Tesco slapped carbon emission labels on some of its products. The British government is considering a green labeling system for all the country’s food. And Japan has already started moving in this direction.

An ideal eco-label should convey all of the environmental and social impacts of a product across its entire lifecycle—from extraction and manufacturing to transportation, use, and disposal. These impacts should include greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, ocean acidification, ozone layer depletion, eutrophication (an increase in chemical nutrients in an ecosystem), habitat destruction, desertification, land use, and resource depletion. Design is key—to be effective, the label must be informative and intuitive enough to guide good choices without confusing shoppers.

Of course, labels require data, and data demands a lot of painstaking research. At present, most companies simply don’t know the environmental footprint of their products. Lifecycle assessments can be difficult to apply to goods with long supply chains, whose constituent parts may be manufactured by a dozen suppliers in as many countries.

Walmart, in an attempt to burnish its green image, recently announced an ambitious plan to develop a comprehensive sustainability index to measure the lifecycle environmental impacts of every product it sells. This could be a game changer.

The index is intended to stimulate a “race to the top” by helping consumers make informed decisions and cut through false eco-labeling, assisting Walmart to choose between suppliers, and even enabling manufacturers to identify areas for improvement.

A comprehensive sustainability index for all of Walmart’s products is still years away, however. So far, the company is sending out a 15-question survey to each of its 60,000 suppliers. The questions, which cover four areas—climate and energy, natural resources, material efficiency, and people and communities—refer to the company but not its products.

Eventually, every one of those manufacturers will have to dig its way back through its supply chain and measure the environmental impacts of its production processes and distribution systems.

Once the index gets off the ground, Walmart plans to turn it over to a nonprofit. The company partnered with universities and even competing retailers and set up a consortium to establish the tricky scientific standards needed to measure the sustainability of its consumer products. This is a gargantuan project that few other companies could take on, and Walmart is serious enough to make it open source. These steps signal that the company is in it for the long haul, despite the legitimate concerns of many environmentalists.

The world’s biggest retailer sells so many products that if these standards are indeed made “credible, transparent, and user-friendly” as Walmart hopes, and if other major retailers adopt them, it may usher in universal eco-labeling. This would go a long way to remaking the way we make things.

This piece originally appeared in Climate Progress

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Transforming Business at 2:33 PM)

The Four-Day Work Week Works

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:12:34 +0000

by Pete Davies

Utah’s experiment shows happier employees and environmental benefits

17,000 Utah state employees have been working four-day weeks since last August. Non-critical government and agency staff have worked ten-hour days Monday-Thursday and then taken three-day weekends. Some of the first findings from the experiment are in:

Nine months in, the state had saved $1.8 million on energy and cleaning bills (the savings are likely to be even higher over the summer as the air conditioning isn’t needed on Fridays).

82% of state employees say they prefer the hours.

Employees also report feeling healthier, showing “decreased health complaints, less stress and [taking] fewer sick days”.

Significant environmental benefits include energy savings from the buildings being closed, fewer emissions from employee commutes and congestion relief because of fewer people traveling in rush-hour all week.

Users of government services have access outside the standard 9-5 times. They can no longer go on Friday, but they can go early or late any other day of the working week.

And an unexpected (albeit largely anecdotal) benefit: many state employees are using some of their time on Fridays to volunteer.

We’ve debated this before, but I have to admit I’m won over by these findings. So if you call our customer service line on a Friday and get no answer, you’ll know what’s happened…

This piece originally appeared in The Terra Pass Footprint.

Image by Mike Judge's fevered brain.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Transforming Business at 3:12 PM)

Shoe Brands Get Tough On Leather Suppliers To Save Amazon Rainforest

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:29:35 +0000

by Damian Carrington and Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro

Crackdown against 'environmental criminals' follows Greenpeace report

Slaughtering the Amazon from Greenpeace UK on Vimeo.

Some of the world's top footwear brands, including Clarks, Adidas, Nike and Timberland, have demanded an immediate moratorium on destruction of the Amazon rainforest from their leather suppliers in Brazil.
The move is the first major development since the Guardian revealed a three-year undercover investigation by Greenpeace in June. The investigation said leading Brazilian suppliers of leather and beef for products sold in Britain had obtained cattle from farms involved in illegal deforestation.

"The decision is good news," said Carlos Minc, Brazil's environment minister. "With government pressure on one side and with the pressure of the consumer on the other, we have started to close in on [environmental] criminals."
"It's great progress in a very short space of time," said Greenpeace's James Turner. "What this does now is really put pressure on the UK food companies. The shoe companies have realised there is a problem and taken action, now it's up to the supermarkets to follow that lead."
Clearing tropical forests for agriculture is estimated to produce 17% of the world's carbon emissions – more than the global transport system. Cattle farming is now the biggest threat to the remaining Amazon rainforest, a fifth of which has been lost since 1970. "I'd say that 65-75% of deforestation is linked to the growth of ranching," Minc said. "We are closing in on this, but it is still the sector that is most opposed to change and responsible for the most deforestation in the Amazon."
Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change secretary, who is in the Amazon on an unrelated diplomatic trip, said: "We can only get an agreement on climate change if it involves Brazil and it involves forestry. There is no solution to the question of climate change without forestry. The Amazon forest is such a beautiful place when it is untouched and then you see these scars on the landscape from the deforestation, bigger and bigger scars."
In addition to the moratorium on leather from newly deforested areas, the footwear makers have also demanded that suppliers bring in a stringent traceability system within a year, which will "credibly" guarantee the source of all leather.
Last night, one large supplier agreed to ensure that the farms it takes cattle from are not responsible for deforestation. Bertin, one of Brazil's - and the world's - major suppliers of leather and beef also agreed to meet Greenpeace this month to negotiate how to prevent cattle ranching from driving deforestation.
The Greenpeace investigation compiled field work, government records, company documents and trade data from Brazil, China, Europe, Vietnam and the US to piece together the global movement of leather and meat from Brazilian cattle.
The organisation said cattle from hundreds of legal and illegal farms across the Amazon were mixed and processed on their way to export sites, making it currently impossible to trace the origins of products. "In effect, criminal or 'dirty' supplies of cattle are 'laundered' through the supply chain," said the report. Greenpeace has asked companies to refuse to buy from such suppliers and for consumers to press supermarkets and high street brands to clean up the supply chains.
It said that some Brazilian processing companies exported products linked to Amazon destruction to dozens of blue-chip companies across the world, and named three major processors, Bertin, JBS and Marfrig, which together control a third of Brazilian beef exports.
"We all agree [preventing deforestation] is possible," Leonardo Swirski, head of Bertin's leather division, told the Guardian last night. But he warned against measures that would harm the livelihoods of the 20 million people in the Amazon region.
"If all [consumers] are not buying any products from the Amazon, they will surely create other sorts of problems." He believes other supply companies will also take action: "We have an advantage if they don't. I believe everyone will follow."
JBS and Marfrig reiterated commitments to not sourcing cattle from illegally deforested land, and all three have agreed with the federal prosecutor to reject these cattle. Marcus O'Sullivan, a director in JBS's London office, said: "We are very committed to the protection of the Amazon biome. We work closely with Ibama [the Brazilian ministry of defence's enforcement agency] and don't purchase cattle from the blacklisted farms."
Under the moratorium, the footwear companies will refuse to buy leather sourced from farms on both legally and illegally deforested land. It will be extended if the demand for credible traceability is not in place within a year.
Clarks, which is a major customer of Bertin, said in a statement: "Clarks will require suppliers of Brazilian leather to certify, in writing, that they are not supplying leather from recently deforested areas in the Amazon biome."
Timberland said: "We are grateful for the work of NGOs such as Greenpeace in exposing problems deep within the Brazilian leather supply chain."
Adidas said: "We believe that joining together with our industry partners in this effort ensures an ongoing and sustainable method to stop deforestation in the Amazon biome region."

This piece originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

Related posts:
“Zero” Amazon Deforestation Possible by 2015, Brazilian NGOs say
Miliband Delivers Message To Forest Tribes Deep In The Amazon

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Transforming Business at 1:29 PM)

Big Polluters Turn Tree Huggers

WorldChanging Team — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 19:07:45 +0000

by Lisa Stiffler

The quest to curb climate change has polluters embracing trees.

Carbon-dioxide consuming forests are helping control climate change -- and that's turning some polluters into tree huggers. Businesses that emit greenhouse gases want to be able to pay forest owners to save their trees in order to receive credit for cutting pollution. And while there's no question that trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, there's plenty of debate over how to value those reductions, as this recent story in the Wall Street Journal explains in plain, non-wonky English.

Timber owners and polluters alike favor tree conservation as "offsets" for greenhouse gas pollution. Under a cap-and-trade program like the one being considered by the US Senate, carbon emitters can meet a pollution cap either by reducing their own emissions through cleaner technology, or by purchasing offsets in which others cut their emissions.
Explains the WSJ:

Trees are nature's antidote to smokestacks and tailpipes. Factories and
cars cough out carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced when fossil
fuel is burned. Trees inhale it. They store the carbon in their roots,
trunks and leaves, and they send the oxygen back into the air.

And the trees do indeed inhale. The National Alliance of Forest Owners, a US forest-owners group supporting offsets, claims that American forests "sequester almost 200
million metric tons of carbon each year, offsetting about 10 percent of annual
US emissions from burning fossil fuels."

That's fine and dandy, but let's get back to the question of how to value those trees.

Offsets only make meaningful cuts in carbon emissions if they prevent pollution that would have otherwise occurred. That is, it doesn't count as a reduction to pay for forest preservation if the woods were already safeguarded against logging. So you have to prove that logging was imminent until the offset came along. And there's the problem of what happens if the woods burn down, or for how long logging is prohibited.

But with lots of money and environmental good at stake, there are countless folks pitching ideas and trying to solve the forest offset conundrum.

Thursday, the Western Climate Initiative, a government coalition of US states and Canadian provinces combating climate change, released its first draft of "Offset Definition and Eligibility Criteria" for public comment.

The paper calls for offsets that are real, additional, permanent, and verifiable -- all features that Sightline Institute also deemed necessary in our "Cap and Trade 101: A Climate Policy Primer" (for definitions of real, additional, permanent, and verifiable offsets -- plus some added features we see as important, see page 15 of the document).

The WCI document doesn't, however, give specific recommendations for regulating forestry offsets, though concerns about them are sprinkled throughout. State-level efforts have tackled the matter, including Washington's Forest Sector Workgroup on Climate Change Mitigation at its report on forest offsets and Oregon's Forest Carbon Stakeholders Workgroup.

While this is all being sorted out, entrepreneurs are ready to start turning trees into cash. Finite Carbon hung up its shingle earlier this month, promising that it's:

"the forest carbon development company that provides a single-source
solution for creating and monetizing carbon credits ... offer(ing) the most comprehensive forest carbon project development and commercialization service in the
United States."

For great ongoing analysis of forestry offsets, check out the Climate Forests blog.

This piece originally appeared on Sightline Daily
CC photo credit

Related posts:

Inside WCI: Offsets
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009767.html
Tackling Climate Change by Saving Forests

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Transforming Business at 11:07 AM)

Joost Bonsen: Boston’s Venture Catalyst

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:30:00 +0000

Nominated by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank

The mind behind MIT social entrepreneurship, Joost Bonsen has brought some of Boston’s best development ventures to life. Joost works his magic from one of the corner tables in the Muddy Charles, a small riverside college pub.

His own early ventures included Howtoons, a comic book series aimed at inspiring children to learn by engineering fun and useful things from everyday materials; High Tech Fever, a television show highlighting key players in social entrepreneurship; and the MIT 100K entrepreneurship competition.

As a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab, his impact among the students of Boston (whether from MIT or otherwise) goes beyond the lecture hall, competition stage, or pub. He is willing to lend his ear and his creative mind to ventures no matter what their state as long as he sees that they are backed by passion. His guidance has nurtured countless student ideas, including award winning start-ups Click Diagnostics and Assured Labor. As a ‘venture catalyst,’ Bonsen has played a silent, behind-the-scenes role, but, to the Boston social entrepreneurship crowd, he is a true hero and change maker.

This piece is part of Worldchanging's Attention Philanthropy campaign. All week long, the Worldchanging Network will be delivering "attention grants" to worthy projects, individuals, resources and more. You can learn more about these gifts of notice and find other entries by clicking here.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Transforming Business at 7:30 AM)

Joost Bonsen: Boston’s Venture Catalyst

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:30:00 +0000

Nominated by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank

The mind behind MIT social entrepreneurship, Joost Bonsen has brought some of Boston’s best development ventures to life. Joost works his magic from one of the corner tables in the Muddy Charles, a small riverside college pub.

His own early ventures included Howtoons, a comic book series aimed at inspiring children to learn by engineering fun and useful things from everyday materials; High Tech Fever, a television show highlighting key players in social entrepreneurship; and the MIT 100K entrepreneurship competition.

As a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab, his impact among the students of Boston (whether from MIT or otherwise) goes beyond the lecture hall, competition stage, or pub. He is willing to lend his ear and his creative mind to ventures no matter what their state as long as he sees that they are backed by passion. His guidance has nurtured countless student ideas, including award winning start-ups Click Diagnostics and Assured Labor. As a ‘venture catalyst,’ Bonsen has played a silent, behind-the-scenes role, but, to the Boston social entrepreneurship crowd, he is a true hero and change maker.

This piece is part of Worldchanging's Attention Philanthropy campaign. All week long, the Worldchanging Network will be delivering "attention grants" to worthy projects, individuals, resources and more. You can learn more about these gifts of notice and find other entries by clicking here.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Transforming Business at 7:30 AM)

Breaking News: Husk Power Systems Wins $250K Venture Competition

Robert Katz — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:16:32 +0000

Husk Power Systems, a company we profiled here on NextBillion back in October, was announced today as the winner of the Global Business Plan competition sponsored by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Cisco Systems. As the winning entrant, Husk Power walks away with $250,000 in seed funding, which they will use to build and operate more power plants in rural areas of Bihar, India's poorest state.

Congratulations to Chip Ransler, Manoj Sinha and the rest of the Husk Power Systems team on this big win. They have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company and FOX Business. More PR will inevitably follow.

I am personally extremely excited about this development, not only because I know and like Chip and Manoj. Part of my excitement stems from the fact that Husk Power is working in some of the poorest, worst-served parts of India - Bihar - that are hardest-hit by the poverty penalty. Many BoP-focused companies work in relatively better-off urban areas or peri-urban villages, where average incomes are higher and consequently, so is ability to pay.

But the single biggest factor that has me so excited about this is that the Global Business Plan venture competition was not limited to socially-focused businesses. Rather, Draper Richards and Cisco collected thousands of entries from companies around the world, most of them focused on a single bottom line. That the winner is a legitimate triple bottom line company - generating financial, social AND environmental benefits - shows how much the social sector is mainstreaming in the eyes of "non-social" investors.

Much remains to be seen - Husk Power remains a start up, and will for the foreseeable future - but, at least for today, there is reason to celebrate in Bihar.

This article originally appeared on NextBillion.net.

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(Posted by Robert Katz in Transforming Business at 2:16 PM)

Intuit Helps Small Business Capture a ‘Green Snapshot’

Joel Makower — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:52:22 +0000

Can the company that tamed financial accounting do the same for carbon accounting?

That's the aim of Green Snapshot, a just-launched free service of Intuit, the company that makes popular financial management software like Quickbooks and TurboTax. Snapshot is aimed at the same market as those products: millions of small and midsized companies, few of which have the time, temperament, or temerity to calculate their company's carbon footprint, let alone take action to reduce it.

The program is fairly straightforward: It automatically mines your Quickbooks data, culls the various payments you've made, and taps an online database that assigns a rough carbon equivalent to each of the payees. Based on that information, it instantly creates a carbon footprint analysis, along with a set of recommendations of ways to lower it.

It's simple and quick. Did I mention that it's free?

At first blush, Intuit may seem an unlikely source of such a program. But if you think about what Quickbooks and similar programs do, it makes sense. In essence, those financial management programs take a jumble of business information (expenses, payroll, income, payables, receivables, etc.) and organizes it in the form of income statements, balance sheets, budgets, and other documents. The goal: understanding your finances in order to help you manage your money and your business more effectively.

Snapshot does the same, taking disparate business information about purchases and activities and organizes it. The goal: understanding the parts of your business that have the greatest contribution to global climate change in order to help you manage those activities and your business more effectively.

The idea for Snapshot began in 2007 when Rupesh Shah, Director, Corporate Sustainability at Intuit, who joined the company eight years ago with a freshly minted MBA from Northwestern University, was tapped for Intuit's first environmental post. Shah had worked in product development, which turned out to be a good fit: The company wanted someone who could mesh improving the company's footprint and engaging its workforce with the potential to develop new products.

That last part was key. "We could do a lot of stuff with employees, or supply chain, or packaging, but that wasn't going to make a big difference," Shah explained to me recently. "Where we could make a big difference was from a customer-facing perspective. So once we started to throw some examples out about what Intuit could do and what opportunities our customers could have around green, then [senior management] started to get it, and then they started to invest in it."

Shah saw an opportunity to help small businesses, Intuit's core audience. "Everyone recognizes they're very important in the environmental game but few people have been able to really engage them."

He got that right. Since the dawn of the green business movement, small and midsized firms have been largely left out of the picture. Regulators and activists have focused on large industrial players — the ones with the spewing smokestacks, drainpipes, and dumpsters — all but ignoring the roughly 98 percent of the companies around the world that have under 100 employees. With the exception of a relative handful of green business programs sponsored by local governments and chambers of commerce (most of which have pretty low barriers to entry), there are few robust and affordable resources to help the countless printers, dry cleaners, parts manufacturers, warehouses, hair salons, restaurants, and butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers that are the backbone of most countries' economies.

Shah also understood another key: "The key hypothesis I had was that in order to get them in the game we had to make it super easy for them."

Along the way, Shah met Michael Gelobter, founder of Cooler, a company I profiled in 2007 that utilizes complex life-cycle databases to provide an economic model, rather than an engineering-based one, for determining the climate footprint of a given purchase. It's a blunt-instrument approach that's cheap and fast — and yields pretty accurate data.

Cooler's database became the engine for Snapshot. As Shah explains: "Snapshot reads your Quickbook data, pulls every dollar the business has spent over the past twelve months, and works with Cooler's economic input-output matching engine. It looks at the payee and the vendor of every transaction and tries to match it to the closest of about 1,000 carbon categories that the Cooler engine has. And for each of those carbon categories there's a carbon intensity — emissions per dollar spent." The result is a report detailing a company's carbon footprint and cost-effective opportunities to reduce it.

Presently, the system typically matches about 8 of 10 transactions. The report you get shows which transactions weren't included in the carbon footprint calculation. In the coming weeks, Intuit plans to add the ability for users to link those unmatched transactions to the Cooler engine, and each user's contribution will help make the system smarter for everyone.

I asked Shah, what's in this for Intuit? Is there a business model here that the company hopes to exploit?

"We have a business model that we're testing," he responded. "The savings engine has a bunch of actions that we recommend. About half of the actions are behavioral — clean your HVAC, drive smarter — and about half involve buying something — an Energy Star computer, or some other greener product." Intuit is planning to point customers to retailers and earn affiliate fees, though Shah quickly noted, "We haven't made a penny yet, and I don't think that we're going to make any meaningful money any time soon."

Beyond that, Shah hopes Snapshot will help small businesses to communicate their environmental achievements to their own customers. "I was struck when I was interviewing small businesses, how many of them were trying to get their customers to see that they're doing something green. But there's no real authentic way to message that." Shah believes Intuit can play a role in providing "a little bit more transparency and legitimacy for those claims around green."

Will it work? Hard to know — the product is barely a couple weeks old — but you've got to like the strategy: a free add-on to a popular product that provides genuine value to customers and, just maybe, to Intuit itself, all the while burnishing the software company's green cred.

As Shah put it: "Our goal in this was not pure charity or philanthropy. It's to build a tool for customers that they would find valuable, help increase the reputation of Intuit, both as a corporate citizen but also from an innovation perspective, and to try to monetize this. We'll see."

This piece originally appeared on Joel Makower's blog, Two Steps Forward, where he writes about business, the environment, and the bottom line.

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(Posted by Joel Makower in Transforming Business at 12:52 PM)

Private Equity Gets Principled

Green Futures — Fri, 15 May 2009 01:02:32 +0000

By Chris Alden

Better late than never?

That would be a forgivable reaction to the news that 13 global private equity firms – who between them hold stakes in some of the biggest names in British business, such as Birds Eye, Boots and United Biscuits – have taken a key step towards integrating environmental and social concerns into their businesses, by signing up to a new set of guidelines on responsible investment.

The signatories, all members of the Private Equity Council, include major names such as Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR and Permira – which became famous amid the buyout boom of the pre-credit crunch years.

Now, under the auspices of the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment, they have met with institutional investors to create a set of guidelines specifically for the private equity industry.

The nine principles include considering “environmental, public health, safety and social issues” when evaluating investments; seeking “to grow and improve companies in which they invest for long-term sustainability”, and respecting the human rights of those affected by investment activities.

There need not be a contradiction between pursuing profits and sticking to such principles, the Council believes. “In today’s world, in order to maximise return on investment, we believe that businesses must address these issues,” said Robert Stewart, its Vice-President for Public Affairs.

Stewart suggested that so-called limited partners – mostly institutions such as pension funds and asset management firms, who invest in private equity funds – would seek to ensure that the guidelines are being followed before investing.

Alice Chapple, Director of Sustainable Financial Markets at Forum for the Future, said that while some limited partners are active on sustainable development issues, it was by no means “a matter of course” that they would hold private equity funds to account.

But she said that these do have an opportunity to think about long-term business risks such as climate change – because they take companies out of the stock market and buy and sell over a three- to five-year cycle. “You have the luxury of pulling a company into a private place while you sort out long-term perspectives – and come out at the end with a company more robustly positioned for the long term,” she said. – Chris Alden

Institutional investors’ interest in climate change appears to be increasing despite the recession. The Carbon Disclosure Project, which holds a database of corporate information on climate change, said that 475 investors signed its latest annual request to companies for climate change information – up nearly 25% on the previous year.
Green Futures is published by Forum For The Future, one of the leading magazines on environmental solutions and sustainable futures. Its aim is to demonstrate that a sustainable future is both practical and desirable – and can be profitable, too.

Photo credit: flickr/extranoise.
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(Posted by Green Futures in Transforming Business at 5:02 PM)

Private Equity Gets Principled

Green Futures — Fri, 15 May 2009 01:02:32 +0000

By Chris Alden

Better late than never?

That would be a forgivable reaction to the news that 13 global private equity firms – who between them hold stakes in some of the biggest names in British business, such as Birds Eye, Boots and United Biscuits – have taken a key step towards integrating environmental and social concerns into their businesses, by signing up to a new set of guidelines on responsible investment.

The signatories, all members of the Private Equity Council, include major names such as Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR and Permira – which became famous amid the buyout boom of the pre-credit crunch years.

Now, under the auspices of the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment, they have met with institutional investors to create a set of guidelines specifically for the private equity industry.

The nine principles include considering “environmental, public health, safety and social issues” when evaluating investments; seeking “to grow and improve companies in which they invest for long-term sustainability”, and respecting the human rights of those affected by investment activities.

There need not be a contradiction between pursuing profits and sticking to such principles, the Council believes. “In today’s world, in order to maximise return on investment, we believe that businesses must address these issues,” said Robert Stewart, its Vice-President for Public Affairs.

Stewart suggested that so-called limited partners – mostly institutions such as pension funds and asset management firms, who invest in private equity funds – would seek to ensure that the guidelines are being followed before investing.

Alice Chapple, Director of Sustainable Financial Markets at Forum for the Future, said that while some limited partners are active on sustainable development issues, it was by no means “a matter of course” that they would hold private equity funds to account.

But she said that these do have an opportunity to think about long-term business risks such as climate change – because they take companies out of the stock market and buy and sell over a three- to five-year cycle. “You have the luxury of pulling a company into a private place while you sort out long-term perspectives – and come out at the end with a company more robustly positioned for the long term,” she said. – Chris Alden

Institutional investors’ interest in climate change appears to be increasing despite the recession. The Carbon Disclosure Project, which holds a database of corporate information on climate change, said that 475 investors signed its latest annual request to companies for climate change information – up nearly 25% on the previous year.
Green Futures is published by Forum For The Future, one of the leading magazines on environmental solutions and sustainable futures. Its aim is to demonstrate that a sustainable future is both practical and desirable – and can be profitable, too.

Photo credit: flickr/extranoise.
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(Posted by Green Futures in Transforming Business at 5:02 PM)

Open Intellectual Property as Sustainability Accelerator

Alex Steffen — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 23:09:26 +0000

It's the job of the world's poor to get rich, and the job of the world's rich to redefine wealth. That is, the biggest task facing the developing world is development and human well-being, while the biggest task facing the developed world is making prosperity sustainable so that as billions of more people become prosperous, we're still able to protect the planet's biosphere.

Critical to this division of labor, though, is the idea of rapid diffusion of sustainable innovation from the epicenters of innovation (the vast majority of which are still urban conclaves in the developed world, places where universities, enterprises and cultural scenes mix and accelerate each other) to the rest of the world. That demands thinking differently about intellectual property.

IP is something we've written a lot about here. In general we tend to err on the side of the commons and intellectual freedom, we also recognize that reward for one's labors is a powerful motivator, adding the fuel of interest to the fire of genius as Lincoln put it. Some things ought to be patented and copyrighted.

Some, though, should not, and this is particularly true when we're talking about sustainable innovation diffusion to the developing world. We've already written about the Open Architecture Network as a means of distributing architectural and design innovations through a Creative Commons developing nation license. Now, though, U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu makes the case for open innovation in clean energy:

The main point being:

“Since power plants are built in the home country, most of the investments are in the home country,” he said. “You don’t build a power plant, put it in a boat and ship it overseas, similar to with buildings. So developing technologies for much more efficient buildings is something that can be shared in each country. If countries actively helped each other, they would also reap the home benefits of using less energy. So any area like that I think is where we should work very hard in a very collaborative way — by very collaborative I mean share all intellectual property as much as possible. And in my meetings with my counterparts in other countries, when we talk about this they say, yes, we really should do this. But there hasn’t been a coordinated effort. And so it’s like all countries becoming allies against this common foe, which is the energy problem.”

This is an incredibly important and poorly understood idea. I also believe that in an era which may see a decline in material globalization and at least something of a return to localized production, adopting open IP becomes paradoxically more important in creating competitive advantages.

That's because I think a greatly increased amount of free innovation is inevitable, both because of the forces driving commons-based/crowd-sourced/open source solutions in general, and because the vast majority of the world's potential users for anything can't afford to pay developing world rates. If something's going to spread, it's going to spread because it's cheap, easy to use, and readily modifiable. In such a world, a creative advantage is a competitive advantage: that is, being able to add special value at the top end, rather than commodity information value, is what makes a business work.

And people who embrace open informational substrates have an advantage here. That in turn requires an embrace of the commons, in architecture, energy and everything else. That's the way to save the planet. It's also the way to save the economy.

Front page image: "Intellectual Property Donor" by flickr/camb416, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Transforming Business at 3:09 PM)

Paul Hawken’s definition of GDP

Alex Steffen — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:35:59 +0000

“We have an economy where we steal the future, sell it in the present, and call it GDP" - Paul Hawken

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Transforming Business at 10:35 AM)

Paul Hawken’s definition of GDP

Alex Steffen — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:35:59 +0000

“We have an economy where we steal the future, sell it in the present, and call it GDP" - Paul Hawken

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Transforming Business at 10:35 AM)

Enlightened Capitalism: Building a New Corporate Consciousness

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:40:45 +0000

Photo credit: flickr/Daleberts, Creative Commons license.

By Rachel Botsman

Besides changing our perceptions of the world and how we operate within it, the buckling of the “old system” of business is rapidly restructuring the relationships between employees, companies and society. The current convergence of global market failures and changing societal expectations of corporations is creating a widespread realization that we can’t continue with “business as usual.”

By shifting their current perceptions of sustainability, companies can re-inspire employees (who are hungry for change) to play their part in bridging the gap between business value and societal needs. If they succeed, they could emerge from this crisis as trusted and sustainable 21st century brands.

In order to capture this opportunity, companies need to build a business culture that truly embraces sustainability and innovation. This is not about “greening” an employee base or organizing one-off community days. Nor is it about setting a target to reduce a carbon footprint or viewing sustainability in the narrow environmental sense. It is about building a cultural ethos that understands and embraces all the dimensions of sustainability -- planet, community, people, business and brands –- and the interactions between them.

A survey of companies with reputations for nurturing best-in-class cultures of sustainability such as Timberland, Seventh Generation, Eileen Fisher, Patagonia and Stonyfield Farm, as well as less niche (and nimble) multinationals like Nike, Wal-Mart and the leading British retailer Marks & Spencer’s which are staying relevant by transforming their old business mindset, reveals some common principles that permeate entire companies in ways that permits employees to experience and view sustainability as an integral part of everything they do and how they do it. So, what are these sustainable companies doing right? Put another way, what are they doing differently?

Abolishing the term or notion of “Corporate Social Responsibility”
Even if the CSR nomenclature still lingers in specific shareholder reports, these sustainable companies do not view sustainability as a responsibility, as “risk and reputation management” or as a reporting requirement. Rather, they embrace it as a (if not the) source of innovation for a better and more profitable company. Eileen Fisher actually uses the term “Corporate Consciousness,” and Unilever istransitioning to “Corporate Social Vitality.” Both terms signal that sustainability should be the source of energy, experimentation and inspiration that fuels a company’s growth and culture.

Sustainable companies are also generally opposed to having a separate CSR department –- a move that can signal to employees that responsibility for sustainability is limited to the job of the designated and knowledgeable few.

Shifting from linear to systems-based thinking
Sustainable companies are committed to enabling their employees to change the way they think about things towards a new culture of systems thinking where everything is connected. This perspective allows employees to see not just their organization as a larger whole (instead of compartmentalized departments) but it also empowers them to develop an innate understanding of how their company is interconnected with the world around them.

For example, Wal-Mart recognized that about 90 percent of its environmental impacts occur deep within their supply chain. To address the inefficiencies at the root, Wal-Mart formed networks across formerly disparate business units from buildings to fleet, to waste to packaging, to food and agriculture. This example helps train employees to address systemic barriers to sustainability that are interconnected.

Teaching employees new types of collaboration
Sustainable businesses require a whole new level and type of engagement with local communities and governments, non-profits and even (at times) competitors. To support this collaborative “open source” way of working, employees should be given new channels of knowledge-interchange and encouraged to open up best-practices and learning to the rest of the industry.

This often requires repeated reassurance that competitors will eventually share back and that it is in the company’s longer term interests to get the whole industry designing better products and services as a whole. For example, M&S has started the “M&S Supplier Exchange,” which is used to share best practices, stimulate innovation and even to help suppliers secure the funds needed to develop more sustainable production methods.

Showing respect for employees
As Jeffrey Hollender, CEO of Seventh Generation recently noted, “It starts with how you answer the phone, how you treat the people who clean the office…these are the easy things we can do.” A culture of respect helps imbue employees with a holistic approach to business, environment and society.

For example, Wal-Mart introduced its “Personal Sustainability Project” (PSP) in 2007 to help its Associates integrate sustainability into their lives by making changes to their everyday habits. Progress toward PSP goals is measured by counting daily activities like healthier eating and lifestyle habits, replacing old appliances with energy-efficient ones, using environmentally-friendly and non-toxic home cleaning products, and getting involved in projects in one's community. PSPs reflect the “shift in Wal-Mart's perspective towards understanding how physical health, psychological wellbeing, social connections and lifelong learning about one's environment feeds the health of a business.”

Empowering employees by helping them to make a difference
From the very first interview until the exit interview, sustainable companies continuously reinforce the need for all employees to be responsible and accountable for sustainability, and to view their efforts in a larger company context. For example, Timberland's “Path of Service” program allows employees 40 hours of annual paid time off to work on service projects in communities.

Setting goals that challenge the imagination
Though practical goals are important, it is also important to set goals that raise the bar for sustainability in business. For example, Nike has set its ‘North Star’ as “becoming a totally ‘closed loop’ company where materials from a Nike shoe, for example, will end up becoming the materials for a Nike shirt.” Imagining this as the end result shows employees that their steps along the way are positive progress on an ultimate journey toward ideal sustainability, and encourages constant innovation rather than resting on the laurels of previous accomplishments.

Using transparency to solve problems
Sustainable companies make transparency work for them by involving their employees, shareholders and customers in the process of exposing and solving problems. This wider community helps by asking questions, challenging assumptions and devising solutions.

For example, the opening page of Seventh Generation’s 2007 Corporate Consciousness Report leads with a frank admission of the company's failure to reveal to consumers and key stakeholders the problems with purging dioxane from Seventh Generation products. As Hollender states, “by exposing problems, transparency begins to solve them.”

In summary, we are in an acute time of change where the wider business community is just beginning to realize the extent to which the health of a company’s core values, beliefs and traditions (i.e. its culture) affects the health of their long-term ability to sustain a healthy business on all fronts. The change represents an opportunity to embrace “enlightened capitalism” and revitalize companies with a new type of connected corporate consciousness: a consciousness that helps businesses to consistently create value by consistently competing on the values of sustainability and innovation.

Rachel Botsman specializes in the intersection between brand, innovation and sustainability. She is Director of Strategy for OZOlab, a leading sustainable and innovation think tank and business incubator. She can be reached at Rachel@ozolab.com.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Transforming Business at 10:40 AM)

Pop!Tech: MobileMetrix Makes the Base of the Pyramid Visible

Robert Katz — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:13:00 +0000

Who are they?" Melanie Edwards asks us. Frankly, we don't know – and neither does the government. These are the people of Morro de Macacoes – Portuguese for "Hill of the Monkeys" – and they are among the 1 billion people worldwide whose existence has no official record.

Imperfect or non-existent information characterizes base of the pyramid markets worldwide. When Edwards began working in Morro de Macacoes (a slum near Rio), she asked government officials how many people lived there. The answer ranged from 5,000 to 60,000. She saw this disparity as a business opportunity; after all, how can businesses, banks, governments and NGOs serve people's basic needs if they don't know who they are? Edwards' company, Mobile Metrix, is founded on a simple principle: that accurate information on the invisible is the first step to solving poverty. Or, as she told me, "[We are] not just about changing lives and counting lives, but about making those lives count."

Melanie Edwards launched Mobile Metrix to identify and serve the world's one billion "invisible" people after a career with J.P. Morgan and the United Nations, among others. The market research and distribution company connects those at the base of the pyramid to critical products and services – including pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, voting registration, and job training. Mobile Metrix accomplishes this by hiring, training and equipping local youth – in Brazil and other developing nations – with hand-held mobile technology that is used to gather demographic data, door-to-door. The company also develops, administers and analyzes surveys for corporations, governments, NGOs, foundations and local communities.

At the recent Pop!Tech conference, I had the chance to sit down with Melanie – a 2008 Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow – for a short interview.

Rob Katz, NextBillion.net: Describe what you do in two sentences or fewer.

Melanie Edwards, MobileMetrix: We create markets to improve quality of life at the base of the pyramid through market research and the distribution of critical goods and services.

NextBillion.net: What gap or problem are you solving?

Melanie Edwards: The main problem is that there are 4 billion people in the world that we know very little about. Even the World Bank's best information is based on outdated surveys. For example, I went to Morro de Macacoes in Rio and asked government agencies how many people live there. The response: anywhere from 5,000 to 60,000. If the answer can vary by 55,000 people in one community, imagine how far off we could be globally? This is a problem because billions of dollars are being allocated based on these data – governments, foreign aid, foundations and companies are all investing or donating based on faulty numbers.

NextBillion.net: What was your A-ha! moment in founding MobileMetrix?

Melanie Edwards: I had a series of a-has. First was when I was in the Peace Corps, in Togo, seeing day to day the invisible population – no electricity, running water, nothing. Later, I was talking to a grandmother in a Rio favela who simply didn't know what social security was – and she is eligible – while her daughter was practically prostituting herself to put food on the table. This fundamental disconnect – which was keeping the grandmother out of the system – keeps me up at night.

The aha moments, followed by frustration – that's what gets a business started.

NextBillion.net: Tell me what I need to know about invisible people.

Melanie Edwards: Imagine if you were invisible. That means you have no official record of your existence. No birth certificate, voting registration, driver's license – without those, how can you participate in society? These people have no voice – we're trying to make the invisible, visible. Data give people a voice.

NextBillion.net: Who are your clients? What do they pay for and how is it useful?

Mobile Metrix: I'll give you the example of Johnson & Johnson. We approached them during the dengue epidemic in Rio earlier this year – when more than 250,000 people were infected. (Side note: All of our projects are community need driven, not necessarily client driven – that will change, naturally, but that's how it works now.) We match the needs of the community with the critical products and services that exist – and our bridge is market research.

So we went to J&J, realizing there was a need for anti-mosquito repellent. First, we went door to door in the communities collecting demographic data. In addition, we collected data on knowledge levels about dengue, prevention methods, etc. After the data were collected, the MobileMetrix agent educated them – on the doorstop – about malaria and about Johnson's anti-mosquito repellent.

A month later, we returned to measure the impact of the J&J intervention. Our agents asked a lot of the same questions to measure the change in knowledge about dengue and people's habits. We found a 45% increase in identification of the dengue mosquito and 100% increase in people who could identify the dengue egg. And for J&J's purposes, we found that 75% of the population would use Johnson’s anti-mosquito lotion again; 59% would buy it. We took these data to J&J, and now they're making a concerted effort to serve these communities.

NextBillion.net: Tell me about someone who works for you.

Melanie Edwards: Alexander joined us on our first project concept, more than 2 years ago. He is from Morro de Macacoes – he started as a team leader, and he's one of those millions of untapped, brilliant human resources that lack an opportunity. So we gave it to him – and now he's on our full time team.

NextBillion.net: What do you look for in your employees?

Melanie Edwards: Passion. Dedication. Trainability. Ethical fiber. Someone who wants to advance not only themselves, but their community as well.

NextBillion.net: Tell me about your market research process in deciding to found MobileMetrix?

Melanie Edwards: An ironic question. Part of it was poking around to see what exists out there already – and a lot of it was just frustration, frustration in getting these federal government studies that are so projection based. It was top down. There was no bottom up data – the system is broken without this viewpoint.

Also, I am a firm believer in the private sector driving new products and services for the BoP – and there were not good data to match company strategies.

NextBillion.net: Please comment on the "base of the pyramid" theory and its practice.

Melanie Edwards: First of all, base of the pyramid visibility is great – this is not any real super innovation. But Skoll Foundation, C.K. Prahalad, othes – they have done a great job raising visibility here. But there are still no data – not for social entrepreneurs, not for NGOs, not for startups, not for NGOs. So I hope that, in 5 years, the BoP movement will have more data through MobileMetrix and others to more effectively channel products and services to meet existing and future demand.

NextBillion.net: What is the biggest misconception you have had or mistake you have made in founding MobileMetrix?

Melanie Edwards: Which one do I pick – there have been so many mistakes! Mistake-wise, we initially started down the road of building our own software. Then we realized that we're not a software company – MobileMetrix is a partner ecosystem. So we brought in the software and hardware experts and used our expertise to build the right bridges between the BoP, the data collectors, the communities, the private sector – we're a bridge builder, not a software developer.

I should have known better! But it is all part of the learning curve.

I had a real conception that community leaders would be shy about sharing data outside of the community. But when I speak to them about what data they don’t want to be published, they respond, "Melanie, I want the world to know our reality" – which underscores the idea of giving everyone a voice.

NextBillion.net: What role does dignity and choice play in your business model?

Melanie Edwards: Through the youth that we hire, they earn dignity through professionalism. We hire people who desperately want these jobs. Our agents insist, for example, that they should not be allowed wear shorts – "we’re professionals, we must wear pants," they tell us. Down the road, these guys go in university and earn 3 times the minimum wage. They walk differently – to me, that's dignity. These are capable, untapped human resources – and by believing in them, we dignify them and they dignify themselves. We see our employees step into their power – to transform themselves and their community.

NextBillion.net: What should the NextBillion community take away about MobileMetrix?

Melanie Edwards: There is a market, plain and simple, for critical products and services.

It's kind of like we're starting a movement, when you think about it. I kind of see this as striking a match for other aha! moments that corporate execs will be having, but then they'll ask for the proof – and we'll have it.

Companies like Johnson & Johnson salivate when they see 73% product recognition and 59% willingness-to-buy. And we ask how much the consumers are willing to pay, of course. Even if the product is out of their price range, these data are a starting point for the board of directors about expansion, product development and pricing. It's a movement.

Rob Katz blogs at NextBillion.net, where this post originally appeared.

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(Posted by Robert Katz in Transforming Business at 9:13 AM)

Letter from Tällberg: Turn Back, O Man

Alan AtKisson — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:33:54 +0000

Here at the Tällberg Forum-- Sweden's annual festival of words and music, science and dreams about sustainability and globalization -- things are getting a little clearer. This is the last day, so it's just in time.

Take 350, for example. This morning I went to the great big tent to join a very small group in a "Hosted Conversation" on the topic of communication and climate change. Bill McKibben, originator of 350.org, was there. So was Mark Lynas, who wrote Six Degrees, as well as two of Sweden's TV meteorologists (the weather is so important here that weather reporters have become key climate change communicators). And the King was there as well, with a surprisingly small retinue, just listening. We heard from a businessman who had been a reluctant, slow convert to the cause (he now dedicates 50 percent of his time to the issue); a bishop who sparked off talk about the nearly taboo (in Sweden) topic of religion as a force for change; and a young activist who is trying to get everyone to paint one finger green as a badge of commitment.

Thanks to that discussion, I finally understood more clearly the rationale behind the 350 campaign. The science was already clear enough: a level of 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere appears, from the paleoclimatic evidence, to be the limit for maintaining the kind of global climate regime that gave rise to human civilization. We are already over 385 and rising. Meanwhile, most political goal-setting for stabilizing CO2 has hovered in the 450-550 range. Jim Hansen has led a growing chorus of scientific voices in saying that those numbers are too high, and that 350 is -- from a natural systems perspective -- the necessary goal, regardless of what has previously been considered as politically and economically feasible.

But the logic behind 350 as a campaign was still a bit fuzzy to me, until McKibben explained it. First, the number: it turns out that Arabic numerals are one of the few symbols that can travel into virtually any language and culture and be understood. People may not understand "ppm" (parts per million, which means that 350 can also be interpreted as 0.035 percent of the gases in our atmosphere), but they can understand the number anyway -- just as they understand that they have to keep their cholesterol under a certain number, even if they don't really know what cholesterol is. So 350 makes a certain universal outreach possible, in a way that anyone can respond to.

Second is the quality of response. According to McKibben, they were first worried that people would react to the news that we are already past the limit with despair. Instead, he says, it seems to be strangely empowering. It makes it clearer that the changes we are talking about must happen now, and must be big, just as a worrying medical report on your cholesterol level jolts you into taking action now to avoid the near-certainty of a heart attack or stroke. Number like 450 send an ambiguous message about slowing down slowly or "stopping in time." It's hard to get excited about that. But 350 says simply, "turn back." And as centuries of religious teaching might suggest, calls to repent now ("repent" means "turn back") are more galvanizing than calls to slow down eventually.

Third, 350 makes a number of very creative responses possible: churches ring their bells 350 times. A farmer in Cameroon plants 350 trees. The number can easily achieve iconic status and be interpreted, both symbolically and practically, in myriad ways -- which is precisely what's happening. After a rollicking discussion about whether people should be marching in the streets or doing home energy conversions, McKibben says that he's come to the conclusion that symbolic actions are, now, the most practical ones, because they have the potential spark the political actions that will drive large-scale systems change.

Bill, who started his public life as a writer, has become a true leader, including notching one of the first public arrests in America for protesting on global warming, about a decade ago. But he is also a climate intellectual, and a leading interpreter of the science. So I feel compelled to ask him (privately, afterward) what he thinks about geoengineering. He's not happy that I've asked the question, judging by his body language; and he's on record as saying that we need "policy engineering first," and I strongly agree with that. These are clearly his priorities. He doesn't believe in shooting sulfur into the upper atmosphere either, for example. But he seems less reluctant to agree that we may eventually find ourselves needing to look at geoengineering options, just to save lives in the near term, as we radically reengineer policies and energy systems and lifestyles in the mid-term, in order to secure sustainability for human and natural systems in the long-term.

This talk on climate in the tent does seem a bit male-oriented, though. I came here thanks to Maiken Winter, a German activist and a member of Al Gore's corps of presenters, who lives in Ithaca in the US. She and I were chatting at breakfast. I was planning on retreating into a cafe to work, but encouraged over the to the tent -- for which I'm grateful. But the Swedish bishop was the only woman to speak, I realize now. And this worries me.

Last night's plenary session in the big tent was the highlight of the Forum, I believe, and it consisted mostly of a few women talking. Two of the women were from Africa -- women of obvious greatness in their bearing, women of great warmth and intelligence and power in their way of speaking -- who came with a simple message. It is the women who have ensured that Africa is still standing. And if you want to help Africa, help the women. They rose the roof with simple, humorous, wise words. "I was talking to the elders in my village about climate change," one of them recounted, "and they said, what, this is news? We have known about this for twenty years." They knew because of changes in water availability, rain, and more. The African villagers find it almost funny that people have to fly to a meeting in Sweden because some people are only understanding this now.

Turn back, O man ... Back to 350. And men, turn to the women. Hand them the talking stick, and just listen.

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(Posted by Alan AtKisson in Transforming Business at 12:33 PM)

PUSH Conference: Day Two

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:47:18 +0000

By Jessica Chapman

This year's PUSH conference was titled "The Fertile Delta." The intended meaning of this enigmatic title was revealed in increasing depth as the conference progressed. The phrase encapsulates a belief in the opportunities available through the collision of ideas, the birth of something new from the intersection of the unexpected.

For example: presenter Anthea Butler, associate professor of religion at the University of Rochester, encouraged those who hold disparate religious worldviews to get over their hang-ups about each other and seek connections. The opportunity to foster dialogue in place of frustration, anger and silence is a fertile delta.

And presenter Antoine Bigirimana, who has no family or friends left in Rwanda as a result of the country's horrific genocide in 1994, has dedicated himself to improving technology there. That dedication to rebirth where many see only barrenness is a fertile delta.

I think it might be fair to say the fertile delta describes something approximating alchemy: the process by which two disparate entities are able to somehow, in an unexpected way, come together and make something new and different and good. PUSH attendees all seemed to harbor a desire to do something good, in more than a pie-in-the-sky way.

So, who attends PUSH? The open-invitation conference draws a varied group including journalists and municipal govermnet staffers, though a casual glance of the attendee roster is sprinkled heavily with titles like "president," "senior" and "leader," as well as a lot of marketing folks. Most people at PUSH this year were from the Midwest, though PUSH founder Cecily Sommers said that hasn't been the case in past years. She speculated yesterday that the economy may have discouraged some from traveling.

A few snapshots: one attendee, who works for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, heard about the event on the radio and paid the $1,350 admission fee out of his own pocket for the chance to simmer for a few days with a group of innovative thinkers and leaders. Over lunch he spoke passionately about the link between home ownership and good health (the topic was the focus of a segment of a PBS documentary screened at the conference). One man, who attended this year for the third time, is at work on a screenplay. A consultant from Seattle, here for the second consecutive year, was almost at a loss to describe her feelings. This brand of speechless, breathless excitement has characterized many attendees' descriptions of their experience this week.

Beth Kolko gave a fascinating presentation this afternoon. Kolko, an associate professor of technical communication at the University of Washington, has traveled to many of the world's lesser-known regions, studying the communication habits and innovations of resource-deprived communities in nations like Cambodia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Kolko is particularly excited by the economic empowerment she sees available to the world's poor via text messaging: for example, how SMS technology is helping rural farmers. Before selling produce to a middleman, they can text ahead to someone already at the market to check the going price for their items. Fishermen can determine their day's work by finding out via text what kinds of fish are selling fast or are unavailable at the market. Kolko cited Robert Jensen's work with fishermen in India on this topic.

She also enthused about Kenya's M-Pesa phone cards, which allow residents to essentially use their phones as bank accounts, enabling them to, among other things, transfer money to one another. The recipient need not even have their own M-Pesa account to get cash from the phone transfer. "People empowered financially have more of a say," she explained.

Kolko also briefly mentioned one case in which a broader market has responded to the communication needs of the developing world: Microsoft Research India has researched the potential for a multi-user mouse. With more people than computers in many developing countries, Kolko said it's common to go into an Internet café and see several people huddled around one computer. The new "multimouse" would allow several users to interact on one computer at the same time, using different colored cursors.

A quick note on an interesting exchange overheard yesterday that some may find interesting: In a short Q&A session on Monday morning, presenters Jonathan Greenblatt and Chandran Nair discussed the utility of direct financial aid to the developing world.

Nair, who leads the Hong Kong-based NPO GIFT, emphasized the necessity of having the developing world--particularly Asia, where he concentrates his efforts--focus on producing wealth and investing locally. GOOD Magazine CEO Greenblatt, however, expressed belief in the ongoing need for development aid and the genuine good it remains able to do.

NAIR: "Too much development aid in Laos results in more 4-wheel drives than anything else … How do you get wealth to invest in opportunities rather than development aid?"

GREENBLATT: "Let's not fail to acknowledge aid and trade … Aid still matters … Aid is important for a segment of the population, of society."

NAIR: "Aid needs to be less associated with just the West. The point I'm trying to make is that there is so much wealth in Asia and it needs to be tapped into. Dependency needs to be broken.

Also, a compelling quote people were talking about, even one day later, spoken by Clyde Prestowitz, former Reagan Administration official, founder of the Economic Strategy Institute and one of yesterday's presenters: "Globalization is not making democracy stronger. It is making the autocracies stronger." Prestowitz made the comment in the context of talking about Singapore, saying that the country's impressive economy has arguably been strengthened by the fact that it is a repressive environment with restricted freedoms.

PUSH has already opened the registration gates for next year's conference, set to take place June 14-16 in Minneapolis. The title for 2009 will be "Make/Believe".

Jessica Chapman is a freelance writer living in Minneapolis. You can reach her at jchapman678 [at] gmail [dot] com.

All photo credits: Jessica Chapman

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Transforming Business at 1:47 AM)