2Sustain

When is it the right time to start a sustainability initiative at your company? Now. Even in this difficult economic environment, sustainability is smart for business, and recent studies have shown that companies with sustainability plans are outperforming peers and positioning themselves for success in the future. While I sense that for the most part, corporate executives understand the basic value of a business plan that includes sustainability, for many the biggest hurdle remains a relatively simple question: how do we get started?  That’s why I’m starting off the week by recommending two new articles that can help you take those all important first steps.

 The first article, titled “Sustainability: Don’t Even Wait For the Rest of Management,” was published a few days ago at Forbes.com. It’s an interview with Mark Tercek, CEO of the Nature Conservancy. The reporter, Saj-nicole Joni, asks Tercek to discuss the practicalities of pursuing sustainability in today’s challenging business climate.

“We need to stop looking at the environment as something we have to protect from humans, and begin thinking about our ecosystems as service systems,” Tercek says in the article. “When we use those services–for example, clean water–we have to pay for and care for them in appropriate ways.”

Tercek then goes on to explain (with relevant examples from today’s business world) what he calls the “three fundamental drivers of action that all leaders relate to”: reducing costs, managing risks, and securing long-term access to needed resources and communities.

I ran across the second article, “How to Hurdle the Barriers to a Sustainable Future,” greenbiz.com/blog/2009/05/27/hurdling-barriers-to-a-sustainable-future  by Darcy Hitchcock, over at GreenBiz.com. Hitchcock takes a more philosophical approach, one that I think could prove quite helpful if you can’t seem to identify what is holding you back from embracing sustainability.

Hitchcock frames her argument around three key questions:

• Is there acceptance that there is a problem? 
• Is there agreement that there is a solution? 
• Does the solution seem at least as good if not better than the problem?

Both she and I agree that all three questions can be answered in the affirmative. In the article, Hitchcock explores each “yes” and reveals how answers to these questions form the basis for a more sustainable future.