[Post #3 of 3 on Wal-Mart's activity in the last couple of months. This appeared at Harvard Business Online]

I wouldn't normally focus on the same company twice in a week, but Wal-Mart just keeps making news in the world of sustainability — and in the world of commerce for that matter. With a major PR push, the company announced its latest initiative targeting supplier sustainability performance. After a lot of huffing and puffing, the announcement itself was fairly simple (at least for now).

In short, Wal-Mart will be asking all suppliers 15 questions about their approaches on four key issues: energy and climate, material efficiency, natural resources, and people and community. A few sample questions:

--> Have you measured your corporate greenhouse gas emissions?
--> Please report total water use from the facilities that produce your product(s) for Wal-Mart.
--> Do you know the location of 100% of the facilities that produce your product(s)?

For now, these questions are mainly for data collection, but they represent the first step toward (a) truly comparing suppliers on their sustainability performance and (b) creating a real sustainability index that consumers can use to compare products. Most of the press coverage on this was making it sound like a product green label was around the corner. But Wal-Mart, according to one top exec, is "maybe five years" away from that level of data and consumer communication.

Rather than analyze the announcement details any further, I want to put yesterday's announcement in context within the range of Wal-Mart's sustainability actions and within some larger trends. But first, let's be clear: this kind of sustainability data collection is good for business, and it's definitely good for Wal-Mart. And while it may seem like a total pain to suppliers, it will be good for them as well.

The logic is simple: knowing your business better makes it easier to find hidden value.

Read the rest of this post...

Everything's getting faster these days you've heard it before. Two mega-trends in particular are merging: rapidly accelerating technological change and rapidly evolving environmental issues and pressures. Lucky for us, the first change is going to save our butts from the second. Fast-evolving, smart IT will play a critical role in helping us navigate and profit from environmental challenges. The two trends together are combining to make for enduring change in how business is done, a movement to a permanently higher plane of green and tech-driven activity.

A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, "Ten-Year Century," makes the well-known case that the pace of transformation in society is accelerating. More has changed, the authors say, in this decade than in the previous century. To be specific,

Changes that used to take generations economic cycles, cultural shifts, mass migrations, changes in the structures of families and institutions now unfurl in a span of years... Game-changing consumer products and services (iPod, smart phones, YouTube, Twitter, blogs) that historically might have appeared once every five or more years roll out within months.

The "Laws" of Technology that the authors highlight Moore's and Metcalfe's perfectly describe how quickly both computational power and networking capacity are growing (double the computing power on every chip every 18 months, for example). It's a "law" in the world of technology that things are steadily getting faster.

But this op-ed and other "tech is changing the world so fast" stories and I'm a sucker for them miss the another big shift that's moving just as fast: the degradation of the natural world and the resulting pressure to green society and business.

[The rest of this blog appears on Harvard Business Online here]

If you put an energy meter inside a home and show people total usage in real time, a miraculous thing happens: they use about 10 percent less energy. The simple act of placing data in front of people changes their behavior. Data makes people smarter and inspires them to make small changes to save money and energy. You can use this powerful tool in business not only to cut costs, but to drive innovation and revenues.

Some are calling this phenomenon the "Prius effect," referring to how people respond when they see real-time fuel-efficiency data while driving the popular Toyota hybrid. As the described it, the Prius effect "can change driving in startling ways, making drivers conscious of their driving habits, then adjusting them to compete for better mileage." Similarly, making footprint data more accessible to those managers that can do something about it can create real value. As they say, you can't manage what you don't measure. It's amazing how often I hear that phrase — and how often people need to hear it. Tech leaders will tell you that one of the best possible solutions to the rapid increase in energy use and cost in data centers is simple: Add the power bill to the CIO's budget!

You can put your green data to use in five ways that will help your bottom line:

1. Saving money — a lot of it. As we've seen, if you give your operational people information on resource use, they will be inspired to find ways to cut back.

2. Driving internal competition. Share footprint data broadly and transparently and you'll see how badly people like to win. When PepsiCo Chicago ran a floor-by-floor energy reduction competition, the results were staggering. In one three-month period, electricity use dropped 17% (and paper use 22%). Energy use on the winning floor plummeted 31%. Factory heads at a number of companies have told me that they'd rather miss their financial targets than their green or energy goals — it's just too embarrassing to be at the bottom of the list.

3. Answering your customers' pressing questions. Wal-Mart, along with many other companies, is asking suppliers and vendors very tough questions about their environmental and social impacts. Those that can gather their data and tell the best story will get the most shelf space and mind space (see my previous post on Wal-Mart's eco-ratings for more on this point).

4. Prioritizing initiatives. Resources remain very tight — you don't want to spend money on the wrong things. With all the pressure to go green, it's easy to get lost in the weeds and pursue avenues that may not yield the most benefit. When companies really look at their full value-chain impacts, they're very often surprised at the results. Green leader Stonyfield Farm discovered that 95% of the ecological damage from its packaging occurred during production and distribution. So the company has made light-weighting (which is what it sounds like) the top priority — use less stuff and the footprint goes down. Stonyfield has made the deliberate choice to not use a recyclable, yet heavier, plastic; this counterintuitive and seemingly non-green choice makes the most environmental and fiscal sense given the real data.

5. Finding new market openings and focusing innovation. Procter & Gamble went through a similar lifecycle exercise and made a similar discovery about its laundry products. The vast majority of energy use was not in sourcing, production, or distribution, but in the use of the detergent in homes. And the majority of that was not the washing machine turning, but heating the water. This insight led to Tide Coldwater, a reformulated product to help customers wash in cool water, using less energy and saving money. Coldwater is one of P&G's seven original "sustainable innovation products" that generated $2 billion in sales in the first year.

Operating your business without environmental and social metrics leaves part of your management "dashboard" blank. How well can you run your company without complete information? But don't worry — you're not that far behind if you don't have a perfect handle on your value-chain footprint, or even your direct impacts. It's getting easier and easier to gather this data, and you can accomplish a great deal with even "back of the envelope" calculations (more on this in my next post).

For a slightly longer take on this topic, see also my recent e-letter, or the full discussion in my new book Green Recovery

[This blog was originally posted on Harvard Business Online]

A couple posts ago, I talked about the ways you can use green data — footprinting information on your products and services up and down the value chain — to create enormous value for your company. As they say, you can't manage what you don't measure. And those with the best information can cut costs, reduce risk, answer customer questions on environmental and social impacts, and help customers reduce their footprints.

But it's a fair question to ask how you might gather this data, especially when budgets remain very tight as the economy gradually recovers. Conducting a full, detailed lifecycle analysis (LCA) is likely to be a time-consuming, resource-draining affair. But luckily there are some shortcuts. Here are a few principles and guidelines for getting smarter about your footprint with the least resources possible:

1. Qualitative analysis is good. In fact, it's better to start with a more strategic view on your products or services than to dive right into detailed numeric analysis. Map out your value chain for a quick view on resource use. Then ask really top level questions that aren't part of the normal day-to-day thinking for most functions in a company, like what comes in the door, and what did it take for suppliers to produce it (are there processes energy or water intensive, for example)? What do we do with our inputs, and how much energy and resources do we use? How much energy and resources do our customers use? What happens to our products after customers are done with them?

You're looking for directionally-correct answers on where the biggest risks and opportunities are...or at the very least, where your data gaps are and how best to fill them.

2. "Back of the envelope" analysis is also okay. Top-line numbers on your own impacts and energy use, from departments like IT, facilities, and distribution, can give you sense of where cuts are most needed or valuable. The data may not be readily available at first, but it certainly isn't capital intensive to find it.

3. Use data that's already out there. A truly detailed LCA is, frankly, a pain. Following a product through every stage of its creation and use is difficult. Luckily, the resources available to help you are multiplying. Industry groups and academics have conducted LCAs on many products. You can extrapolate numbers from similar categories to save time and at least understand where the biggest issues lie. For example, let's say you produce food products, some of which have a big dairy component. The dairy industry has conducted an extensive LCA on a gallon of milk. That study can tell you that the methane produced by livestock may dominate your life-cycle carbon footprint as well.

Another option: public (or quasi-public) databases. See the wonky-sounding Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment (EIO-LCA) data at Carnegie Mellon, or the data collected by AMEE in the UK. Without going into too much detail, the EIO-LCA captures data on flows of goods in and out of all sectors of the U.S. economy, along with data on energy use in each sector, and allows for big picture estimates on impacts. It's a back-of-the-envelope calculation — on a very big envelope. But if you don't want to dig into databases yourself (and who does), then you'll be glad to know that some smart developers have embedded these data sources into handy software products, so...

4. Seek out tools to help you. There is also a wealth of options for software that can help you get a handle on your impacts, including those throughout your supply chain. There are a few now classic providers of product LCA software, such as Ecobilan's TEAM and GaBi Sofware. But new niche players and products that focus on a company's carbon footprint include offerings from both the usual suspects and new entrants: Carbon Impact (formerly Clear Standards, now part of SAP), Planet Metrics, SAS for Sustainability Management, Computer Associates eco-Software, and two open source solutions Carbon Counted and Earthster (in beta).

I've worked with, or been taken through demos of most of these players — all are offering good tools and expertise. But I'm sure I've missed many others so please send me tools you've found useful (andrew@eco-strategies.com).

On top of these carbon modeling tools, companies are offering a range of other green data-tracking services: a sustainability dashboard from Microsoft, Google PowerMeter to measure energy consumption (for homes, but how far off are business-targeted versions), and a cool new product from AngelPoints (working with Saatchi S) that puts the Wal-Mart Personal Sustainability Project program into tracking software so companies can show employees what all their pledges of behavior change add up to.

Beyond these more self-help methods, there is an ever-growing number of consultants that can guide you (including partners of mine such as Domani). You may need to start small with my guidelines above and estimate if resources are too tight, but if you can, working with experts can provide you with a much deeper picture of your company's data-gathering capabilities.

Finally, a larger investment in getting smarter — building that internal capacity to understand footprints on an ongoing basis, and even real-time — will pay back in ways you can barely imagine. Those with the best data win.

This first appeared on Harvard Business online.

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Happy New Year all (ok, I'm a bit delayed, but I entered the new year and promptly got really sick -- lost over a week in there). So let's start fresh now!

Anyway, I took a bit of time at the end of 2009 and early 2010, with a couple weeks' perspective, to think about the stories that really grabbed me in 2009. The top 10 is below, but see my brief write-ups and logic on each at my e-letter site here.

1) Copenhagen fails or does it?
2) The debate over climate science rages on (in the U.S. at least)
3) The EPA steps in
4) Wal-Mart keeps the pressure up (and saves the rainforest?)
5) Domino's employees deliver a new kind of openness.
6) IBM starts building a "smarter planet"
7) GM goes bankrupt
8) Some of our biggest capitalists get serious about carbon
9) China emerges as a green tech leader and the world's biggest emitter
10) The bottom of the pyramid becomes a source of innovation

And the bonus, theater of the absurd, wacky story...
10 1/2) Forbes names Exxon green company of the year

[This appeared first on my Harvard Business Review blog]

Pepsi recently demonstrated its commitment to reducing its environmental impacts up and down the value chain with two rapid-fire announcements about new initiatives. The old-school approach to greening is to focus on operations within the proverbial "four walls." But Pepsi, like other leaders, is approaching sustainability more holistically, with much greater impact.

I recently spoke with Tim Carey, Pepsi's Director of Sustainability for Beverages in the Americas, about two big initiatives in which he's playing a key role.

First, on the downstream side, Pepsi looked for ways to raise the recycling rate of beverage containers from a relatively paltry 34% to 50% or higher. Working with GreenOps, a division of Waste Management, Pepsi launched a new program called "Dream Machine." These "reverse" vending machines, now being placed in high-traffic areas such as gas stations and stadiums, take back those often-abandoned and often-unrecycled empty bottles and give users points toward rewards from sponsors or local merchants.

But Pepsi has gone beyond those relatively minor incentives to add on a social mission. The program will also help fund Pepsi's donation to a group called Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities (EBV), which trains vets at business schools around the country. Pepsi expects that the combined immediate points and larger mission will drive new, greener customer behaviors — and help solve one of the beverage industry's most intractable value chain problems.

Second, Pepsi has embarked on a very unusual supply chain effort to reduce the carbon emissions associated with its Tropicana orange juice. After conducting a full life-cycle analysis of the product line, the company was relatively surprised to find that the biggest portion of the carbon footprint was found not in manufacturing, or distribution, but actually back in the agriculture stage — primarily the result of the heavily natural-gas dependent process of making fertilizer (see chart).

The analysis showed Pepsi execs where the largest impacts were, and thus where they'd get the biggest bang for their buck on carbon reductions. The company started working with suppliers and farmers to find new ways to make and apply fertilizer. For example, instead of using natural gas from as far away as Russia (which then requires shipping heavy fertilizer across the world), Pepsi is using biomass from closer to home. Wood waste and agricultural by-products are two sources, but execs are hopeful they can also use the large number of their own orange rinds left over in manufacturing, which would fully close the loop.

The company is also working with scientists on the root chemistry of orange trees, applying fungi and bacteria to increase the uptake of nutrients. All that techno-speak means that the trees will need less fertilizer in total, which means less manufacturing and shipping of that fertilizer and, voila, a smaller footprint.

A 100-acre test run of these new methods of working with new, low-carbon fertilizer is underway. A few years from now, Pepsi and its suppliers will know what's working and what isn't.

But here's the best part: the cost of these changes to consumers and growers will be about zero. And it had to be. Let's face it, this kind of carbon reduction isn't easy to convey to consumers, so the market benefit may be small for now. So the sustainability team needed to find ways to lower the fertilizer footprint without causing any additional cost to suppliers or farmers. How did they do it?

By focusing its efforts on the real footprint — identified through a solid lifecycle analysis and good data — Pepsi found the approach with the highest payback. As sustainability exec Tim Carey put it, "It's not unusual to spend tens of millions of dollars removing some carbon from a manufacturing process at returns that can be 10% or less...or we can take 15% of total carbon out in the fertilizer step without costing anything."

The impacts of these tests — and future rollout — will not be small; Pepsi buys a fairly shocking one-third of the Florida orange harvest. And the recycling work could shift millions of bottles out of landfills. Pepsi's full value chain view on sustainability is deep green stuff — this is how you implement green thinking.

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It's always easier to picture how a manufacturing company can go green — just cut back on energy, waste, and material to reduce air and water pollution, for example. But what does it mean for a service-focused business, such as a software company, to travel down the sustainability path?

Last week I got an interesting view on how enterprise software giant SAP is pursuing a green agenda. Sustainability was a core theme at SAP's annual meeting SAPPHIRE NOW, a large gathering of over 16,000 CIOs and tech professionals. (Full disclosure: SAP hired me to speak at the event.)

So how does a company with a seemingly small physical footprint create real value from pursuing sustainability? SAP seems to be pursuing three paths that are a good framework to keep in mind.

First, walk the talk. SAP is first reducing its own impacts. Last year, the company saved $90 million Euros through eco-efficiency, including a 7% reduction in energy consumption. A good portion of the savings came from reducing air travel, which makes up 35% of the company's total carbon impact. SAP also got lean in its IT operations; for the first time ever last year, it had fewer servers when the year ended than when it began.

SAP also worked to engage employees and tackled some smaller, symbolic issues like paper use. Sustainability managers placed large stacks of empty paper boxes in the cafeteria to demonstrate how much employees used in a single day. The company has also asked its 50,000 employees to take "100,000 steps" (that is, two each, or one for each foot) to be more sustainable in their lives.

Second, and far more importantly, help your customers reduce their impacts, a core greening strategy for any company. As co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe put it during his keynote, SAP wants to be "an Enabler." Snabe continued, "We believe transactional systems we have installed in many customers have information that...can help customers manage resources — not just human capital, materials or money but scarce resources like water, energy and CO2...This is the mission we have taken on with sustainability."

SAP took a hard look at its product line to see if it could deliver on this vision. In the last year, the company acquired Clear Standards, a well-respected carbon footprint software company (rebranding it Carbon Impact), and announced it will purchase Technidata, a leading provider of environmental, health, and safety management software. Last week, SAP execs were running around the show floor, gleefully demonstrating how cool Carbon Impact looked on an iPad, and demonstrating how it helps SAP analyze its own footprint data.

As an example of how SAP envisions working with companies to enable sustainability goals, execs describe how the company helped oil refiner Valero harmonize its operational systems. By obtaining much better information on energy use and processes across the organization, Valero was able to save $120 million in energy costs last year (and an expected $200 million-plus in 2010) and slash environmental incidents 63% since 2006. The savings realized from having better data available is a perfect example of the "Prius effect" that I've written about before.

By working in this way with their customers, SAP is able to reduce impacts and create value far beyond what it could just do internally.

Third, communicate clearly with customers and stakeholders about how your products and services help the cause. SAP has developed a view on the key operational focal areas that companies need to manage well to head down the road to sustainability. The company created a "Sustainability Map" that includes 33 topics — such as sourcing, logistics, design, and green IT - across 8 functional areas of the business. These topics map to some broad goals that SAP argues drive sustainable value creation (such as reducing operation risk and improving resource productivity).

The map is a critical part of the company's new CSR report, an innovative, social-media-driven approach to both discussing the company's impacts and pitching its solutions. This dual-purpose report makes sense for a service business.

Dr. Peter Graf, the company's Chief Sustainability Officer, put SAP's shift in large, strategic terms and made it clear that providing customers with solutions was critical to the company's future: "When we look at sustainability we compare it to other fundamental megatrends [such as] globalization and the Internet. Sustainability is going to be similar in the way it fundamentally changes all business processes...so as the leader in business process technology, we have to play, and we have no choice but to lead." (See a streaming video of an interview with Peter Graf and me here — you'll have to register, and then look under "keynotes and broadcasts").

For many years, IT companies felt that they didn't have a lot of skin in the sustainability game — they didn't have big smokestacks, after all. But now even service companies like SAP are seeing the deep connection between green and business growth survival.

[This post first appeared at Harvard Business Review Online]

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While the "greening of the supply chain" has been in the works for decades, the movement has really taken off in 2010. In the last few months, a number of corporate giants have announced new initiatives that pressure suppliers to do much more to measure and manage their environmental impacts. The big guns asking the questions include Pepsi, P&G (more in a future post), and IBM.

For years, most supply chain programs have included a similar, somewhat narrow range of demands: stay on the right side of the law, keep operations within regulatory levels of air and water pollution, avoid child labor, and so on. Wal-Mart has already pushed that envelope to dive much deeper into supplier practices (packaging, fossil fuel use, and even how some things are sourced). These new announcements also expand the demands in different ways. In recent years, most of the high-profile supply chain initiatives like Wal-Mart's have taken hold in the consumer products and retail arenas, and Pepsi and P&G are no exception.

But IBM brings a new value chain — electronics and IT — to the discussion and thus broadens the movement. Other electronics companies are also pressuring suppliers; the biggest players in the industry launched the Electronics Industry Code of Conduct (EICC) for suppliers in 2004, and members now include Apple, Cisco, Dell, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Sony, Xerox, and many more.

But IBM is helping expand the definition of a green IT supplier by upping the demands. To get a sense of what IBM is asking of its 28,000 first tier suppliers, I spoke with Wayne Balta, IBM's VP of corporate environmental affairs and product safety.

Balta described IBM's work as "just the latest step in a long-standing continuum." In 2004, the company launched its own IBM Supplier Conduct Principles, which helped define the EICC standards. Even earlier, in 1998, IBM asked suppliers to consider adopting the international green operating standards, ISO 14000. But the new announcement makes this "request" more of a mandate, and that's at the core of the new demands.

In short, IBM is asking for four things and telling suppliers they must:

1. Define and deploy an environmental management systems (EMS).

2. Measure existing environmental impacts and establish goals to improve performance.

3. Publicly disclose their metrics and results.

4. "Cascade" these requirements to any suppliers that are material to IBM's products.

The mandate for deploying an EMS helps suppliers build their own capacity to manage environmental issues. But most of the biggest suppliers already have some EMS in place, and that means they will have some metrics already. So I find the third and fourth elements even more important. These demands differentiate IBM's program from most of what's come before. They give heft to the requirements and expand their influence.

The third element makes companies publicly disclose their data — they don't just need to report their information to IBM; they need to make it clear for all to see. Transparency is a very powerful tool, and the new openness will benefit every customer of these suppliers. It will encourage improved performance like no other incentive (good, open data, drives competition and results in many ways - see my post Five Ways to Use Green Data to Make Money).

The fourth component, "cascading," means that IBM's requirements will ripple up the supply chain. Businesses will move a step closer to the holy grail of environmental measurement — knowing the footprint of every product without conducting a costly and time-consuming lifecycle analysis. In essence, if every link in the value chain tracks its footprint closely, and uses the tools of cost accounting to distribute these impact measurements across components, it becomes much easier for companies to estimate the value-chain impacts of their products.

IBM didn't undertake this initiative lightly. Balta explains that "we thought carefully about how we would feel about having these requirements ourselves from our customers." In essence, they're not asking anyone to do anything they have not already done themselves.

IBM execs know that the green path is a profitable one, so they're pushing suppliers to operate leaner, better, and smarter. As Balta says, "Our goal is not to punish people, but to have them succeed."

(This post first appeared at Harvard Business Online.)

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Right before the big election last week, I found myself thinking about beliefs and what people are absolutely sure they know, regardless of the facts. Two stories that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on the same day, demonstrated Americans' remarkable ability to kid ourselves.

- First, a story about how virtually everyone in America — and especially the anti-tax advocates — thinks their taxes have gone up or stayed flat under President Obama. They don't realize that taxes actually went down for, as the article says, "95% of working families." That cut to nearly everyone's withholding tax was a pivotal part of the stimulus bill.

- Second, a story titled, "In Kansas, Climate Skeptics Embrace Cleaner Energy," about a Midwestern non-profit, the Climate and Energy Project, that has gotten people to reduce energy use and emissions...by not mentioning climate at all.

The first story is a microcosm of every accomplishment the Democrats managed to keep hidden from the American public, but I'll leave real comment on that phenomenon to the politicians and economists.

But the second story is right up my alley — it's about how to motivate people to pursue the societal and economic benefits of going green. The Climate and Energy Project is cleverly avoiding the climate debate and thus any discussion at all that triggers arguments about the really bad misinformation out there (the article, for example, points out the shocking statistic that only 48% of people in the Midwest agree that there is actually warming going on — whether you think it's human-caused or not, temperature measurements are clear on this point).

Instead, Nancy Jackson, Chairman of the Climate and Energy Project, has hit on three alternative arguments to going green: personal thrift, the benefit to the community of promoting green jobs, and a religious appeal to "creation care." The program has targeted everything from home weatherization to getting the community to lobby Siemens to build a wind plant in the region. They've also gotten towns to compete with each other to save energy.

Their success has been remarkable; according to the Times, "energy use in the towns declined as much as 5 percent relative to other areas — a giant step in the world of energy conservation, where a program that yields a 1.5 percent decline is considered successful."

This group's work goes to the heart of a critical debate moving through the climate policy world. I recently took part in a meeting of green thought leaders to discuss why the climate bill in the U.S. failed this summer and what we can learn. We all asked ourselves, what's the right messaging to reach Americans? The only real divide in the room was over the question of whether to talk directly about climate change.

On the one hand were respected thinkers who said, "You can't solve climate without talking climate." On the other side came the argument that talking about saving money, jobs, the economy, and other drivers of action would do the job. Although I think that we probably have to talk climate change to policy makers, when it comes to reaching everyday Americans, I tend to fall into the latter group (see "8 Reasons You Should Cut Carbon (Aside from Climate Change)").

The lesson in Kansas is clear to me: it does not really matter if you believe in climate change. The logic of decoupling our country, our businesses, our communities, and even our homes from carbon, and from oil in particular, remains incredibly strong. At the macro level it's about national competitiveness, national security, and not relying on declining, ever-more-expensive resources.

But this applies on the personal level as well. Who doesn't want to save money and use less energy? Who wouldn't want their town to depend on locally-created, free energy?

For businesses wondering how to promote their green initiatives and products, I see lessons in how to talk to both consumers and employees. For employees, the best motivators are proven cost savings, good data, and competition. The Kansas program used all of these to great effect.

When talking to consumers, the lesson seems to be to use whatever combination of these works, plus throw in some values and religious mores, if that fits the audience. A call to save mother earth for purely environmental reasons might work well in Berkeley, but in Kansas make the subtle shift to talk about creation care, or don't go down that road at all.

So even though I titled this piece a bit sarcastically, the Kansas program works so well because it IS based in reality -- the savings you can yield, the jobs you can attract to your town, and the connection to religious values you can feel are all real. It's just not the reality of climate change.

The end result is the same — people are saving money and energy and starting to build a new economy. And if we move down the path to a cleaner world, who really cares how?

(This post first appeared at Harvard Business Online.)

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I attended a Executive Sustainability Summit last week at Xerox's request and I'm writing a few blogs about what I saw and heard. This first one is on Xerox's site and I comment on a framework proposed by Xerox's long-time VP of EH&S, Patty Calkins. I think she provides a good set of principles for a sustainability program, including a quantitative focus and value chain perspective.

There's also a quick "top ten reasons to act sustainability," and a short video of me talking about green strategy (which is also up on YouTube here).

Check out the blog here.

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