Lean manufacturing practices and sustainability are conceptually similar in that both seek to maximize organizational efficiency. Where they differ is in where the boundaries are drawn, and in how waste is defined. Sustainability expands the definition of waste to include the wider range of consequences of business actions including environmental and social consequences. Lean processes are inherently less wasteful and in this sense promoting lean processes can help organizations become more sustainable.
This post talks about the difficult transition between marketing to savvy early adopters and achieving penetration in the much wider mass market. There’s a big difference between what companies need to do to effectively sell technology products to early adopters and what they need to do to sell to the early and late majority of the technology adoption lifecycle; and this is what has been aptly and ominously called the chasm.
In discussions on the merits of distributed solar power too little focus has been given to the many important benefits that result from increasing the use of distributed solar power. These benefits accrue to both the utilities and presumably their rate payers as well and to society (and the tax payers) at large. This post summarizes a recent paper “Solar Power Generation in the US: Too expensive, or a bargain?” that attempts to give these benefits a tangible quantified value in order that the debate on the merits of solar power also begin to include this side of the cost / benefit analysis. A side that is all too often glossed over and largely overlooked.
This post examines the importance of successfully communicating the importance of sustainability for the bottom line, in terms of risk mitigation, value opportunities and business benefits associated with sustainability to an organization’s CFO. The CFO is typically ultimately responsible for investor relations, facilities, purchasing, human resources, IT and have a large impact on all organizational resource allocation decision making in general, and CFOs can have a major impact on the ultimate success or failure of an organizations sustainability programs.
This post asks the provocative question whether solar PV is really market ready yet. It goes on to suggest that it might be counter-productive for the long term growth of the sector to push solar photovoltaic adoption rates through the use of government subsidies, making the point that this may in fact be slowing down the adoption of needed innovation and process improvement that should ultimately make renewable energy more affordable.
Summarizes the new green jobs study by the Brookings Institute, noting that the study reports that the driving force behind the U.S. “clean economy” over the last decade has been emerging energy technologies. It is these dozen or so “hot” segments within the larger green economy where most of the growth has been concentrated. This suggests that, in order to build a cleantech economy, the U.S. should put primary emphasis on new, technology-intensive, energy-related sectors.
This post examines how to communicate the business value of CSR to the stakeholders those important external groups that are linked with and can have large impacts on a company. The post goes on to point out various ways effective CSR initiatives can have a positive effect on the business and how it is becoming […]
In this post Robert focuses on the green marketing gap, the perception gap that exists and results in most Americans perceiving green as an elitist phenomena. He outlines some of the principle problems that have caused this state of affairs to develop and argues that marketing should be geared to reinforcing the benefits that your product offers the planet.
By Kathrin Winkler on Comments Off on Lessons for Creating Your Sustainability Report: An EMC Case Study
In this post Kathrin examines some of the issues and challenged that crop up in sustainability reporting from the perspective of her own recent experience preparing the sustainability report for EMC. The author gives advice to those who are about to embark on crafting a sustainability report — saying in effect that it is a big job with a very large scope that includes practically every aspect of the organization. She concludes by sharing some of what she learned from her experience and what could have perhaps been done differently.
