Featured post by Lara Valentine from Green Habits

Today’s Alert Headline from CSR-Wire read “CSRwire Reports Top Corporate Social Responsibility News of 2007:Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize helps validate business case for addressing climate crisis”. The story highlights a report by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors that released a “Carbon Beta” study that gives strong evidence that connects the proactive actions of a corporation on climate change “with strong financial performance.” It goes on to say “Companies increasingly recognize that their responses to the climate crisis may well determine their fates, as demonstrated by the growing number of firms joining the US Carbon Action Partnership (USCAP), which calls on Congress to set a carbon cap.”

If I were a CEO and was considering the options of moving my company into the environmental-sustainability-age I’d be confused on how to move the ship around though. It is clear to me that making this change will have long term benefits however, there aren’t alot of books or actual authorities on “how” to do it. Befuddled comes to mind, with the lack of concrete options in front of me. Where would you start? You could hand pick a group of employees in your company to set up standards or write a plan but where would that get you? Does your staff have the capability to do this kind of work? Would they come up with a plan that includes out of the box thinking or would it be status quo?

I’ve given the answer a lot of thought and here’s what I’ve come up with. I would hire an independent consultant to give a macro overview of options. Before your business can begin to analyze the myriad of options before you, wouldn’t you want to know the universe? To plan first will save time and money. To plan first would help determine the budget, the type of staff who could be best utilized, areas of priority, and areas of least benefit.

The problem of bypassing a consultant is that your staff may be too ingrained in the “way it’s always been done” to see that simple solutions may be of tremendous benefit. To skip over a macro overview could mean that the company only concentrates on one area of change. A consultant of any caliber can analyze operations, facilities, product design, the fleet, the supply chain and the marketing. They can find the points of integration that make the most sense for the type of business. Does switching to an energy star Xerox machine make you a green company? What about just advertising your green product? The FTC doesn’t take kindly to eco advertising without any back up, nor do your customers.

So before you make any decisions, hire an expert to give you direction.
Green Habits can do an energy audit for starters, but the options go much deeper and the change more profound. Let us help to earn your business the reputation it deserves in this world of changing energy and environmental concerns. Check out www.greenhabitsaustin.com for more information.

Discuss this post in the CEO Consultant forum, or leave a comment below.

If you have found this site helpful, please consider leaving a donation for support.

Return to Home Page

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 10:35 am and is filed under Green Business, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.