Category Archives: Uncategorized

Investment in Sustainable Energy Sector Falls 53%

It’s been awhile since I have written, but I am moving from San Francisco to Portland, the most sustainability conscious U.S. city, and I needed to take a vacation AND get everything moved. By the second week in October I should be settled in. More about that in my next post.

First the good news.

I wanted to bring to your attention a fact taken from a New York Times article entitled, An Investment Bet: Going Small and Green. It’s about some financial pros who were booted, catapulted, or escaped out of the ruins of our financial system and have started, albiet early in the game, a boutique investment bank, the “first to focus solely on alternative-energy and clean-technology companies.”

The first investment bank focused solely on alternative energy!

And the bad news.

The article calls on some sobering news as to the state of what they call the green industry:

“In the first quarter of 2009, new financial investment in the sustainable energy sector fell 53 percent, to $13.3 billion, from the comparable period in 2008, the lowest level of quarterly investment in three years, according to a report from the United Nations Environment Program and New Energy Finance, a research company.”

Two Silos: Marketing and CSR

I wrote a version of this article yesterday on the CSR/Sustainable Development Network, but wanted to repeat myself.

In the July issue of The Economist a particular sentence jumped out at me as being relevant to my experiences in the world of sustainability as a marketer. The sentence read “part of the reason” economists failed to see the crisis coming “as partly due to the professional silos which limited both the tools available and the imagination of the practitioners.”

Marketing Silo
I don’t t think it’s just an issue with economists. As a marketer involved in creating Earthsayers.tv, the voices of sustainability, I was slow to recognize marcom as a silo, but it is, and it is limiting imagination and creativity, two capacities crucial to bringing about change or as Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation puts it, doing “the right stuff, quick enough.”

Here are several symptoms of the marketing silo and its effects.

Organizations continue to expend resources on mediums that marketing professionals feel comfortable with and are, in the end, unsustainable – events and print – while adoption of Web 2.0 tools is slow. How are marketing resources allocated today in your company? Do your executives rely on processed information, fearful of new technology and slow to embrace collaboration across the enterprise and with partners? Are any executives you know using video to blog like John T. Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems does? His observation: “Today’s world requires a different leadership style – more collaboration and teamwork, including using Web 2.0 technologies.”

A recent report by the WWF-UK entitled, Let Them Eat Cake, calls out the six myths that have further strengthened resistance from the marketing industry, an industry pivotal as “the marketing function is at the heart of the sustainability debate, because it is the interface between the forces of production and consumption.”

One debunked myth in the WWF-UK report suggests many marketers are just waiting for permission and an appropriate framework in which to engage with sustainability issues even if not familiar with the language of sustainability. One of the leaders of high tech in the U.S. was Admiral Grace Hopper who advised people new to the industry (I heard her speak in 1981) to not seek permission as much as learn how to apologize. Are you waiting for permission?

Even Sir Martin Sorrell in the WPP’s Social Responsibility Report (2007/2008) advises his flock “to shape and encourage consumer demand for sustainable products and lifestyles; to restore the true value of durability; to reject the superfluous in products and packaging; to make much of what has passed for fashion deeply unfashionable…” Quote him in your apology.

CSR Silo
Yet if marketing is slow on the uptake, what of Corporate Social Responsibility professionals? Operating from another silo, limiting both the tools available and the imagination of the practitioners? I offer but one symptom and look to fellow network members to think about their own experiences.

At the eighth annual Corporate Philanthropy Summit hosted by the CECP this past June in New York City the bywords were collaboration, systemic change, advocacy and sustainability as reported online in “on Philanthropy.”

It’s good to see sustainability on the short list, BUT its strategic importance as the business and investment strategy is not understood as reflected in this meeting report.

Sustainability needs to be a strategy not a program. It needs to be the strategy that drives all programs, all investments. Advocacy focused on supporting the cause of sustainability nets big changes precisely because it brings a focus to collaborative efforts, all of us need to be on the same page at the strategic level and we are not.

Silo Demolition
One company involved in silo demolition and referenced in the report, Future tense: The global CMO by the Economist Intelligence Unit (sponsored by Google) is IBM. They seek to remove the barriers between its communication functions to include “marketing, media and public relations, corporate communications and, eventually, the company’s corporate citizenship function which is responsible for promoting IBM’s corporate values.” Would you recommend this in your organization, and if not, why not?

The WWF-UK report includes a ten point plan for sustainable brands, two of which are particularly relevant to this discussion:

1. The Corporate Responsibility Function should act as a driver of innovation, using its combination of sustainability expertise and broad strategic view to tease out consumer insights.

2. Collaborate. Create multi-functional, multi-skilled teams that include personnel from all relevant functions, including marketing communications, investor relations, product design/development, brand strategy, financial planning and analysis, and corporate responsibility.

In closing, I quote a recent letter to the Editor of the New York Times by Aliza Wasserman. She points out another field of siloes, special interests, which should come under the sustainability banner. (We have created a taxonomy for sustainability as part of our earthsayers.tv project)

“The story that is waiting to be told is the one that unites these issues (health care, climate change and economic crisis) as symptoms of our decades’ long failure to create moderate, forward-thinking systems that are built on concepts of sustainability and prevention.” ALIZA R. WASSERMAN, Cambridge, Mass, July 30, 2009

The professional class, “siloed” and often issues focused, has a chance to bring about the right stuff, quick enough, if the keynote is advocacy and collaboration, and I would maintain, the key initiative is sustainability as both a business and lifestyle strategy. It can’t be business as usual.

The reports referenced here are on my whitepaper library.

Sustainability Advocate

Letter to the Editor of the New York Times by Aliza Wasserman

As a member of Generation Y who has spent my adult life downloading individual songs and listening to them on shuffle, I appreciated Matt Bai’s take on President Obama’s detour from the linear governing style of past presidents as particularly relevant to younger Americans.

I wish Bai had gone a step further in this trajectory, instead of continuing to silo the problems of health care, climate change and economic crisis. While the author views these issues as competing for the attention of the president and the public, the story that is waiting to be told is the one that unites these issues as symptoms of our decades’ long failure to create moderate, forward-thinking systems that are built on concepts of sustainability and prevention. None can be solved on its own; led by the “shuffle” generation, we must take the leap — a paradigm shift toward sustainable, systemic solutions to all of these problems together.

ALIZA R. WASSERMAN
Cambridge, Mass.
July 30, 2009

Resistance from the Marketing Industry

If you wish you could reconcile your need to advance your marketing career with your need to make a personal contribution to a happier, healthier future, then the report, Let them Eat Cake, by the WWF-UK could provide the bridge you are looking for. I highly recommend reading this report.

Why call out marketing? The authors argue “the marketing function is at the heart of the sustainability debate, because it is the interface between the forces of production and consumption.”

I will be calling out sections of this report in future blogs, starting with the six “myths” that have further strengthened resistance from the marketing industry. The report points out that a new perspective is required if recent advances in thinking are to become the new paradigm.

The report is available online by searching on the title, Let Them Eat Cake, or you may download it from my public library of reports. Either way, please give this report a read, and soon.

Sustainability as a Strategy, Not a Program

It’s good to see sustainability on the short list along with one of its elements – systemic change- and two keywords or practices, collaboration and advocacy, but basically its strategic importance as the business and investment strategy is not understood as reflected in this meeting report.

From the article it seems that what was meant by sustainability was making their contributions sustainable with no indication of the vital role they could be making in driving sustainability principles and practices at all levels from the personal to the global.

I just don’t think it’s going to be business as usual ever again and if the anticipated “new growth” referenced in the article is not based on sustainable development principles and the Internet used effectively for collaboration and advocacy, our citizens are in big trouble as is our planet. It’s not just the climate that’s a big problem.

Environmental Sustainability and Aging Skyscrapers

Often times in a conversation it takes just one example to communicate a meaning of a word or concept. In the case of environmental sustainability such an example is the retrofit of the Sears Tower in Chicago. As detailed in today’s New York Times article, the Tower is “4.5 million square feet of office and retail space, 16,000 windows and 104 elevators.” Environmental sustainability is a crucial initiative in terms of buildings, especially existing buildings, because buildings are among the world’s largest contributors of greenhouse gas emissions. The good news is that retrofitting buildings to be environmentally sustainable makes sound business sense with the energy savings being “equal to 150,000 barrels of oil a year.” These savings are expected to help redeem some of the project’s cost, which is to be financed through private equity investment, grants, debt financing and government funds.

There are plans to open a first-floor center to educate the public about the redesign, and the developers offer the Towers as a model for other aging skyscrapers around the world.

Illustration by Rose Cassano, EarthSayers.tv, the voices of sustainability

Sustainability and the VC Taskforce Roundtable

Each month the VC Taskforce hosts The Elevator Pitch Roundtable an opportunity for entrepreneurs “in a startup that is currently seeking capital” to present a 90-second elevator pitch to a panel of VCs, usually four. These are very interesting as the panel gives a score of their interests based on the pitch and the Q/A that follows.

If I were to expand beyond my experience with this group it seems to me many VC’s, not ALL of course, have no sustainability strategy for their investment activities. If they venture outside the business as usual space, they have a laundry list of sustainability related categories, as do the big consulting firms. See my blog article below on laundry lists. Mobile, alternative energy and bio refineries is a list from Khosla Ventures and under “the things we care about” (Khosla Ventures), you will find some of this and some of that.

Microfinance – SKS, SHARE, ASA, CFTS, Jamii Bora Grameen USA, Unitus – with a goal to provide credit to over 25 million “below poverty line” borrowers. See also An Anti-Poverty Success Story; Video
Environment – GE Ecomagination Advisory Council, Chairman of India Advisory Board of the Cleantech Network
Education – Indian School of Business – a world class school of business, DonorsChoose.org – teachers ask for private funding on thousands of projects
Health – Public Health Institutes of India, UNICEF
Affordable housing – Global Home – goaled to build a $5000 home!

Companies need to put all the wood behind one arrow as spreading energies across a broad spectrum of sustainability categories has proven to be pretty ineffective. Jeffrey Hollinger of Seventh Generation hits the nail on the head when he talks about the need for companies – and VCs are no exception – to make sustainability their core business strategy.

At one Roundtable they poohed-poohed two technologies relating to reducing energy consumption in existing buildings (big, big source of greenhouse gases), but got excited over a travel Website catering to honeymooners. That’s when the question entered my mind: Are we twittering while Rome burns?

It’s going to take more than Al Gore to turn things around, if they can be turned around.

McKinsey weighs in on Battery-powered Age

McKinsey Quarterly article

Electrifying cars: How three industries will evolve

My friend and alternative energy colleague, Paul Steinbroner of Energy.tv, has been documenting the electric car industry for years, knows EVERYBODY, and is in the process of raising funds for a major alternative energy documentary staring plug-in pioneer, Dr. Andy Frank. Here’s what McKinsey says about plug-ins:

“are projected to offer a lower cost of ownership than vehicles with improved internal-combustion engines, but only if fuel prices and taxes cooperate.”

Hope to get some comments on the McKinsey story.

Sustainability Defined and Logic

A blog article from the folks at Southern Crafted Homes (which I found through a Twitter alert) starts with a dictionary definition of sustainability and quickly suggests a more simple one:

Resources must be consumed at a rate that allows them to be replenished.

I bring this up because when I talk about our site, earthsayers.tv, and emphasize it highlights the voices of sustainability the first comment is often the question: what is sustainability anyway? On EarthSayers.tv we are capturing the language of sustainability to include definitions from all kinds of people ranging from environmentalists to designers to politicians. This one from Southern Crafted Homes is a good one.

The writer also notes there are extremes of sustainability positions among professionals and our citizens, but, again, the writer simply points out:

“…logic tells us that if we extract a resource from the ground and that resource cannot replenish itself then at some point that resource shall cease to exist. The question then is of scale and context.”

Sustainability Advocates

Sustainable Electric Automotive Solution

An interesting earthsayer is Shai Agassi, founder and CEO of Better Place. In an interview by Kristian Steenstrup of the Gartner Group, she asks: “Shai, did the concept of electric cars and environmental issues give you motivation to leave SAP?”

Not exactly, but the Young Global Leaders forum started him thinking of the question, “how would you run a country without oil?” as the answer for “how are you going to make the world a better place?”

This thinking resulted in his founding the venture-backed company, Better Place. A sustainable electric automotive solution is vital to economic opportunity, energy independence and a cleaner planet.

Does he miss SAP? “No, I think it was the best thing for me to do this, because I have found my passion. I wake up every morning full of life and full of energy to do this. I think SAP has been one of the most instrumental tools to get where I am right now, the ability to do something like that.