In my previous blog, I put forth the premise that companies should stop focusing on the one-dimensional idea of “going green” and concentrate instead on the goal of achieving sustainability, which involves a three-dimensional focus on the ability of people, the planet and profit to all survive and thrive.

Now I’d like to carry this a bit further by posing the question: Is the Green Movement over as it relates to business?  I think so – at least in the sense of being a  purely “environmental” cause.  It reminds me of a point in time back in the ’90s when I was just exhausted after trying to rebuild The New Organics Company, an early supplier of organic foods to conventional retail outlets. The company then had its products in some 300 Walmarts and thousands of other stores, and was struggling every day to maintain its somewhat precarious position of leadership in what was then a fledgling industry.  Some $30 million dollars or so into my tenure as CEO, I suddenly realized that the industry was fighting itself, and the lack of coordination and consistent messaging from the various entities involved had become a major issue. We just couldn’t seem to get our act together on such fundamental questions as whether it would be better to preserve the small-farm “purity” of organic crops or to cultivate them on much larger tracts of land in an attempt to market organic foods to a broader segment of consumers.  I personally preferred the latter approach, but realized the inherent lack of scale and efficiencies would result in premiums that most people just weren’t prepared  to pay. So any scale outside of specialty retail would be very difficult to implement, and in fact for the most part just wasn’t profitable. That’s why I believe – and yes I am going to say it here – that the organic industry’s share of three percent of total food sales has not been a success.

But how does this apply to the Green Movement in general?  The problem, as I see it, is that the business of “going green” can’t be accomplished at conventional prices. It nearly always necessitates an added premium – and people generally don’t like to pay a perceived premium for something they really don’t understand. That is why I believe green is going the same route as organic – a specialty for an elite and enlightened market, but not something with mass appeal.

Now this needn’t be a downer for either environmentalists or for companies that wish to appear progressive, provided that they’re willing to demonstrate flexibility and take a pragmatic approach to the problem. To once again use my own experience as an illustration, after leaving The New Organics Company (which ultimately lost its foothold due to unfortunate circumstances that I won’t go into here), I went to Horizon Organic Dairy. Sales there were flat, and the firm was then engaged in determining which direction to go. So we did some research and found that the biggest boosters of organic milk were pediatricians, who were recommending it to parents because it did not contain bovine growth hormones, and thus protected children – and especially girls – from early puberty. Now we had a direct benefit to justify the premium, which we honed in on. This led to our building a much stronger company, thanks in part to a partnership with Starbucks, which bought our organic milk and proceeded to make a small size for children available in its retail outlets.  At that point, the brand really took off,  causing Starbucks to become interested in buying it, and eventually leading to its being acquired by a small stakeholder, Dean Foods – a huge success for everyone involved.

The point of this story is that in order to make organic a really profitable proposition, we had to  persuade a sizable group of consumers to pay a premium. And that required our being able to show them convincing evidence of a specific health benefit, particularly where their children were concerned – something that’s a bit more difficult when you’re merely talking about the the absence of pesticides and other organic attributes. So to apply this same lesson to the Green Movement in general, I would venture that until you can attach a specific, tangible benefit for  the buying public to premium green initiatives – the ones whose costs have to be passed on to the consumer – they won’t have the runway to be effective, and may well make your products less, rather than more competitive.

That’s why I’m now convinced that at least where business is concerned, the Green Movement, as such, is no longer sustainable – and thus needs to be replaced by the Sustainability Movement.  That is to say, by environmental-type programs that will either save companies money or provide consumers with demonstrable, tangible benefits – and that they’ll thus be willing to pay a little extra for.  If such programs also will help prevent climate change or save an endangered species, that’s all well and good, and those aspects can and should be included as added benefits in any promotional efforts. But our primary focus should be on making people’s lives a little easier, or perhaps eliminating a threat to their family’s well-being – for instance, by offering nontoxic alternatives to harmful chemicals in household products  Let’s start emphasizing the the kinds of things that will help make daily existence more sustainable, rather than more noble goals that  a majority of shoppers – particularly in a stressed-out economy – might feel they can ill-afford to worry about  (and that you can rest assured will continue to be addressed by companies whose main appeal is to those concerned about the environment.)

That’s the message I’m now attempting to convey to groups I’m addressing – complete with an opening slide featuring a  red X through the word “green.” And that in no way is meant to imply that I don’t remain as fully committed an environmentalist as I ever was. It’s just that I have come around to the  belief that a more pragmatic and less idealistic-sounding approach to environmentalism can often be  the most effective way to promote it .

Lately, I have started rethinking the value of businesses “going green.” When companies spend money to make their products or manufacturing methods “greener,” but find consumers are reluctant to pay a corresponding “green” surcharge, what they have done is to substitute one form of green – the environmental kind – for another — the monetary variety. And while virtue may be its own reward, it’s also true that a company that engages in enough unprofitable behavior may soon become unsustainable.

Now when you say anything is in danger of becoming unsustainable, that implies more urgency than the idea of simply modifying it in some way to go along with a “green” agenda.  So what I would advise today’s companies to do is to dispense with the idea of going green,  and talk about becoming sustainable instead. It may seem like a mere semantic substitution – but semantics can mean the difference between a message that nobody buys and one that’s truly effective.

“Sustainability” is about people, planet and profits  – all three of which are essential parts of the equation – whereas “green” is a one dimensional concept. It is also one that many consumers simply can’t wrap their heads around. Far too often, they associate it with hippies, or elitists, or folks who lack a sense of practicality, and give more importance to trees than jobs. Now green can, under some circumstances, be a tie breaker — but it is not a key selling point that is going to distinguish your enterprise. Sustainability, on the other hand, symbolizes survival– something that can be successfully conveyed even to those who disdain a green rationale.

So how do you go about creating a sustainable company that, in turn, can promote an image of sustainability to the public? Here are five tried and true ways that I have used in many instances, and am convinced that, taken together, form the best approach:

1).    Now this might sound surprising, but start with yourself – that is, how your company’s policies affect you personally, especially if  you’re in top management or even the CEO. What does that mean, exactly? Well, how many of you C level executives are working at a healthy sustainable rate – which means you are rested, eating healthy, exercising, going to work with a clear mind? If you start with yourself, you will internalize the importance of sustainability as it relates to the company, and be able to apply it in other areas of corporate life.

2).     Meet with key employees and if possible take a pulse on where they are in regard to their own health and the sustainability of their pace. The question you might ask them is, “what can we do here in the office to eliminate waste, do our jobs more efficiently, and be generally less stressed at work.” By showing that you’re concerned about the well-being of employees and the danger of their “burning out” (which in today’s demanding work climate, is increasingly a factor), you might be surprised at the responses you’ll get – suggestions for sustainable policies that will not only improve your company’s image, but end up saving you money (as has happened at companies like Walmart and Proctor & Gamble.)

3).    Put a team together to do a complete life-cycle assessment of your supply chains, again looking to eliminate waste and inefficiencies, as well as toxic or otherwise hazardous materials whenever possible. The key here is to make sure you include your suppliers’ sources and ask the same questions. Then, if you’re bold enough to carry the analysis a step further, move on to end-of -life discussions for your products and how they can be disposed of more effectively and efficiently.  Keep in mind that all such measures, rather than adding to your operating costs (as has often been alleged about green improvements), will actually end up saving your company money.

4).    Set up a “filter” for all such proposed policy changes to identify those that don’t make good business sense. Make sure, in other words, that the changes themselves are all sustainable before you implement them. I can’t tell you how many green initiatives have fallen victim to budget considerations because they lacked basic sustainability, and were thus relegated to the category of dispensable temporary measures.

5).    OK, having successfully accomplished all the previous steps to sustainability – feeling better and exercising more; making the office environment less stressful, with happier employees humming around, cutting out waste and inefficiency in your supply chain, resulting in a lower carbon footprint, less water use, and the elimination of toxins in the environment – now here is where the real magic comes in: Don’t tell anyone. Rather than using  how sustainable your operation has become as a selling point, and thus opening it up to suspicions of greenwashing, let the word leak out gradually – perhaps from your employees or customers.  When it does, it will have much more of an impact, establishing your reputation as a company that is simply committed to doing the right thing, quietly and efficiently, without having to brag about it. You might even find your organization featured as an enlightened, sustainable business model on the news or one of those magazine-format shows.

As Kermit the Frog once reminded us, “It’s not easy being green.” To which I would add, “No, it’s much easier being sustainable.”

As I’m writing this, yet another Earth Day has rolled around – but I must admit that this year I’m seeing things from a somewhat different perspective. That is to say, I’ve come to the conclusion that merely focusing on “pure” sustainability efforts is currently the wrong approach to preserving the planet. While it has been increasingly evident for years, I am just now realizing that having so many people engaged in a struggle for daily survival is seriously detracting from the issues involved in saving the environment. So today, I  have begun putting my energies into innovation and entrepreneurship that will help create new economic opportunities while curtailing the waste of our resources that is a key aspect of the sustainability challenge.  This shift in direction reflects my conviction that relieving social stress will become more and more intertwined with sustainability, and, like that old song said about love and marriage, “You can’t have one without the other.”

Recently I was asked to speak at the Middle East Growth Conference, where representatives of various countries in the region will assemble in an effort to promote entrepreneurship. One of the main motivating factors of  the so-called “Arab Spring,” in fact, was the need to put millions of destitute and economically forsaken citizens of those countries to work. But while this is going on, millions of once middle class Americans are also unemployed, many of them facing eviction and depending on food pantries – and they’re hardly in a position right now to give much thought to saving the Earth. Yet if we abandon all our environmental concerns, the threats to people’s existence will grow exponentially.

So this year, I am changing my focus to developing enterprises that will create jobs while filling fundamental social needs and reducing or eliminating waste in the process – goals that I think will  address both the long-term survival of the planet and the immediate needs of its inhabitants.  Our team will be starting with a company called Food Star Partners, which will intercept food that would ordinarily go to waste and sell at deep discounts to the roughly 44 million Americans who are currently food-security-challenged, and a reclamation business that will start putting such resources as used products and electronics back into use here in the U.S., rather than being shipped off to China.

In short, “sustainability” isn’t something that can be sustained unless people’s lives are also made sustainable.

Recently I was talking with a friend about his business and couldn’t help asking him why his expectations for it were so low. It made me realize how important it is for us to set our sights high and not put limits on what we expect to accomplish, because, quite frankly,  if you can’t visualize your particular enterprise being on top, getting there is going to be that much more difficult.

In the course of my career, one of the things that has always characterized my business philosophy is determination to align my endeavors with the biggest and the best. When my partners and I created Pet Promise, for example,and decided we’d be much better off with the backing of big company, we began by approaching Nestle Purina with the idea. The upshot was that they wouldn’t let us leave until we had worked out a deal, which led to it’s becoming the number one brand of natural pet food on the market. And when it came to our recycling business Code Blue/Greenopolis, the very first company to which we took the idea was Waste Management, which ended up buying it six months later and developing it into the highly promising operation it’s since become.

That’s why if you’re an entrepreneur with what you think is a great idea, my advice to you would be the same as it was to my friend: make your expectations for it great as well. Whatever the potential you have in mind,  think bigger – even globally.  Include the fast developing BRIC (Brazil/Russia/India/China) market in all your projections, as well as the idea of approaching the biggest and best known companies as prospective partners. Remember; entrepreneurs with new ideas represent new opportunities  for established businesses to expand, create jobs and enhance their reputations for innovation. So rather than setting modest goals for whatever you’ve created – which you might consider more “realistic” – think of it as your special gift to the world, and raise the bar far higher. You might just be amazed to discover how much it’s possible to exceed your original expectations and goals.

This past week I was visiting with an old colleague who was contemplating a career change. He was especially interested in a particular opportunity that had arisen, but didn’t feel he had the right qualifications. So I told him a favorite story of mine about one of our top guys at Greenopolis who took it upon himself to find out how much in the way of recyclables was being disposed of in bus-stop trash cans. Unable to come up with any data on the subject, he went out one night and personally sifted and sorted through the trash cans at a total of 51 bus stops.

As a result, he became an instant expert in on-the-go recycling, always able to cite what he had learned from his night of rummaging through the trash deposited by people awaiting public transportation. Never one to throw  away an opportunity, he had actually discovered a new one in things that had already been thrown away – literally by taking matters into his own hands.

The point I was making to my friend is is that we all have the opportunity to develop expertise in one or more disciplines, provided that we’re ready and willing to find out what we need to know first-hand. So what I advised him to do was to become an “instant expert” in one aspect of the industry or category involved and proceed to develop his knowledge base from there.

In today’s world, there are many fields of endeavor or areas of proficiency one can master in a relatively short time without having to earn a degree or be given an official stamp of approval.  Once you’ve made yourself knowledgeable in a particular specialty, you can chart your own course, create your own niche, coin your own self-proclaimed title and start blogging about your experience in or understanding of the field. But my recommendation is that every week you do something new to build on your unique brand of “down and dirty” expertise.

With the kinds of resources now available, you can give yourself a professional ‘makeover’ and acquire genuine new skill sets faster than you ever thought possible. Just make up your mind to do whatever it takes to acquire the necessary information – even if it means having to literally take matters into your own hands on occasion (and perhaps get them a little dirty in the process).

I recently attended a major meeting where there was a lot going on. The next day three of us who were there did independent recaps. I did mine last, without knowing what the other two had said. The report I ended up turning in was not so much content-related as an appraisal of how I felt about what had taken place and my emotional read on the participants’  frame of mind and passion for the project at hand  When I read the other two accounts, it struck me that theirs very accurately focused on  business aspects such as strategies and objectives, but were devoid of any feeling. And this got me to wondering whether our internalizing of events and the emotions and passions they stir in us are actually more significant indicators of what a successful business really is than the logistics, plans and schemes we use to accomplish our various vocational aims.

In business and commerce, we like to think of ourselves as pragmatic, goal-oriented, and impervious to “emotional” factors that might somehow become an impediment to whatever it is we’re trying to achieve. But for all the emphasis we place on success and material rewards, are our innermost feelings about things – the intangible aspects of our lives – actually the ones that are most important to us as human beings?  We tend to measure the pursuit of happiness in terms of material acquisitions – cars, boats, houses and the like – but don’t automatically assume that the mere attainment of those things makes for a happy person. We’re more inclined to talk about joy and contentment (as frequently expressed in mediums such as song and poetry) as resulting from feelings of love, hope, trust, and our ability to appreciate the beauties of nature. Shouldn’t these qualities, then, be as meaningful in the way we conduct our enterprises as is, say, our obligation to maximize shareholder profits?

So, as ‘unbusinesslike’ as this approach might seem, during the next few weeks I am going to be focusing on my subjective feelings about things rather than on dispassionate, unsentimental and purely practical considerations, and see what effect that has on my professional as well as my personal life. The reason is that I have a growing suspicion that much of what’s wrong with the way we do business these days stems from our inclination to regard emotional concerns as “unrealistic,” or as standing in the way of progress, only to discover later on that we should have been attaching more importance to what our sensibilities told us and less to what merely seemed “sensible” at the time.

I may just be on  to something here, and if so, I  believe it will show I have often been focused on the wrong outcomes. In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts. Do we make a big mistake by keeping our emotions in check when we’re doing business?

As an ‘early-to-rise’ type of individual, I like nothing better than to get up at the crack of dawn and have breakfast to the accompaniment of the birds. In fact, I’m usually at my best about the time when other folks require two or three cups of java to wash away the cobwebs, and love to schedule my meetings in the morning.

That’s why it’s so unusual for me to find that ‘waking up is hard to do’, as I did for a week or more after we were told to set our clocks ahead by an hour.

Judging from the disruptive effect that the arrival of daylight saving time seems to have on my natural sleep cycle, I’m inclined to think that the occasion is as taxing on my body as April 15 is on my bank account. From springing out of bed no later than 6am every morning and feeling on top of the world, I suddenly found myself barely being able to arise by 7 a.m., and going around feeling uncharacteristically tired all day. (And as a frequent flier, I’m someone who’s grown quite adept at adjusting to “jet lag.”) In fact, I’m inclined to think that it has a similar effect on most of us, seeing as how the Monday immediately following the annual ‘lost-hour weekend’ always seems to be the most difficult day of the year to do business.

But this sudden feeling of being thrown slightly out of kilter has also served to make me all the more aware – and appreciative – of the impact and subtle influence that nature’s rhythms have on our equilibrium. The certainty that night will follow day and that the tides will rise and fall at predictable times, or that seasonal changes will inevitably occur on a regular schedule are a source of physical, mental and emotional reassurance as well as wonder. The predictability and variety that these cycles provide are also things I believe we tend to take far too much for granted in our daily lives.

While it’s not my intent here to argue the pros and cons of tampering with time, the point I am trying to make is that we really need to be aware of just how important predictable patterns are to our basic sense of well-being Just as our internal clocks are set to expect a certain number of hours in the day (and night), our cellular mechanisms are geared to anticipate certain conditions at different times of the year – something that’s evident from the recurrent behavior of animals like squirrels and bears depending on the season.

So if turning the clock ahead disrupts your slumber schedule and resulting feeling of “being yourself” let that be a reminder that the agenda Mother Nature has created for us is something we should celebrate and be thankful for – and of the consequences of messing with it. Especially at a time when climate change (which we’ve seen a sample of this past month) threatens to disrupt that plan in a way that, unlike daylight saving time, can’t be reversed.

If you’re among those who watched the Academy Awards, or at least the news clip featured on the awards telecast,  I wonder – what would you consider its most arresting moment? Most viewers, I believe, would say the sequence in which Sasha Baron Cohen pours what he says are the ashes of the dead North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il on Ryan Seacrest. This made me think of what motivated some recent unusual behavior on my part, and why every contemporary company needs a more novel and attention-grabbing way of promoting itself or getting its message out (and despite what you may or may not think of Sasha Baron Cohen, he is a brilliant promoter).

Cohen, of course, is but one example of what I would characterize as the “made-you-look” phenomenon. Two other personalities whose exploits have caused me to watch events I normally wouldn’t view are Danica Patrick and Tim Tebow. The former prompted me to tune into the Daytona 500 just to see her her first start in the NASCAR Nationwide Series, and the latter got me watching the Denver Broncos to see for myself what all the “underdog comes out on top” hype was about.
 
What such attention-getting antics and notables make me realize is the importance of injecting an aura of fun, entertainment and excitement into our business endeavors – in other words, to transform them into something that transcends the outmoded idea of  “business as usual” in order to successfully compete in today’s far more dynamic culture and environment.

My question to you, then, is: does your enterprise have something going for it that might potentially have a mesmerizing effect similar to that created by a Danica Patrick or a Tim Tebrow? And if you have found such a entertaining schtick, what are you doing to bring it to the attention of a wider audience? Might you try using it, for example, to “kick some ash?”

Lately I have been contemplating business models – what makes them unique, and what attributes are apt to produce really big wins. A few of these, such as Bubba Gump Shrimp and Crocs, I have discussed in past blogs, but today I want to talk about what I call the “crazy” factor.

I am coming to the conclusion that the thing that can give the most value to any new business or business model should be an operating strategy that causes someone to ask the president or CEO: “Are you people crazy?” In fact, if that’s something you’re not hearing in regard to your enterprise, my recommendation would be for you to come up with some really “wild and crazy” idea that challenges conventional thinking, and run with it until you do start eliciting such comments.

Recently I was reflecting on working with Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, and how he managed to create a business organizing philosophy that permitted almost any bank to issue its own Visa card. At the time, he was being called crazy for the unique vision he espoused of a “chaordic” blend of order and chaos that enables self-governing organizations to become successful. Today Visa has grown into one of the largest companies in the world, processing a trillion dollars worth of transactions, despite the fact that most people don’t even know where its headquarters are located or who its CEO is.

It was Dee Hock who taught me one exercise that I now feel compelled to share. It consists of drawing three concentric circles. In the inside circle you would write down the functions of every sector of your business, including both typical aspects such as purchasing, manufacturing, sales and customer service and customized ones, be they people, coding, patents, acquisitions, whatever. The second circle would be reserved for certain connections your company has, say, with a university or a bank, or perhaps a unique customer relationship. In the third circle, you could talk about aspects of your operation that most of its executives seldom think about, from its cell-phone contract to the kind of music played by its personal computers or piped into its lobby or over the phone during “call waiting” intervals (which can sometimes serve as a subliminal factor in inviting people to stay, as when supermarkets broadcast “oldies” over their intercom that appeal to a large segment of their customer base). And, as you have probably guessed by now, this would be the “crazy circle” where you could incorporate that off-the-wall idea that ends up putting your company on the map of edgy and innovative organizations.

An example of what I’m talking about was our getting a popular M.D. and health expert, Dr. Andrew Weil, to both help us formulate and then endorse Pet Promise pet food. It was a move that made many people in the industry think we were crazy — but it served to give the product line instant credibility with the public, and to leapfrog over other brands to achieve a top ranking in the natural pet food category.

So my question to you is: what are you doing in your business that gives it a reputation for craziness? If the answer is nothing, make that a goal for the rest of the year — to do something outlandish that ultimately results in your being asked, “Are you people crazy?” Then you’ll know your organization has made an impact – and has achieved a definite strategy for outmaneuvering and outpacing the competition. (And that is what’s commonly known as being “crazy like a fox.”)

This week, I was privileged to take part in a exercise the object of which was to help determine what brands can do to turn consumers into loyal followers and enthusiasts. 

Now, this particular meeting was conducted in accordance with the “Chatham House Rule,” which specifies that participants are free to use any information they receive as long as they don’t reveal the identities of the speakers or others present. So while I’m restrained from going into specifics about the people involved, I can talk about something else – my own reaction upon discovering that I was one of the oldest people in the room.  This realization came as something of a shock, since for most of my career, I have been the youngest in the room when attending such functions. So, at least for me, this conference represented a milestone of sorts – that moment of truth we all inevitably arrive at, when we say to ourselves, “Yes, I have to admit I am getting older (if not quite old).”

But, beyond such personal reflection, the key question here is: how best can I and others who have reached such “maturity” (or perhaps seniority is a better word) use our collective experience and the wisdom that comes with it to help guide an enterprising new generation that is admittedly far more technologically savvy than ours?  

Just how to go about this without appearing to be either arrogant or antiquated, so as to form a basis of mutual respect – ours for their novel ideas and mastery of new technology, and theirs for our battle-hardened understanding of things like strategy and diplomacy – is an important and delicate issue that we must increasingly grapple with. And I, for one, intend to give it a lot of thought in the coming months.