The prevalence of social media increases the impact of civil society and many are hopeful that consumer action will help drive sustainable behavior.

In this post, and others, I have expressed my doubts about whether consumers will put their purchasing power into action to support sustainability.

But even if they do, the activities of the last few weeks on pink slime make me question whether consumers,  on the occasions they are motivated to act for sustainability, even make the right decisions.

This blog from The Washington Post, is one of many that highlights the downside of stopping our use of pink slime, also known as lean finely textured beef (LFTB).  LFTB maximizes the use of each  slaughtered cow.    Refraining from using it will increase the number of cows killed and the burden on the environment (including climate change).

The Opinion section of the New York Times this past Sunday carried this article that highlighted that LFTB has a relatively high nutrition for low cost and low fat. LFTB also has a good safety record.  It reports that the Consumer Federation of America and the National Consumers League defended the product. The reaction to the public outcry has caused job losses already.

The reaction to LFTB fails it seems on almost every measure of corporate responsibility and sustainability; environment, resources, animal rights ethics, jobs, nutrition, health.

Perhaps worth noting that there was no immediate and direct cost impact apparent to consumers for speaking up against LFTB. A convenient untruth it seems is more powerful than an inconvenient truth.

Only last week I wrote a post that questioned whether we can pin our hopes on an expectation that consumers will purposefully behave in a green manner. There are loads of great ideas out there that provide sustainability information, but nothing I have seen that grabs me by the throat. Until last night!

Last night I went to Bethesda Green for an event organized by the Energy and Environment Committee of the DC chapter of the British American Business Association.

Bethesda Green is a green business incubator, based, not surprisingly, inBethesda,Md.

I talked to a number of people and would like to write about everything, but the one that grabbed me by the throat was while speaking with John Jabara founder of SaveniaLabs. The retailer pays to have the products they sell assessed by SaveniaLabs and tagged accordingly in the store.

Sitting on the table next to us were two filter coffee machines in their boxes.  Each product cost about $100. They each had a label on them highlighting their Savenia Labs Energy Rating in the form of the lifetime energy cost.

One was $50 lifetime energy cost, the other about $350 lifetime energy cost, based on a 5 year energy life. That is quite a difference for a product that costs $100 – impactful information provided at the right place and the right time.   John reported that products with better ratings had seen their sales increase significantly.   You can bet that products with worse ratings had seen corresponding decreases.

With differences that big on just a coffee machine, I was persuaded that this is an approach that will have a big and positive impact on sustainability.

My stint on the governing board ended after two years and I continued to chair the professional development association for an additional year and just handed over the reins to my successor, Bart Alexander from Molson Coors.

As a committee, we spent our few meetings identifying the characteristics that define a profession and shortlisted those we would focus on.

• Professional society
• A clear definition of the role
• Specification of knowledge, skills and attributes
• Code of ethics

The CRO Association now includes an individual membership category and we focused the mission on empowering individuals at all levels to take action to improve corporate citizenship.

We took a lot of input from members of the profession in workshops, at conferences, on webinars and in one to one conversations and, in February 2011, published a Guidebook on Structuring and Staffing Corporate Responsibility that included job descriptions mapped across to a definition of knowledge, skills and attributes.  We presented this at the subsequent CR conference and developed ideas for the next steps for the professional development of the field.

We also considered the role of ethics, established an advisory group and published a draft code of ethics for practitioners. Our intent was to develop a values-based ethics statement rather than a compliance statement.   We held two ethics workshop sessions at CR conferences. At the first we held roundtable debates on case studies on ethical dilemmas.  The second, at Commit Forum 2011 inNew York, was facilitated by Rush Kidder only a few months before his untimely death. Rush reinforced for me the idea of Ethical Fitness and the importance of personal ethical strength.

Ethics is the area about which I feel the most passionate. Attendees at the workshops were very engaged and enthusiastic. However gaining consensus to a code proved a tough nut to crack because there is still a broad range of views of the values at the core of the role. I hope that the discussions themselves served a purpose even though we didn’t manage to complete agreement on a code.

I am moving on now. I think it is healthy for committees to have new leadership and the opportunity to take a fresh look at priorities and direction. My thanks to Richard Crespin and the staff at CROA for their support and to all the committee members who served during my term as chair;  Hess Oil, Boeing, Molson Coors, Cisco, Capaccio, Crowe Horwath and Weinreb Group.    I also want to extend a big thanks to Bart Alexander for agreeing to pick up where I left off and move things forward.

CROA is not the only organization working on professional development. I wrote a post about some of the others. But we are not there yet. I participated in a workshop on Business and Human Rights with John Ruggie earlier last week at the State Department. At the end of one of the breakouts, one of theUS government representatives commented that he continued to perceive a lack of standard methods to approach human rights issues across companies.  I could see why he thought that based on the discussion in the workshop.   Of course, one solution is legislation and regulation.   Another though is to continue to develop the role of the professional practitioner so that when we meet at workshops we have a common understanding of what we do and how we do it.

Professional development is an area about which I continue to feel passionate and I am looking forward to seeing the next initiative from the CROA come to fruition.

I enjoyed reading Marc Gunther’s piece on consumer behavior in Green Biz a couple of weeks back, together with his analysis of whether consumer behavior is driving companies to participate in initiatives like the Good Guide and effecting company change.    I’m still with Joel Makower, founder of GreenBiz, in that I, too, don’t see that consumer behavior is driving market change.

The recent IPO for Annie’s Organics demonstrates perhaps, there is potential for green products.  Molly Ashby, who heads up the fund that took Annie’s from the shelves of specialty organic markets to Costco, commented in the Wall Street Journal that “[e]very once in a while a company comes around that changes things.”  And, Annie’s Organics may really be that company – after all it’s a company with a very clear and forceful CSR mission and its IPO was hugely successful by any standards, not just those of ‘green’ or ‘eco-friendly’ companies. My perspective at the moment though is that this is still a niche marketplace.

I think that before consumers get behind the greening of products they’re going to need a simpler way to consume the information.  One approach is the likes of easy to digest publications like  Consumer Reports and Eat This, Not That.  Another approach is apps that relate to the consumers personal experience.  So, for example, an app that rather than providing the nutritional specification of a product, tracks the consumers intake of vitamins, calories etc and provides specific  advice on  what to eat for the next snack to stay on track.

But overall,  I think that a sustainable future is not in green products or in detailed sustainability related product data.  I think that the right green decision will ultimately be one that is invisible to the consumer. It is not something the consumer is deciding on consciously. Rather, they buy the best product because it is the best product with the best brand, and it happens to be sustainable too. Sustainability might be reflected as a component in the customer’s trust of the brand, but not of the individual product.

As Dara O’Rourke notes at the end of Marc Gunther’s article, transparency is critically important.  The Sustainability Consortium certainly seems to be moving in that direction. It is building, tools to analyze and evaluate the impact of thousands of products. But, in my opinion, it is not important because the consumer cares on an individual product by product purchase. It is important because it is an important indicator of commitment by the company.

Closer to home, BT recently became the first company to ever achieve a certified cradle to cradle carbon footprint of a product with the new Green House Gas (GHG) protocol, certified by The Carbon Trust. I don’t expect customers to read about this on the side of the box and buy the product as a result.  But it gives us the information we need to understand the full end to end footprint of the product from upstream manufacture at one of our vendors to consumption during in life use at a customer’s premise.  That way we know where to focus our attention to have maximum impact. I hope this attention to fundamentals will become a part of our brand recognition.

More recently, other significant global brands, including Coca-Cola and General Motors, have pulled funding from organizations that have aggressively advocated positions against their CSR/sustainability policies.

General Motors withdrew funding from the Heartland Institute, according to RTCC,  due to its aggressive skeptic oriented proposal on how represent climate science in schools. (Although it appears that the GM funding was not  associated with this particular policy issue)

Coca-Cola withdrew support from American Legislative Exchange Council ALEC for the same climate related reason according to the RTCC report. Although The Guardian reported that  Coca-Cola withdrew support  from ALEC  because of that organization’s approach to Stand your Ground and voter ID legislation.

Either way though, in the new world of increasing expectation of corporate responsibility there are ever more complex layers of decision making to be tackled in determining which organizations you align with.

Can a member of any organization expect every position held by that organization to be consistent with their values?  One option of course is not to join anything, but to make every determination on an issue by issue basis. But many positions are well aligned on a values basis. Society can make progress more efficiently through aligning by common interests and delegating some of our representation accordingly. On some issues we will disagree with the position of the organization and we should be comfortable saying so.

And surely there are times where one can effect change better from within that without.   I imagine many CSR practitioners have faced this question in their own mind at times.

My inclination is towards transparency and focusing on the overall values of an organization.. Depart from organizations with conflicting values even if there are individual issues where interests are common.  Join those where values align.  Then address differences on individual issues from within. And if you want to keep your membership secret?  Probably a sign of a one you should leave.

What do you think?

Environment once meant something we went to visit on a weekend hike to a national park. But that type of thinking is counterproductive.  It separates the daily actions of the majority of people, who live in urban environments, from the environment.    This interview with Harvard economist Edward Glaeser addresses why urbanization could be a solution to many intractable sustainability problems:

“It is somewhat counterintuitive but all that is leafy is not necessarily green – living around trees and living in low density areas may end being actually quite harmful for the environment, whereas living in high-rise buildings and urban core may end up being quite kind to the environment.”

Citystates captures this tension neatly with the statement “sustainability needs cities as much as cities need sustainability”.   The paper takes a broad look at the city from political, social and operational perspectives and how cities are vital to the future of sustainability.     The report posits seven characteristics or citystates.

Of course my attention jumped to the first of these citystates, the connected city. The combination of networks, sensors and applications creates a host of opportunities for improved environmental efficiency.  But, as the paper points out, it also creates the possibility of social separation if technology replaces too much human interaction.

The November 2011 paper Information MarketPlaces: The New Economics of Cities by The Climate Group takes a deep dive into the many possible solutions that information communications technology can bring to the sustainable city. The Smart cities of this paper are smart in a connected technology sense, but also in the sense that they are driven by the need to tackle long term challenges.

BT offers technical solutions for cities and communities that meet the needs of commercial and government customers and of consumers.   Our sustainability partnership with LOCOG  for the summer Olympics and Paralympic Games has been on the scale of a small city. This case study highlights some of the components of the sustainability angle of our partnership with London 2012.

The foundation is broadband, and super-fast broadband even more so. This report,  just produced for BT shows that the financial benefit alone is hard to resist. For the city of Sunderland, superfast broadband plans already announced could create £296 million in Gross Value Add (GVA) for the city’s economy over 15 years. For London the figure is  £19.8 billion in GVA over the next 15 years.

The world’s cities are not homogenous though, as we show in this BT report Mega-cities that looks at Sao Paulo, Guangzhou, Jakarta and Mumbai. The opportunities and challenges vary widely.

But in all cases, sustainable city based communities, supported by connected technology have the scale and the potential to address some of our greatest sustainability challenges. We just need to find ways to work together with a long term perspective across business, government and citizens.

It was a fascinating discussion, including a number of city sustainability practitioners from across in the wider DC metropolitan area.

What struck me the most were the similarities between the challenges faced by city managers and the challenges faced in business.  Here are a few examples:

1)      Short term thinking.  Some of the city representatives referred to the challenges of planning cycles that, at best, align with the time between elections.  Of course we have similar (one might think worse!) challenges in business, meeting the limited time horizon of many investors.

2)      Departmental Silos. A spend in one department results in benefits in another department.   In these days of focus on cost and budget cuts and with the customary management structures in large organizations, it takes creativity and determination to make holistic decisions in government and in business.

3)      Motivating stakeholders to care. Whether civil society with their vote or consumers with their investment and spending power, both government and business are challenged by the difficulty of motivating stakeholders to act in a way that rewards sustainable behavior.

Both reassuring and at the same time worrying to see how similar are these themes. The good news is that we are all trying to address these challenges.

Do you see any other commonalities or differences between the challenges faced by business and government?

In the ‘Retraction’ show, Charles Duhigg outlines that the fictional account in the earlier broadcast,  while being based on factual events, connected and exaggerated the facts in a way that was way beyond the standards of journalistic reporting.  Ira Glass, the show’s host, asks Duhigg the question “Should we still feel bad about working conditions in China?”   In declining to answer that specific question,  Duhigg instead offered to share some facts to allow the listener to reach their own conclusion.  I would summarize his response as stating that working standards in many Chinese factories are significantly worse than we would accept in the USA both by law and by practice.  While I think this is almost certainly true, I don’t believe it is enough of a basis upon which to make a determination of whether or not we should still feel bad.

‘How much worse ?’ is obviously an important issue in reaching a personal determination.

But even if we can resolve that question, there is an equally important issue. That is, the extent to which the working conditions have enabled the low production costs and production flexibility through which economically developed nations have shared their wealth with developing and emerging economies allowing them to improve their societal wellbeing.

I think the key conditions for accepting worse working conditions are:

• A baseline of global human rights
• That working conditions are better than the alternative that would exist without the foreign investment
•  That they are on a path of continual improvement designed to lead to an equality of standards, rather than a perpetuation of the imbalance.

What do you think ?

The very next day, on March 16^th, in this show, This American Life retracted the January show because the main report upon which it was based contained numerous fabrications.

I had planned to write a follow up post this week identifying the many similarities between This American Life’s report and The Jungle; migrant workers, poverty traps, collusion between government and industry, guards, injuries, pollution, predatory behaviors, underage workers…..the list goes on and the likenesses in theme still amaze me.   In a second post identifying the contrasts, my conclusion was to have been that we have actually made progress.  Now the January show has been retracted, the case for progress having been made is even stronger. But the retraction show raises some other interesting issues:

• Mike Daisey tries to excuse the fabrications in the original show by saying “the work tells a story that makes people care” and without the fabrications the story “would come apart in a way that would ruin everything.”
• Charles Duhigg of the New York Times outlines the known issues in Chinese factories. His interview confirms that the issues in the Mike Daisey story have some basis in fact. However they didn’t happen to nearly the same extent and connected manner that Daisey portrays.

As a result the story is not as compelling.   Ira Glass wavers. He states that he doesn’t feel as bad as he did and is no longer sure he should feel bad at all about conditions in Chinese factories.

Working standards in many Chinese factories are significantly worse than we would accept in the USA both by law and by practice.  A question I hope to address in a future post are the criteria by which we should determine whether we should feel bad about it. But let’s assume for a moment that we agree we should.

One of the most challenging issues in CSR and sustainability is motivating stakeholders – especially civil society and shareholders, to care enough to act in a way that rewards companies (and governments) for taking responsible and sustainable paths.  There is continual agonizing for example about walking the right line on climate change – between scientific truth that loses peoples’ interest, versus emotional stories that risk sensationalism and exaggeration.

Factual reporting has a critical role to play, but I would argue that it will not bring about change in society without being translated, responsibly, into accounts that make the personal experience real and meaningful. The same as companies translate the boring feature list of a product into an emotionally appealing advertisement.     Fictional accounts can be a vehicle to stimulate change but, while not misrepresenting fact, they need not purport to be fact to achieve that change.

I would still urge you to read The Jungle and the transcript of Mike Daisey’s show. Also listen to the March 16th This American Life podcast here.  The discussion of the issues is as enlightening as the original show.

The Jungle is an expose of the appalling conditions in the Chicago meat packing industry in the opening decade of the last century. Told through the eyes of the proud patriarch of an immigrant family from Lithuania, it was a classic of its time and an enduring classic of CSR literature.

Thank goodness we have safeguards in place now and are beyond that. Or are we?

Partway through reading the book, I found myself in the gym listening to Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory – podcast #454 from my favorite radio show This American Life.    Told through the eyes of a stand-up comedian-come-journalist, Mike Daisey visits Shenzhen in China to learn more about the factory in which his iPhone was manufactured.

A little over 100 years later the similarity between the opening of The Jungle and the opening of Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory was striking. For me, the juxtaposition of reading the former in a 106 year old first edition of the book, and listening to the latter on my iPod was also striking.

If you have a chance, listen to the podcast.  Perhaps read one of these summaries of The Jungle, the full text or even buy a first edition copy for yourself.  There is a signed copy here on Abebooks for $11,500 but much more reasonably priced copies also available!

I plan to write a little more about the similarities and differences in the coming days, but would also love to hear what you think.

Post script  March 20 2012 – On March 16 th 2012, the day after I posted this blog, This American Life retracted the Mr Daisey show due to the number of fabrications in the story. I have commented on the implications of the retraction here http://csrperspective.com/corporate-responsibilty/retraction-a-place-for-truth-and-for-fiction/