A regular blog about (un) sustainable business. A focus on practical stuff, not blue sky pretentious waffle. Around 6000 regular readers, surprisingly.
Alex Edmans is professor of finance at London Business School and Wharton. He’s been researching the links between investing in employee welfare, and financial returns. Alex’s prior research shows that companies listed in some “Best Companies To Work For” lists beat the market by 2 to 3 per cent per year over a 26 year…
With the news that Kara Hurst, head of the Sustainability Consortium is to join Amazon as a senior sustainability executive an important question arises. “If you work in sustainability/CSR in a company that doesn’t really care about the agenda, what can you do about it?” There are two ways to answer this question. One is…
Forums, all about innovation. Come along to one of them. Recently, after 13 years, I left Ethical Corporation to start a new company, Innovation Forum. There’s a number of reasons behind this, as some of you who know me, will be aware. It was a difficult change to make, given I had founded the business…
I recently moderated a session on business models and innovation at the Centre for Sustainable Design’s conference titled “Collaboration, Co-creation & New Business Models” and organised by Martin Charter. More about it all can be found here. Here below are Martin’s ten key take aways from the conference. Foresight: adaption to climate change, circular economy &…
Lots of tech companies, unsurprisingly More on all this, here. Sustainability issues and innovations don’t seem to be taken into account, at least as far as one can tell. Odd considering BCG consultants seem to regard themselves as sustainability experts too. Look at this recent report they co-authored, the Innovation Bottom Line, all about sustainability….
Here are some McKinsey CEO / Leadership interviews which ought to be useful weekend reading. McKinsey seem to have stopped asking you to log-in to their website to read these, thankfully: An interview with Daniel Vasella, Chairman, Novartis Key quotes: “what we see is a paradox: people seem to have less trust in government, yet…
This video may help explain: For those reading by email, click here. “Chance favours the connected mind”, argues Steven Johnson in this four minute video. Sounds about right to me.
Here’s a great story about how sustainability and innovation can work hand in hand: “Color It Green: Nike to Adopt Waterless Textile Dyeing“. This is particularly significant considering that: “Textile coloring and treatment accounts for between 17 percent and 20 percent of global industrial pollution, according to The World Bank, including 72 toxic chemicals in…
Ever wondered exactly what the difference is between the Coca-Cola Company and Coca-Cola Enterprises? I wasn’t clear, so I asked Joe Franses. Oh, and we talked about some greener related stuff too: Coca-Cola Enterprises and sustainability strategy and implementation Joe Franses, head of corporate responsibility and sustainability at Coca-Cola Enterprises, discusses the company’s new sustainability…
Here’s some great advice from Jim Collins on how not to demotivate employees. Worth three minutes. The best leaders, says Collins, don’t worry about motivating people. They hire passionate employees and don’t extinguish their passion. There’s a big difference. What demotivates workers? 1) Hype: a failure to acknowledge the real difficulties the organization faces 2) Futurism: Always…
Now available used Alongside having my favourite corporate website of all time on transparency, Patagonia has some new ideas about sustainable consumption. Read about them here. Briefly, the idea is to “enable consumers to resell their used Patagonia apparel via the Common Threads Initiative within eBay. In addition, consumers will now be able to resell…
I was at a meeting with some lawyers and anti-corruption consultants recently. During the meeting it became obvious that whilst they were interested in the ethics angle of anti-corruption compliance, sustainability didn’t register as relevant. They looked bemused when I mentioned it in a similar context to corporate ethics. Ethics itself, is often looked at…
The team at Ethical Corporation spend at least a third of their time on research into what companies are doing, and thinking, in the field of sustainable business. Luckily, I get to spend about half my time on this. It’s a lot of what my job entails: Work out what’s happening, try and turn it…
Here’s a link to a new publication Ethical Corporation has just released. It’s called “Smart Strategy for Sustainable Business“. The PDF is a sixty page round-up of the best of our management articles in the last two years. If you are subscriber you can get it for free by emailing subs@ethicalcorp.com If you’d like to buy…
Yes, it sounds like lunacy. Or at least, hippie nonsense. But it’s not. A culture audit MAY be just what you need. Given the importance of culture in embedding sustainability, working out what yours looks like makes a lot of sense. UBS appears not to have had any, which may be more the problem than…
I'm Toby Webb, founder of Innovation Forum, a sustainability focused research, publishing and events business. I've also been a lecturer on Corporate Responsibility at Kings College London and at Birkbeck, University of London for eight years. I work with large companies all over the world and sit on the sustainability advisory board for Walgreens Boots Alliance. From 2006-9 I lead the development of UK CSR policy, resulting in the Responsibility Deals framework. I can be contacted at Tobias DOT Webb AT innovation-forum.co.uk
Recent Comments