Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Managing for Sustainability: It’s Not About the Market

I was in a meeting of electronics manufacturers this month and heard the comment that “there really isn’t a market driver for sustainability.” While I know for certain that many consumers do care about sustainability, it’s true that rapidly changing technology is almost always the deciding factor when people are buying electronics.

So why should electronics companies (or anyone else, for that matter) work toward being more sustainable if their customers aren’t overtly demanding it?

To think about this from a micro perspective, why do humans do good? Not because it will make us rich, but because we’re afraid of the societal risks if we’re caught being bad, and because it makes us feel better about ourselves. I think these two reasons translate to corporations pretty well.

Acting unsustainably creates risks for corporations – and not just the risk of bad publicity. In the world of electronics, some raw materials are rare and come from warzones or countries with tightly controlled economies. By using these materials thriftily and encouraging reuse and recycling, a company can minimize its risk of raw material supply disruptions. More broadly, the less energy any company’s process and supply chain uses, the less susceptible they are to the risk of energy price fluctuations.

The feeling-good part also translates. All of us want to make a difference and many are willing to take a lower salary if we know we’re contributing to a good thing. The Ray Andersons and Paul Hawkens of the world show how CEOs and business owners are not immune from this need, and in fact, their passion and success show that even a CEO can do well by doing good and managing for sustainability.

But the real benefits go far beyond the executive suite. There’s ample evidence that a reputation as a sustainable company helps attract and retain the best employees. And that nurtures one of the most important qualities of any successful company: innovation. Having the best and the brightest, and cultivating their sense of engagement with their work, leads to better ways of doing things and new products.

Thinking about your product through a sustainability lens also opens up new lines of thought that can lead to new concepts and, perhaps most importantly, new business models.

We know of one electronics manufacture that has completely reinvented how they are addressing their place in server farms, and we’ve reported here on how data storage giant EMC has tapped into employee creativity to create initiatives that improve both environmental and financial performance.

So when you are considering a sustainability platform for your company, I urge you to look inside your company for the drivers. You may find more value than you thought possible hiding in your employees and your supply chain.

Originally published on EarthShiftGlobal.com.