Ethics Trumps Sustainability

I posted a blog in January "sustainability is over-rated" in which I posited that sustainability was just one of the principles against which Corporate Responsibility can be judged and practiced. A number of people commented that we should focus on action and not worry too much about terminology. Call me obsessed, but I cannot let it go at that. I believe more and more that ethics underpins sustainability and that we must be able to speak to ethics to be able to resolve some of the most challenging sustainability issues we will face in the future.

The broadly accepted principle of sustainability asks that we use resources in a manner that satisfies current needs without compromising the needs or options of future generations. Who says that the needs of the yet to be conceived, their children and their children’s children ad infinitum, are valued equally highly with the needs of those alive today? The answer is that our predominantly accepted code of ethics tells us that.

If being sustainable turns out to be easy, this might not matter. However, if being sustainable turns out to require behavioral change and perhaps sacrifice, we will need to be able to articulate and defend the ethical foundation on which it is based. To illustrate, I like to look at another view of the world……..

At BSR last year, many others and I listened to an inspiring plenary highlight by Zhang Yue Chairman and CEO of BROAD air conditioning in China. We all felt so good listening to a fantastically successful Chinese businessman talk about all he achieved through his environmentally friendly business approach. But you could hear the sharp intake of Westerners’ breath when he stated that of course he fired any employee who had more than one child, because more than one child per family was not consistent with a sustainable population and planet. This contrast in values is fundamentally an ethics question.

I recently read Practical Ethics by Peter Singer. It provided me with a structure to step back from my inherited values and look at them from an external perspective. I have not changed my views (that much!), but I understand them and their heritage much better. I also learned that our approach to sustainability is rooted in ethics and that some of our most difficult dilemmas, in particular when two good outcomes compete in a zero sum game, need to be sorted with the help of ethics, before we can apply sustainability correctly.

Employee Engagement

This is the first in a series of posts on the topic of employee engagement. It expands on my participation in a panel at BSR 09 a few weeks ago with Christopher Corpuel, Vice President, Sustainability at Hilton Hotels and Silvia Garrigo, Manager of Global Issues and Policy at Chevron. Silvia talked about engaging at the leadership level and Chris addressed integrating sustainability with the business. My focus was on engaging employees.

Deborah Fleischer at Triple Pundit - wrote a great overview of the session as did BSR. I have decided to try and capture my own thoughts while they are still relatively fresh in my mind.

But we should start with the question, why do any employee engagement at all? Employees are a key stakeholder group. They have the primary impact on the performance of the company in any particular corporate responsibility pillar and they have an impact through their actions outside of the workplace. The Green IT survey we did earlier this year identified that companies are able to lead the views or our employees towards a more positive approach to acting on climate change. So there is a rationale for companies to take action to engage employees on sustainability topics which they consider important – it makes a difference. The survey also identified that employees take more action at home than at work, so there is also room for improvement.

While I use carbon emissions and climate change primarily for examples, the steps apply equally to all pillars of corporate responsibility. And though I present them as a series of steps, in practice most examples I come across are implemented in parallel. Initiatives rarely start from a standing start and who wants to wait anyway! In three subsequent posts I will describe what I consider to be three stages to full employee engagement; leading from the top, generate momentum and harness momentum.

I am at BSR but the Real Sustainability News is at Supercomm

I am at BSR in San Francisco. Shortly I am speaking on a panel about sustainability engagement. My topic is employee engagement and one of my points is that for effective employee engagement you need visible senior management support.

At the same time as BSR, Supercomm09 is happening in Chicago. Supercomm is an international event for broadband communication providers, carriers and vendors. Thousands of people attend from the ICT sector.

In one of the sessions, five leaders in the telecom industry were asked on the SUPERCOMM stage what technology they would invest in today if money and budget were not an issue. These are technical guys (CTO, CIO, VP of networks etc). According to XChange Magazine, two of them, BT’s George Nazi and Sprint's Matthew Oommen presented ideas about clean energy and energy efficiency as their wishes.

This is the sort of visible leadership I am going to be referring to when I speak this morning. It lays the groundwork for effective employee engagement.

Of course speakers at BSR will address issues of social, economic and environmental sustainability. But the real news, and evidence of good progress, is when two of five senior business speakers on a technical panel at a regular trade conference put green issues at the top of their wish list.