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March 22, 2012

A recent start-up in Portland, Oregon is social car sharing. Instead of renting from a carshare company, you rent cars by the hour from people around you. So “waste” unused car hours are reduced and the car owner gets some extra income. (Part of the scheme includes management of risk issues such as insurance.) It’s…

March 13, 2012

At a networking event the other day, we were talking about business sustainability.   Somebody asked me what I’d say if I found my ideal CEO client next to me in an elevator. KNOW / FEEL / DO One great tip I work with (from Bill Jensen’s Simplicity Survival Handbook) is about being clear in your communication. …

March 13, 2012

“Business doesn’t listen!” is a regular complaint that I hear in environmental circles – but what IS business?   Essentially, business is a group activity – a process.  There is no physical thing called business that we can put in a wheelbarrow.  We may be able to put a building, a product, a machine or a person  in a wheelbarrow…

March 4, 2012

A friend connected me to Simon Sinek’s TED talk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action”.   

February 28, 2012

Great initiative in Seattle, documented on Grist recently.  A great example of smart local approaches to environmental sustainability: “There’s a stretch of arterial in Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood that I’ve traveled probably thousands of times without giving a second thought to the empty, grassy hillside it parallels. When I heard about plans to create a seven-acre…

February 26, 2012

I saw an interesting-looking role advertised recently: Sustainability Strategy Manager.  From the title, it seemed like it could be interesting.  Sadly, when I read it, it wasn’t what I’d hoped.  The role reported into Marketing and seemed to be more to do with external communication than with building strategic sustainability capability within the business.

February 25, 2012

The first step in innovation success is listening – really getting to know the people you want to influence.  NLP’s model of primary interest filters provides a handy checklist of 5 things to listen for to help you  influence.  Use this list to identify what interests different people have and how you could interest them in the results you…

February 13, 2012

Stephen Covey’s new book “The 3rd Alternative” showed up in my library this week.  My first encounter with Mr. Covey was in “7 Habits of Highly Effective People ” and his distinction between “urgent” and “important” tasks has been a key time management tool for me for ever since.

February 8, 2012

Wandering the web the other day, it occurred to me that the continuous improvement process “5 whys” could be a powerful tool for sustainability.  I was watching a LinkedIn conversation on the challenges of consumption, and there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of depth to the conversation.

January 26, 2012

Behind the products we buy is a complex web of businesses that collaborate to make, transport, store, sell and deliver everything that goes in to the final product. This web is often (simplistically) described as “the supply chain”. Each business in a supply chain is a group of people combining a range of skills, ideas and…