Creating Sustainable Organizations

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Creating Sustainable Organizations - Sara Schley and Joseph Laur

and industry, especially on efforts to establish prices, to compete, and to earn a profit.
Yet what would happen if we turned these constraints around and saw them not as challenges but as opportunities for innovation in business-- just as a skilled engineer or architect uses the constraints posed by his or her project as catalysts for designing creative, attractive, and valuable solutions? To see constraints through the lens of opportunity, organizations need to adopt a systems view, and see natural systems principles as strategic guidelines for product and service development. Companies that can develop strategies in alignment
with sustainability principles will avoid getting squeezed by the walls of the funnel, and will hone their competitive edge in the marketplace.

Global Warming: Problem or Opportunity?

So how do organizations use sustainability principles to their advantage? The issue of global warming is one that has an impact on many industries. Global warming is a familiar and controversial subject in the media today. However, no one refutes the observable data: Average annual global temperatures have shown an upward trend overall, from about 14.5 degrees Celsius in 1866 to 15.4 degrees in 1995—the warmest year on record. Simultaneously, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are 25-30 percent higher than at any time in the last 160,000 years (State of the World, 1997, WorldWatch Institute). Carbon dioxide, a "greenhouse gas" that results in part from the burning of petroleum in combustion engines, is thought to contribute to the trapping of heat in the

THE "FUNNEL"

Earth's atmosphere and hence the phenomenon of global warming.
Indeed, in December 1997, 160 nations came together in Kyoto in an unprecedented global agreement restricting emissions of greenhouse gases, to be implemented over the next decade. GM chairman Jack Smith predicts that global warming will force a "phase-off of the internal combustion engine" (Time magazine, December 15, 1997). What fuel and power technologies will replace the internal combustion engine? These challenges create tremendous opportunities for innovations in business, as illustrated in the examples below.
In addition, regulatory pressures add compliance costs and create barriers to entry into certain markets. And, as losses mount due to wild weather swings, the cost of insuring our businesses increases. Crop failures and other disruptions in supply chains may also result. Global disruptions, no matter how distant, are rarely good for any

business. And because we don't know just where our atmosphere's limits are, or how severe the consequences of exceeding them will be, or what the delays in the system might be, we are conducting a risky experiment on ourselves, our communities, and our economies worldwide. Global climate change is a powerful reminder to consider the systemic impacts of our actions, and to correct them ourselves before the system corrects them for us, at our expense.
Clearly, the problems that come from global warming and the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide suggest the need for controlling carbon dioxide emissions. It's also obvious that establishing such limits has enormous ramifications for many industries. But the idea of restricting carbon dioxide emissions also opens the door to some exciting new possibilities. Below are several examples of industries that have risen to the challenge of creating alternatives to greenhouse gas emissions.

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