Sustainability = Innovation, Reinventing the Infrastructure & WSE™

Why Sustainability is Now the Key Driver of Innovation will rank up there with Core Competence of the Corporation as a must read article IMHO. R. Nidumolu, C.K. Prahalad and M.R. Rangaswami provide us with a 5 stage sustainability roadmap in their Harvard Business Review article to gauge where an enterprise is along the journey.

1. Viewing Compliance as Opportunity

2. Making Value Chains Sustainable

3. Designing Sustainable Products and Services

4. Developing New Business Models

5. Creating Next Practice Platforms

In the beginning of any major shift there is a plethora of information without a good framework in which to put it all in perspective. This has been true for two management arenas - sustainability and innovation. Continuous innovation has long been thought of as the key to enterprise sustainability but what is different here is formally linking the two. 

Business Objectives - Beyond green and CSR

Nidumolu and colleagues are no strangers to deep enterprise transformation work or the fundamental reinvention required to attain new business models (stage four) and next practices (stage five). We see some of the usual culture change suspects executives must face – asking tough questions; what should the business be, how can we meet customers' needs differently, what are the implicit assumptions behind current practices?

Their survey of 30 companies resulted in a few simple rules for getting started: 

• Don’t start from the present
• Ensure that learning precedes investments
• Stay wedded to the goal while constantly adjusting tactics
• Build collaboration capacity
• Use global presence to experiment

The article makes clear that a sustainability journey is beyond “green” and “corporate social responsibility", a pattern which is clearly emerging from a variety of venues. 

It’s Time to Reinvent - Take Action

In the past few week’s, cover stories have featured:

• Fortune, New Rules for Recovery - CEO’s taking action to re-invent their businesses 

• Business Week, A radical re-think of R & D

• The Atlantic -  from health care to health and well being 

• NY Times, Venture Fund’s Green Fund’s Top $1billion   Khosla Ventures, a major venture fund taking a  bold stake toward investing in “science experiments”  to reinvent our infrastructure and not be afraid to fail if we are to reduce the carbon footprint

• Sloan Management Review, Beyond Green - Flourishing Forever an interview with John R. Ehrenfeld

In Ehrenfeld's words, sustainability is defined as:

"the possibility that human and other life will flourish on the planet forever. It’s a definition about as far from the central notion of sustainable development as night is from day. But, to me, it represents a truer idea about what sustainability is all about. Flourishing, like many other desirable qualities, is an emergent property. It has no thing-like character. It’s like health, or liberty, or freedom: It appears only when the whole system is functioning properly."

He challenges our thinking about typical "sustainability measures" as actually:

"... are our attempts to reduce the level of unsustainability. That’s different, because unsustainability can be divvied up into little pieces. Global warming, fisheries collapse—you name it, there are a myriad of different categories which we talk about today. All these problem areas need to be lessened and made less harmful because we’re not going to be able to flourish until we get these under control. They’ll never go away entirely, but they can be brought under control."

Common to all of these stories is:

• Acknowledgment that something needs to be different (our world has changed)
• Willingness to experiment with a new approach
• More than CSR, green or sustainable development
• Emergent
• Whole system (beyond the enterprise boundary), and
• An expectation of failure before success.

Workable Models for Executives

Several months ago I challenged Pepsi Bottling Group here to rethink carbonated and non-carbonated beverage bottling and recommended Carol Sanford’s regeneration process. 

Another sustainable innovation leader is Janine Benyus who coined the term biomimicry – using nature's design for innovation. There's much to learn from a system that has been around for 3.8 billion years!

And our own CORE™ model, featured in The Sustainable Enterprise Fieldbook , to bring stakeholder networks together for innovation.

There are many methods to push ourselves to reinvent, restructure, and become sustainable enterprises, but only whole systems approaches will make a difference. We can not afford to keep nibbling and patching problems while hoping for different outcomes.

Sustainable Globalization

I ‘m preparing a presentation on Sustainable Globalization for the Organization Development Network Conference in October with fellow co-author Karen Davis. We'll demonstrate our "6 Lenses for Sustainable Globalization" approach to assist leaders in understanding the whole system in which their enterprises operate.  Combined with the "5 Stage Sustainability Roadmap" and the insights from thought leaders mentioned above, executives can take away a fair diagnostic of where they are and where they need to go.  These are approaches that work. 

Wikisourcing Sustainable Enterprises and Influencers

In order to capture more of the “next practices” colleague Jenny Ambrozek and I have launched Wikisourcing Sustainable Enterprises, a crowd sourced initiative to profile enterprises and people who are creating the “next practices.”

We know there are more than the well known organizations challenging their old models and we want to hear about and share them with others.  Add your examples of inspiring sustainable enterprises and the people influencing your thinking. Then send the link along to others to contribute too.

Collectively we can make a flourishing sustainable future.

~ Victoria G. Axelrod