21st Century Organization

SEC Climate Change Disclosure 10-k Race Opens 2012

It’s ironic that the SEC’s 2010 interpretation of a previous Climate Change 10-k Disclosure ruling of the material impacts to a business is equivalent to a 10k foot race.  One thinks the race winner is to be a sustainability leader, but businesses, investors, Wall Street, and legal counsel see risk as well as opportunity. It’s a complex race in 2012 for public companies.

For those of us in the field of sustainability consulting, knowing the perceived constraints to transparent and honest disclosure, the politics of the SEC and other regulatory agencies will enable us to do more informed work with our clients and their stakeholders.  Public or private we need to work within a whole dynamic system.

An excellent panel discussion – SEC Climate Change Disclosure Requirements and what you need to know took place in late November at Baruch’s Zicklin Center for Corporate Integrity.

The panelists painted a landscape of conflicting behaviors from all stakeholders interpreting climate change impacts. Part of the issue is the lack of a clear framework for companies about what to disclose or what is material.  But I see these as the questions a company might need to discuss, bringing together legal counsel, accounting and business unit leaders.  Each holds a valuable perspective.  Be proactive and set the race course or wait to follow what others set in your industry.

Climate Change Disclosure Documents:

Download SEC Climate Change Disclosure Ruling Interpretation

Download CERES Disclosing_Climate_Risks_Feb_2011-1

Enlightening questions and comments from the panel discussion:

“climate change or any other sustainability issues are interchangeable”

“the insurance industry is particularly impacted by climate change – think Japan’s earthquake and tsunami”

“is reporting integrated from board to employees?”

“GE Ecoimagination is not visible in SEC filings”

“how will products create less climate change?”

“where do rating agencies enter?”

“is the accounting profession behind disclosures?”

Panelists:

Karoline Barwinski - Research Associate, Assistant Vice President with the ESG Investment Program at ClearBridge Advisors

Jim Coburn, JD - Senior Manager, Investment Programs, Ceres

Adam Kanzer, JD - Managing Director and General Counsel of Domini Social Investments and Vice President and Chief Legal Officer of the Domini Funds

Moderator:  Michael J. Greis – Principal, Riverbend Advisors

Companies mentioned:

AES - disclosed $17mm in carbon reduction

Chiquita - disclosed farms affected by floods

Climate Disclosure Standards Board

COSTCO - committed to sustainable seafood species based on consumer demand

Estee Lauder - thorough disclosure example

Puma - mapped their entire supply chain for material impacts

PWC – Carbon Reporting Standards

Siemens - Environmental portfolio of products and solutions

Timberland - CEO promotes sustainability

If you are in the NYC area and interested in sustainability please join us at ODNNY’s - OD and the Sustainable Enterprise with panelists from CSRwire.com, BSR and Deloitte’s Sustainability & Climate Change practice.

Make 2012 the year your enterprise wins the 10-K Climate Change Disclosure race and stays sustainable.

~ Victoria G. Axelrod

 

 

GE's Ecoimagination Challenge: The Power of Ideas, Ecosystems and Scale

November 16 I was fortunate to attend GE's event announcing the first winners of their Ecoimagination Challenge that strives to speed solutions to smarter power grids and energy technology. GE CEO Jeff Immelt, Marketing CMO Beth Comstock, VC funding partners and challenge winners were in the room

GE contributed $100m that was matched by 4 venture capital companies to invest in new smart power solutions and companies. The announcement of the first 12 winners, who will receive $55m in funding, generated media buzz including from MarketWatch, the Huffington Post and Fast Company. Meet the winners on the GE Ecoimagination site and watch the announcement video highlights here:

   

Beth Comstock's frank opening remarks set the open tone.  GE understands it doesn't have all the best ideas and (because of it's scale) can play a convening role for smart grid innovation. 

Clear too is GE’s understanding of the power of ecosystems.  GE’s partnering with leading venture capital firms increases a funded companies chances of success. VC’s bring cash and business nurturing expertise while spreading  the ventures reach to an extended investor network. And winners get access to "GE's army of product developers, engineers and sales people".

By crowdsourcing the pool of ideas and energy around the Ecoimagination Challenge are maximized. 4,000 concepts were submitted from across the globe over the course of the 10-week open competition.

Clearly GE is not the first to discover the power of crowdsourcing. Eli Lilly's outsourced research and development program that became InnoCentive dates to 1998; Procter and Gamble has inspired others with Connect and Develop, that CEO Lafley instigated in 2000; and IBM has been using Innovation Jams since 2001. Still GE's Ecoimagination Challenge and the announcement presentations highlight the potential in appropriate openness and the power in creating idea and talent ecosystems to drive innovation.

What's your experience with crowdsourcing for innovation?  What companies and programs impress you?  How impactful do you see the Ecoimagination Challenge will be?

~ Jenny Ambrozek

NETworkMINDS - Forbes 90th Anniversary Issue

28 essays from great minds tell the story of our connected lives quartered by Breakthroughs, Lifestyles,Technology, and Community in the May 7 issue of Forbes magazine -  The Power of Networks.  For anyone not familiar with all aspects of a connected world or needing a means to connect the dots, this issue should do the job.

Editor William Baldwin kicks off the issue with a re-framing of Metcalf's value of a network with Zipf's Law in his editorial, Making Connections.  Zipf. a linguist, used the frequency of words  usage  as the  determiner of value not just the number of connections in a network. 

Plotting word frequencies, Zipf observed that the numbers corresponded to the reciprocals of the words' ranks on the frequency table. If the, the most common word in English, appears 10,000 times in a book, the tenth most common word will appear 1,000 times, the hundredth most common 100 times.

The sequence of receding values 1, 1TK2, 1TK3 …, called the harmonic series, crops up in all sorts of places. There's Zipf in the size of cities, in the popularity of Web sites, in the familiar rule of thumb that says a handful of good customers account for the bulk of a company's sales. If you have 1,745 customers, the 80-20 rule says the top 20%, or 349, will deliver 80% of the dollars.

Forbes.com has created a Corporate ORG Chart Wiki  in beta which is a great start for helping the "hierarchy dependent" to possibly map the "informal organization" where we know the real work gets done!  Let's all use the Forbes Org Wiki for this purpose as well.

Congrats to Forbes for the grand tour from our brains "synaptic networks" to the collective character our "global community" to do good.

~Victoria G. Axelrod   

Diagram Of A Blog

Brava to Paula Scher! Her Diagram Of A Blog in today's New York Times maps the civility cycle.

View this photo

~ Victoria G. Axelrod

Network Science

A well thought out reference for understanding network science generated from your tax dollars hard at work for some positive benefit.  Enjoy!

~Victoria G. Axelrod

How are people 2.0-ing?

Thursday, November 30, 2006 2:18:19 PM

Today Robert Scoble links to this technology-out view of Web2.0 applications from Don Dodge. Ross Mayfield (my go-to guy for a more nuanced view of how wikis are influencing business (and vice-versa)) also gives Dodge a mention. I like this quick summary and the basic conclusion. But I want to see the "people-" and "work practice-"in view.

Specifically I'd like to see Dodge's "build it and they will come" view replaced by a user oriented, participatory "let's find out what people are really doing before we build anything" approach. The build it first way definitely has it's place. Who knew we could do so much with a photocopier, or a personal sound device, before we had them? No one. However, I want to look a bit more deeply at the user and participatory practices that run through Web 2.0 visions.

As I mentioned the other day, Tim O'Reilly's What is Web 2.0? paper is mostly about the software. But nestled in there are some ideas about participation among people and a core competency that Web 2.0 companies need to have; viz., "trusting users as co-developers". What, exactly, does that look like? Fortunately, this has been done before, and we can look it up.

Co-development with users has been practiced in Scandanavia and Europe under the name "Participatory Design" (PD) since the 1970's and in the US since the late 1980's. (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) is a good starting point for learning about PD and linking to PD resources.) PD grew out of sociotechnical systems and action research work in the 1950's and 1960's at the Tavistock Institute in London. Bringing social science to bear on business and management problems was a hallmark of this work. In addition, Kristen Nygaard, the inventor of the Simula object-oriented programming language, was also a major proponent to PD approaches to system development. So this key requirement for business has long roots in both technology and the humanities. Maybe, just maybe, these new internet practices will force us to appreciate the social nature of technology development and use. Maybe our adoption of the new will help us remember and bring forward the parts of the past we can use right now. I hope so.

So we're good with co-developing systems and applications with users. What does it take do this well and to be successful? Joan Greenbaum and Morten Kyng (quoted from this Kuhn and Winograd profile on PD) identify four design techniques that are based on PD:

1. The need for designers to take work practice seriously—to see the current ways that work is done as an evolved solution to a complex work situation that the designer [or programmer] only partially understands.

2. The fact that we are dealing with human actors, rather than cut-and-dried human factors—systems need to deal with users' concerns, treating them as people, rather than as performers of functions in a defined work role.

3. The idea that work tasks must be seen within their context and are therefore situated actions, whose meaning and effectiveness cannot be evaluated in isolation from the context.

4. The recognition that work is fundamentally social, involving extensive cooperation and communication.

Putting these techniques into practice requires an entirely new paradigm of software development (cf., Floyd, Reisin, & Schmidt); one that moves engineers and designers out into the workplace of the potential users, so that they can actually understand what the work entails. This knowledge can enable the development and deployment of systems and tools that really augment the work and enable the discovery of new work.

So, how's it going for "trusting users [the people in the 2.0 world] as co-developers"?.

Well, one thing to say is that more and more anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers are getting involved with software development companies (cf.; the anthrodesign e-mail list; interaction design; contextual design). In most cases, these people really are looking at work and work practices. They do still need to translate what they know into information that engineers and programmers can use. And this doesn't get the engineers out, but people who know how to look and how to ask can bring in key product requirements.

On the technology side, agile approaches to software development are facilitating concerted efforts to engage customers (not always the end users) directly with engineers to deliver small solutions quickly, and to refine what's needed through use. Not only is there cooperation; there's a neat division of authority and responsibility. Customers get to say what they want; developers get to say how long it will take. When this works there's lot of discussion and communication about needs and costs. However, customers and users are often represented on the engineering team by a single person. This is better than letting engineers imagine how work is done, but the details and context of the user's work practice is often lost -- it's hard for one person to know everything. Not to mention that when you hang around with engineers you eventually see the world as they do.

And, finally, on the consumer side there is a steady drumbeat (start with The Cluetrain Manifesto) to find ways to talk directly with customers; to get unfiltered feedback about how your product or service is working "in the wild". Here wikis and weblogs, etc., look like great tools. But very often I don't want to have a conversation with my vendor; I just want to buy the digital camera and start taking pictures. This participatory customer / vendor relationship seems like a great idea. But I don't know if it can capture enough of the context of my complaint or need. And I don't know if it can scale. Could conversations between every MS Word user and Microsoft even be supported? Are there enough hours in the day for that?

Even with all the questions I think it will get better for people in the 2.0 world. Definitely! And some bloggers continue to re-enforce that the web is all about people, people. That's good. It's all good.

- Bill