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Tag Archives - sustainability

What is your favorite Social Media Channel for CSR / Sustainability topics in 2013?

May 14, 20134:09 pm

Back in 2012 I did a poll asking you what your favorite social media channel was. The results where pretty clear with Twitter being by far the most popular channel.

Today I would to repeat this poll with the intention to see whether the results will change 12 months on. Has Google+ now become more popular or has the social media push by LinkedIn helped to convince more people that LinkedIn is the best social media channel? Or does Twitter still rule the pack?

So please take am moment and vote. The poll closes in 2 weeks and I will post the results a few days after that. Many thanks.

Your browser doesn’t support iFrames :( Vote for this poll <a href="http://twtpoll.com/ya17hn" title="here" target="_blank">here</a>.

Moving Sustainability best practice to the next level of development

March 18, 20135:19 pm

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The last year has been very busy in my life and I did not spend as much time working on Sustainability topics as I would like to have done.

During 2013 I started to refocus on Sustainability topics. Today’s post is meant to be a short resume post about what I believe is happening in the Sustainability field at the moment and how I could see the Sustainability best practice future.

Key learning for me over the past months has been that Sustainability best practice desperately needs to move to the next development level. Too many professionals still have a nostalgic view of Sustainability best practice and this reflects current organisation best practice. This is not the ideal way to move forward in my view and needs to be addressed by all of us.

I strongly believe that all of us as Sustainability professionals need to leave the past behind us as quickly as possible and change our view of how Sustainability should look like in 10 years time. We do not have the time to rest on our past achievements anymore. It was a great time back when Sustainability was the new business trend but lets us all now move on to integrate Sustainability best practice into normal business practice. Our goal should be to not be needed as internal or external Sustainability experts. That is how I see it.

The example of Sustainability reporting:

Roughly 10 years ago more and more organisations realized that a complete-as-can-be Sustainability report was the goal. Complete Sustainability reporting was hailed as the process and communication tool by Sustainability reporters. Fast forward to today: Sustainability reporting has evolved yes, it is more direct and user-friendly, yes but in itself I always feel that Sustainability reporting is a practice that needs to be integrated into overall Sustainability communication and stakeholder engagement activities. Not as a separate practice just for the sake of keeping some powerful Sustainability reporting specialists’ organisations alive. Now this goal of sustainability reporting is still a very important goal for organisations but Sustainability reporting is just not enough anymore for an organisation to show that it is a responsible business.

These days Sustainability within an organisation is changing to be much more integrated into the overall fabric of daily business.

Sustainability related memberships to boost the acceptance of your Sustainability best practice,Other examples of over-rated Sustainability activities are:

GRI reporting to be part of an elite group of reporters,
Independent assurance to show how transparent an organization is and
mandatory participation in Sustainability conferences to “belong” to the Sustainability crowd.

Do not get me wrong. These are all important aspects/activities of Sustainability best practice but it seems that we professionals (myself included sometimes) are still trying to promote the old Sustainability concepts in favor of revolutionizing best-practice once again.

This post is already long enough in my view but one of my next posts will tackle this exact topic. I will try to explain to you what I see as a possible next step in Sustainability best-practice. All according to my experience and my view on new developments in the Sustainability field.

I do not have all the answers what the next development level for Sustainability best practice looks like in detail but what I know is that we need to look beyond the successes of the past to be ready for the future.

This is what I think. What is your view?

Picture Credit: foilman

The Global 100 ranking: Yet another ranking?

January 24, 20132:48 pm

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Through a tweet from a person I follow on Twitter I came across this new ranking today called: ‘Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World’.

The Toronto based research company Corporate Knights published this list during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland several days ago. This is the global press release as a download if you are interested: PDF Version of the ranking.

So is this yet another ranking?

So is this yet another ranking for us Sustainability professionals to consider? Here are several links to what other bloggers and journalists thought:

So is this ranking any good? This is what I think.

To be absolutely clear from the start. This is a ranking that is very well researched and ticks all the boxes in terms of methodology. But there is one big question mark. How well can you actually compare the wide variety of businesses included in this top 100 with each other. This report would have gained a broader acceptance when it introduced a clearer categorization by business sector in my view. Similar to the BITC Index for example. In this way the results would have been a lot more understandable and convey a much stronger story for us as stakeholders to make sense of.

Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World is a good report but in my view they missed a trick to make the report stand out from the crowd of recent reports. A shame but hey we have enough similar rankings out there to tell us what companies are good things and which do not.

Reorganizing my Twitter lists for 2013

January 16, 201311:51 am

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I am a big Twitter fan. I always have been. And ever since Twitter introduced the “List” feature I use Twitter lists as a good way of structuring the number of people and organizations I am following.

But over the last months I noticed that I have not been as consistent as I should have been in following people back and adding them to a list when they start following me.

I just changed this by following all people I have on a Twitter list at the moment and reorganizing the members of my lists. I also had to add several new lists due to the fact that Twitter only allows a maximum of 500 members per list. But the logic of my list categorization will stay the same.

These are my updated Twitter lists and their corresponding links. Please feel free to subscribe to the various lists if they are of interest to you.

My current Twitter lists:

Sustainability Friends 1 – List one of the people I follow with interesting tweets on CSR / Sustainability
Sustainability Friends 2 – List two of the people I follow with interesting tweets on CSR / Sustainability
Sustainability Organizations 1 – List one of the organizations I follow with interesting tweets on CSR / Sustainability
Sustainability Organizations 2 – List two of the organizations I follow with interesting tweets on CSR / Sustainability
Various Tweeps – List of people and organizations I also follow that do not tweet about CSR / Sustainability

Why we as stakeholders should stop buying Apple products

September 13, 201212:42 pm

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Before I start this blog post I have to say that I am a current iPhone 4 and MacBook Pro user and love my Apple products. I have been using Apple products for many years now and love their design and user-friendliness. But the main message of this post today is to ask you to not buy yourself a new iPhone 5 or any other new Apple product at this point in time. Why?

Here are my reasons from a CSR / Sustainability and individual stakeholder perspective:

1) Apple as a company is too powerful these days. It is the same argument as with Microsoft or IBM several years ago. Once a business is getting too big and its products too popular, is it very likely that the leadership at this business will try to take advantage of this situation by acting in a monopolistic way. This is just the nature of business in a free market economy. The maximisation of profits and shareholder value is still the most important maxime these days. My experience working in the CSR / Sustainability tells me that CSR / Sustainability is playing a role for business but nowhere near as much as rising profits and a constant increase of shareholder value. Sad as it might sound but this is the reality.

2) The marketing hype for their new products is just too intense and focusing on consuming more instead of less. Apple Inc. has evolved into a huge global marketing machine these days. Everywhere you go you see Apple branding and marketing. We are bombarded with encouragement to consume more. But our current environmental situation on this Earth does not really allow us to consume more. We need to look into possibilities to consume less instead. The current marketing approach from Apple is more like a giant hammer knocking you down to the ground and telling you that it is okay to consume more. This is just wrong.

3) The way these Apple products are being produced is not acceptable and Apple had their opportunity to fix it over the years but simply did not do enough. Just read this latest Forbes article from today: Apple’s New Foxconn Embarrassment. It seems to me that, through its ongoing business with Foxconn ,Apple have decided that they will do everything to produce as many devices as they possibly can to cover the demand for their products taking whatever possibilities they can get. This is not proper responsible business practice. Quite the opposite really.

My personal decision on Apple products

At some point something needs to change when we look at these three points mentioned above. Do not get me wrong, tt is not all bad and I am an optimist generally but we as the stakeholders of Apple have given this organisation too much power in my view. I believe that we as stakeholders now need to take steps to correct this imbalance of market power in order for Apple to change its ways towards being more responsible as a business.

I personally will make a change starting today. I will no longer buy new or another related Apple products as long as they are not changing their way of doing business and move towards being a more transparent and responsible business.

Sorry Apple, you just lost a customer.