I have a young protégé who was a sustainability director at Campbell’s Soup for a few years before she headed to Africa for volunteer work.  She’s a scientist with a doctoral degree in water ecology and engineering. Often, as she walks through factories and offices, she can see what would save energy and reduce waste. Yet she knows most of this is invisible to others. She has asked me, “How am I ever going to get people to learn to look and see for themselves, everywhere?” She wants a step-by-step roadmap to finding and changing everything that costs money and produces nothing in buildings, manufacturing, shipping, and even creative processes.

Well, Kala, I have a book for you—The Green to Gold Business Playbook: How to Implement Sustainability Practices for Bottom-Line Results in Every Business Function. If it misses something about how to be “advantageously thorough” when it comes to sustainability, it’s hard to find.

Daniel Esty and P J Simmons, who is Chairman of Corporate EcoForum,  have created the textbook for building sustainability strategies and action plans for businesses. They draw on a thorough study of every major player who has sought to create a sustainability strategy with the intention of also making it pay back on the bottom line. The Green to Gold Business Playbook is about creating a competitive advantage through sustainability practice, not in spite of it.

 

The eco-advantage is based on four values presented in The Playbook.

 

 

  • Identify and reduce environmental and regulatory risks, across the value-chain, thereby reducing liability, avoiding costs, and increasing speed to market.
  • Cut operational costs and improve efficiency by reducing environmental expenses, including scrap, waste, disposal fees, regulatory paperwork, and energy spending.
  • Grow revenues by designing and marketing environmentally superior products that meet customers’ needs for energy efficiency, improved resource productivity, and reduced pollution.
  • Create intangible value for the business by enhancing brands, connecting with customers on an emotional level through environmental stewardship, raising workforce productivity, and attracting and retaining the best employees.

 

Esty and Simmons exemplify plays for each of these values with no less than a dozen companies. They include practices to illustrate how companies made green products and packaging, green shipping and manufacturing, and sustainable supply and value chains work to their advantage. The examples demonstrate how sustainability leaders became relentless at tracking down places to improve the eco-advantage across their entire companies.

 

The word play as Esty and Simmons use it is not just a football metaphor to capture the attention of readers like me, who grew up in Texas immersed in football. Their plays offer the same competitive advantage as those in the valuable playbooks that coaches take extreme measures to protect. What is particularly useful about The Green to Gold Business Playbook is its gradation of places to enter, from basic to advanced. It works if you’re just starting out and it works if you’re an established green business looking for much more sophisticated ways to play.

 

Once you’ve found your entry, the next steps are to analyze what actions fit your organization and build a strategy to implement them. In the two sections on these subjects we are introduced to rigorous methods that yield not just internal measurements but also, in several cases, ways to know if your sustainability efforts will make a difference in the world. For example, will your strategy contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gases while it advances your business profits?

 

The lens through which strategy is developed is proactive: design for the environment in order to satisfy your customers’ sustainability concerns.  Restructuring day-to-day activities to fit within the new strategy becomes the work of every business function.

 

The mobilization of a new strategy assumes that people need and want to be connected to sustainability in deep and meaningful ways.  The engagement strategy is built on the belief that employees want to do the “right” thing. When they can see what it takes, they adopt it gladly, with rigor and dedication. To optimize the results, tracking becomes a ritual along with sharing what is being learned.

 

Esty and Simmons ask two questions at the outset that need to permeate the thinking of managers. In regard to both social and environmental issues, does my business create impacts for which I will be held accountable? Could any of these issues impinge on how I conduct my business? If the answers are “yes,” then the manager needs a plan. It’s impossible to imagine than anyone with integrity would not see the opportunities arising here and the potential for tragedy if they are not addressed. This means that every manager needs a plan.

 

The thing I like about these questions and how they keep showing up in the book is that they make social and planetary health a personal question for every business leader. This is critical to responding creatively to the huge challenges we face today. I believe that business will lead the change to healthier ways to engage in life. The Green to Gold Business Playbook is a good resource for any manager who wants to make a practical case to convince others of the why and how. It gives approaches that can answer “why bother” questions from investors, communities, and employees. If you know someone who is still asking whether being on the sustainability forefront is worth the time and money, hand them The Playbook.