Sustainability Wisdom from Tom Peters
One of my passions these days is providing the sustainability context for seemingly traditional business and management wisdom. I love the surprise factor – or the dot-connecting aspects. Though various authors and speakers may not be pitching “green” or “corporate social responsibility,” as such, many of the smartest ones are promoting those same values without using the expected labels. I see it as my job to highlight the crossover.
With that in mind, I dove into Tom Peters latest, The Little BIG Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence. Rest assured, I will not go into all 163 items, but will note a few that caught my attention on first glance, as follows:
Master the fine art of…nudgery. Tom is referring to ideas from a few books, including Nudge by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, which is also a favorite of mine. Tom suggests that the toughest part of this is seeing “nudging” as an ATTITUDE and not a one-off program. It demands commitment and integration. And, in nudging readers to be nudgers – he emphasizes the need to be amenable to the idea of rapid experimentation/failure, quick implementation/roll out and to be able to realize that this does not require a “power position.” Nudgery is mainly the invisible stuff that is under most people’s radar. All of which is true with sustainability.
As sustainable thinkers, we need to change our entire attitude, be fine with failure, be open to quick turn-arounds and embrace the “under the radar” work. In most cases, the little things we can do in improving energy efficiencies, developing new packaging, or forging partnerships with community organizations etc., are not-so-sexy to the public eye or media. But, we should be in it for the long-term shift! So, as Tom might say: deal with it,… and start helping to nudge opportunities in a sustainable direction.
Build Green Now. (No Excuses). The sustainability implication is obvious, but the bigger point is that this idea is in Tom’s book at all. Consider this: it is a strong recommendation from a guy who has been a highly regarded, much lauded management “guru” for years and years. He’s not some credibility-challenged, “treehugger “emerging just as green goes trendy. He’s been around a while and recognizes this as a smart business move. As he puts it, “Green buildings are…NOT…controversial.”
As a savvy business person today there is no excuse for not being a green building advocate-practitioner. While initial investments in green building may be significant, as Tom notes, those costs are recovered quickly and deliver unexpected bonuses in employee productivity, and more. Even the most conventional of thinkers in the most traditional of businesses or industries should understand that and incorporate green building into his/her future decisions. (Take a look at Walmart, for an example of an uber-traditional company in an uber-traditional industry that saw the huge cost savings in energy efficiency.) Even if you think “green” on the broader scale is a bunch of hooey, energy efficiency and sustainable buildings boil down to cost savings over the long haul and are simply smart business.
Zen and the Art of Achieving Change Where It Already Exists. Tom quotes Bob Stone here: “I look for things that went right and try to build on them.” The sustainability implications lie within Tom’s summarizing words (which I’ve paraphrased) – to comb the underground for those who are creating and living tomorrow today, to anoint them as the public voice for the new corporate ways-to-be, to encourage others to learn from their ways of doing things and to applaud/award the first round of voices that come from the early “live tomorrow today” voices (and keep it going…).
This reminds me of Appreciative Inquiry, an organizational management approach based on the idea that new ideas or problem solutions come, most productively, from a look at what is already working. Moving to sustainability is not reinventing the wheel or pointing out all the awful mistakes businesses have made in the past. Rather, it is the next step on a continuum of smart business moves. Given there are a lot of companies that have bits of under-the-radar sustainability to thank for their successes already, there is much good from which to start. Just as with paradigm-shifting cultural/business “movements” of the past, the sustainable pursuit involves the further fine tuning of your business practices, based on current conditions and market demands. There is Zen in flowing into those next sustainable steps.
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In my opinion, Tom offers powerful tidbits of wisdom in The Little BIG Things that make excellence in management today sound a lot like super smart, sustainable thinking. Given his example, why not revisit your corporation’s own treasure trove of wisdom, as well? I bet you’ll see sustainable practices hidden within.
Proceed from there.
