The Sweet Spot of Sustainable Business Pursuit
“The End of Men,” a cover article for the July/August issue of The Atlantic written by feminist scholar Hanna Rosin, got me thinking about our extreme cultural pendulum swings. Do we really need to swing from seeing women as wholly unimportant to seeing men as wholly unimportant? My gender studies tell me the answer to that is “no.” I see a similar pendulum of extremes swinging from traditional business to sustainable business ways. Is everything about pre-sustainable business wrong, and everything about sustainable business the answer? Probably not. Instead – the extreme traditional business minds can add innovation and incredible value to their practices by folding in and pursuing sustainability long term. On the other hand, sustainable-from-the-start businesses may well learn a few things from the big brands that have clearly been doing something right for years. If what was noted, time and again, at last week’s Sustainable Brands 2010 conference is any indication, one thing a lot of sustainable brands must learn to do better is: communicate their stories.
My latest HuffingtonPost piece considers extreme business culture pendulum swings and where things might soon settle – the sweet spot. That’s where women and men, and traditional and sustainable businesses, get beyond extreme differences toward a more collaborative and productive place.
Here’s an excerpt:
Sustainability has a bad rap with some, for being overly emotional and other-focused. But instead, in a more sustainability-focused business, efficiency, quality and innovation are still “king.” There’s just unimaginable added value to boot. In other words, sustainable business is not necessarily something new, it’s just the highest standard.
My recent experience at Sustainable Brands 2010 (SB2010) reflected the settling to center pendulum effect. That event had the likes of Ford and Coca Cola sharing their sustainability-oriented developments. Let’s remember that a few years ago that would have sounded like a dream. To be clear, no one is saying that the big, traditional brands are fully into their likely very long sustainable journeys. However, these beginnings do reflect the pendulum heading toward center. Alternatively, the many smaller, less “known” companies at SB2010, like H2O (boxed water) and Nature’s Path, are also doing amazing good by making sustainable steps more accessible to consumers. Such brands are by no means out in some sort of green la-la land (i.e. at an extreme pendulum swing). Rather, they’ve figured out how to do business with the big boys, and are even teaching them a few things along the way.
Back to Rosin’s article, and one of her points: “A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts. It also requires communication skills and social intelligence, areas in which women, according to many studies, have a slight edge.” Similarly, I’d argue that both conventional and sustainable businesses have the core business part down, but the sustainable enterprises likely have an edge in understanding, and serving, the social side. That’s the “people and planet” part.
