A recent corporate reputation survey by CR Magazine and AllegisTalent2 shows that the majority of people, even in these tough job-finding times, would still not take a job offer from a company with a bad reputation.  Specifically, the results showed that 75 percent of Americans felt this way. This fairly surprising fact should get a lot of corporations thinking about how to build their talent pipelines and more.

So, do corporations realize how much they damage their own self-interest by not practicing responsible business (fiscally, socially and environmentally)?  Helping them avoid such damage is one reason the COMMIT!Forum conference is worth notice.

In advance of the event*, which will be held in New York City October 2nd and 3rd, I spoke with Richard Crespin, Chair of the conference and Executive Director of the Corporate Responsibility Officers Association (CROA), about the state of corporate responsibility and where some (big) opportunities lie.  The corporations now leading the way on this front may surprise you and the degree of opportunity still available is significant – especially when it comes to developing a sustainable work force.

A few things that struck Crespin about the development of the corporate responsibility movement include:

• The biggest strides in CR are coming not in the Business-to-Consumer channels but in the Business-to-Business channels, with emphasis on fine-tuning the operations, supply chain and marketing channels.  Instead of expecting consumers to drive this movement, businesses are seeing the writing on the wall, and – with or without mandates (which is a key point in comparison to European corporations, for example) – beginning their process.
• Colleges and universities, including top business schools, are not necessarily aware of the resource of CR data, or the ways partnering with an organization like CROA could help them develop programs that could better prepare students for their leading futures.
• The obvious suspects may not be the actual key players. In fact, the COMMIT!Forum conference speakers and agenda include representatives from corporations the average consumer (aka non-CR insider) might be surprised to see, including: UPS,  NASCAR and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
• Women in the workforce will likely be key for moving the corporate responsibility needle.  Though too early to draw conclusions, Crespin noted that the CR Magazine/AllegisTalent2 survey did show that 83% of women (compared with 75% overall) said they would not take a job with an ill-reputed corporation, even if they were unemployed.  Furthermore, women who are moms may be particularly influential in shifting corporations toward more responsible behavior and practices.  (Joan Blades of MomsRising.org is one COMMIT!Forum speaker who will surely share more information on this point.)

As the COMMIT!Forum tagline puts it: “Good business makes the difference.”  By starting with responsibility-educated talent and integrating that thinking into operations and supply chain, as well as building on the influence of women in the field, corporations may improve the odds that the best future employees are attracted to, and will “commit”, to theirs.

*I will be attending the conference and hosting a table at the Blogger Breakfast on October 3. I’d love to see you there and get your sense of the state of corporate responsibility.

What if people, businesses and organizations got more appreciation for laying the groundwork of something incredible than they got solely or mainly for creating dramatic end results or products? To a degree, and especially in sustainability and social entrepreneurship circles, we should be living in that world now. Smaller businesses and nonprofits are doing incredible things that are absolutely seeding a huge revolution, and now is when we need to celebrate their building momentum – especially since  it must continue.

In the past few months alone and just in my own small circles, I’ve gotten to know the people behind startup endeavors that are creating templates and building scalability for more effectively “greening” existing home stock (Green Canopy Homes), for developing more female social entrepreneurship angel investors (Pipeline Fellowship), and for helping put urban rooftops to use in hyperlocal, hydroponic agriculture (Urban Harvest).

Their “deliverables” are not single-use products or just-for-fun smartphone apps. Rather, the innovations of these companies are truly seeding the sustainability revolution. The entrepreneurs behind these ideas – and the  many others you know of in your own communities – are quietly doing incredibly time and resource consuming research, development and partnering that will not only lead to strong businesses, but also lead to huge change for their respective industries and the world. And, while the particular examples I’ve cited here may garner some quiet recognition along the way, such notice probably won’t ever equal the potential their sustainable developments hold.

It is often said that sustainability is a journey. And, that may challenge the notion of what typically motivates an entrepreneurial mind and ego.  First – today’s innovations will likely not reach their full potential for sustainability until some future generation. So, there’s no immediate recognition.  Two – while some of these journeys start with what seems to be a single person’s own brilliant idea, the truth is that some unnamed person or group likely did related and significant foundational work over previous decades or generations. This journey is a continuum, which makes it very difficult to lay a static claim.

Sustainable business journeys don’t have an obvious beginning, nor do they have an absolute end. The paths businesses tread are complex, long – and dynamic. Such ventures will always involve many hands, hearts and minds across the generations. So, can that be OK?  Is laying some foundational work enough to keep today’s entrepreneurial minds motivated, moving forward to address the important sustainability and social change problems that need their help?  Here’s hoping.

Consider Ray C. Anderson, the founder of the pioneering sustainable textile manufacturer, Interface. That company’s success in making such an impenetrably toxic industry greener and more sustainable has been a relatively quiet one, developing small step by small step into what is still a continuing journey. But, the reverberations of what Anderson and Interface started in the mid-1990s are nowhere near quieting. Only history will show the astounding effect of the sustainability seeds they have planted.

Perhaps the self-help cliche gets this right: The sustainability change begins with each of us.

Whether or not your organization gets the recognition it already deserves for seeding this revolution, and as with Interface, history will prove undeniable even your small part in creating a more sustainable future. Rest assured.

We are living in history-making times.  Thanks to “edtech” partnerships like Coursera and edX, free, world-class university courses in a wide range of topics are now offered online.  And, the potential for educating people in the ways of more sustainable business thinking (among many other topics) – and for students at any level – is incredible!

So, let my lastest HuffingtonPost piece serve as a call to action.  Will your alma mater jump in to start helping future generations of business leaders see through a more sustainable lens?  Here’s hoping, and here’s an excerpt:

What would happen if more people, not just the usual (privileged) suspects, had access to the theory, concepts and best practices that could help them become the sustainability change agents or leaders in their respective workplaces? If the finest of sustainable business and corporate social responsibility-related courses were offered free through these new online ventures, students could more easily gain new tools and perspective, and begin to re-shape the way their employers deal with today’s natural resource and social responsibility challenges.

Much as the talk seems otherwise, corporate sustainability leaders and change agents may still need to function like an annoying little sister or brother.  Eventually, companies will (should) notice the truth behind the nagging, and take steps to re-balance their values and fully commit to a sustainable future.

However, as even multinational corporations are (or seem close to!) approaching their respective sustainability pivot points, the emerging entrepreneurial side of sustainability and social change also deserves attention.

As I wrote in my latest HuffingtonPost piece, I’ve recently added another role to my writing and consulting career mix.  Thanks to my work within the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, I’ve been seeing sustainable possibilities through undergraduate and graduate level entrepreneurial eyes. All I can say is: Wow!

I look forward to sharing what I learn with you.  In the meantime, here’s an excerpt from Sustainability’s Neglected Frontier: The Young and the Entrepreneurial :

A week ago I spent a day with representatives of the Pacific Northwest’s emerging generation of sustainability and socially-minded entrepreneurs, and it blew me away. To fully disclose, and though the thoughts I share here are my own, I participated in this event in my social media role for the University of Washington’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, covering their Environmental Innovation Challenge (EIC). After being at this gathering, I realized that corporate sustainability likely has nothing better than the potential for paradigm shift that bubbles inside the men and women now attending our colleges and universities.

But, back to the actual event. As the 23 student teams made their two-minute pitches early on, it was all my Twitter-happy fingers could do to capture each of their cool ideas and smart thinking. And, I was not the only one impressed. Even the highly experienced Seattle-area entrepreneurs who judged the challenge seemed to have the same feeling as me, which was that our economy will do just fine — as long as we identify, support and encourage this generation of student sustainability innovators. (Many also said something like “Darn, why wasn’t I this smart when I was that age?”)

***

The students I am meeting are incredibly passionate and committed.  Those of us who love our sustainability work have as much to learn from them as we have wisdom to share in return. It may be time to look around and see if there are ways to get involved with your local university’s entrepreneurial programs…

A recent New York Times piece on how Target uses data analytics to reach pregnant women with their ad campaigns (at just the right time) got me thinking.  How can sustainable businesses leverage their awareness of life transition decision-making to better serve consumer needs, and possibly inspire some behavioral change along the way?  In this, the final piece for my SustainableBusinessForum series on women and sustainability, I use pregnancy, an urban move and retirement as three possible scenarios for doing just that.

Here’s my bottom line:

While the data analytics budget of most companies is nowhere near that of the largest corporations, life transitions are so common that they can be generally anticipated in most markets. If more attention is paid to them, especially in the lives of women who tend to be the core purchase decision-makers, sustainable options in products and services could gain much more interest and truly impact the broader movement.  The flexible “opening” caused by life transitions could be your best chance to remind consumers that they can more consciously, and conscientiously, decide.

When you get to be a certain age, or possibly before then, your career path can look like a long, disconnected, chain of jobs.  But, when you take the “it all fits together” systems perspective, the natural beauty – and sustainability – emerge.  I’ve been thinking about this as I fill in all the bio and profile sections on social networks lately.  What do I put into a space that allows for 200 characters?  Is the crucial thing about me that I am a marketing to women expert, or that I’m a writer, or communications strategist, or social media coach, or…?

Firemen have it so much easier!  Yet, each of your unique career path “stops” are crucial because a sustainable career is an adaptable, compounding one that could circle back and pick back up on what you did in even your earliest job.  What so many of us now have are layers upon layers of seemingly unrelated skills and expertise that together form an integrated  and uniquely strong system of ways we can serve the sustainability movement and our employer/clients.

Would that it were so, but nothing stays the same.  Sustainability work is never “all done.” Instead, and as is oft noted, sustainability is a journey.  The knowledge and practices you experience all along the way in your career don’t make sense as one-off trips.  Your youthful vacation to a small town in Mexico led you to meet a person who referred you to your next job which involved a move, and then inspired your next vacation to a whole other part of the world, which then nudged your life journey in another new direction.  That’s exactly how you build a strong web of foundational experiences, skills and comfort with new things.  Resiliency!

In my case, who knew that my deep understanding of how women think would end up leading me to a business writing career, which then led me to covering sustainable business, which then led me to see how, incredibly, my women’s market knowledge now came back into use for communicating sustainability messages!  In isolation, one element of my path did not necessarily (or directly)  flow into the other.  But, for me and many others, layer builds upon layer, skills compound, and we are all ready for anything (even if that means learning another new way to apply all those skills).

So what, you say? The point is that being in sustainability-related work – however you get there – is an honor and a privilege (and really exciting).  We might want to embrace that.  Rather than being a frustration, the continual career re-directing and adapting we each get to do, depending on our partnerships, employer or our daily responsibilities, gives us new layers of experience, builds resilience, readies us for anything and exposes us to whole new worlds.  We morph with our work because our work will ever be morphing.  We did not see this coming, but that’s the point.

While Abigail Rodgers, VP of Global Sustainability Strategy and Communication for The Coca Cola Company, had a lot of great insight to share in my latest SustainableBusinessForum piece, her idea that sustainability serves as a corporate leadership beacon my have been the most important.  If they are looking for it, I’d guess that many a corporation involved in sustainability is noticing a similar pattern: that many senior leaders, and perhaps mainly women, seem to flock to those positions and roles that are of and about furthering it.

Rodgers’ career experiences and reflections, which I share in this piece, should help you learn more about how your own corporation/organization can draw in, inspire, nurture, engage, and reward its sustainability change agents and leaders (male or female).

And, if you are seeing similar “sustainability as beacon” patterns in your own organization, please let me know!  I’ll follow up on with another article later in the year.

Here’s an excerpt:

To put the three sustainability-encouraging themes Rodgers and I discussed in a nutshell, the advice to other sustainability-striving corporations might most simply be: question assumptions. Don’t assume a particular and set definition of sustainability. Don’t assume your employees/leadership teams leave their home values at the office door (instead, hope and pray they don’t!), and, finally, go way outside of the obvious bounds when brainstorming about potential partners.

My most recent SustainableBusinessForum piece takes a look at Outdoor Afro, the thriving social-media savvy business launched by Rue Mapp.  This business, which emerged from Rue’s personal passion, is now powerfully connecting African Americans with nature – and with each other – and is poised to do so much more.

Here’s an excerpt:

As the business has developed, Mapp has taken cues from the ways in which social media and interdependence of many systems of connections mimic nature. The more diverse, multi-platformed “habitat’ forms the strongest foundation, which lends Outdoor Afro its likely long-term sustainability as a community. 

In order for the business to create and maintain this, as Mapp puts it, “pathway for people to attach to, that is relevant in their own lives,” it must:

• Serve up deep, personal, authentic engagement. Mapp’s audience, for example, knows she truly understands their interests/issues/apprehensions about doing more camping, hiking or biking.

•  Provide many ways by which community visitors and members can connect with one another around the brand.
•  Amplify the passion and engagement of the core audience so that they then go on to influence their own families, friends and communities.
•  Partner with affinity groups and NGOs to broaden reach and influence.

Please check out the entire piece and let Rue inspire you!

In Part 2 of my SustainableBusinessForum piece, More Women, Better CSR, I point out that what women bring to the corporate leadership “table” is practice and comfort using their relational traits.  I see huge potential in recognizing that and developing strategies for nurturing – in everyone – the types of thinking that emphasize (and reward!) the relational.

Here’s an excerpt:

CSR reflects the integration of values and social engagement into what is known – traditional ways of doing business.  In other words, the relational lends purpose to the straightforward.  Without the relational perspective, the status of business will remain “quo,” which is clearly unacceptable.

In this post, I point to Iain McGilchrist’s book about “the divided brain,” The Master and His Emissary.  It may interest you, as well, if you’d like a deeper look at the interplay of the right and left hemispheres of the brain.

McGilchrist writes that the right hemisphere directs our attention to what is “new” or coming at us from the edges of our awareness.  The right hemisphere alone can bring us something other than what we know, while the left hemisphere prefers what is known.  The right hemisphere is more capable of a frame shift, while denial and certainty are a left hemisphere specialty…and so on. 

‘Tis the season for “best of 2011″ lists and 2012 trend forecasts.  From year to year, few of the items included in these compilations ever seem that earth-shatteringly newsworthy.  However, with an eye on the sustainability-forward business, seeing the longer term may be the point.  As it stands, few businesses undergo complete revolutions in thinking and practices from year to year.  Instead, the greatest corporate sustainability shifts will likely only be visible decades or more from now.

Looking back on the past ten years,  I’d say we’ve seen a significant increase in business awareness of the importance of “emotional intelligence.” No longer a topic only for the geeky social scientist or armchair psychologist, smart businesses are starting to put the wisdom of “EQ” into play, both in serving their customers and toward becoming stronger, more resilient organizations overall.

As behavioral scientist and author Daniel Goleman put it in the subtitle of his book, Emotional Intelligence, it can matter more than IQ.  And this is seeming to be the case in sustainable business.

To be clear, Goleman does not think that IQ and EQ are opposing competencies.  Instead, his point, which I find incredibly relevant to sustainable business thinking, is that cognition is simply not enough. What Goleman wrote in this partiucular book (first published in 1995, mind you) seems advanced for its time.

So, let’s first take a look at what the four core abilities of emotional intelligence are:

• Self-awareness
• Self-management
• Social awareness
• Relationship management

Now, when those abilities are considered as sequential phases of learning, it gets interesting.   Seen as phases, these abilities provide a type of map for an organizational (or personal) evolution toward sustainability:

Phase I, Self-awareness: The ability to realize that you are part of the problem.  While many businesses have gotten to this point with regard to sustainability, I suspect there are still plenty of companies that remain willing to sit with it, deny it, and so not move on to…

Phase II, Self-management: The ability to see, control and process thinking and behavior in a more healthy, responsible way.  For instance, seeing and taking control of energy efficiency and working toward healthier employee engagement could contribute much to a business’s success/development, but it must first have realized the need to work on those things.  For a few years now, the green business press has covered both newly formed and long-established companies that have made it at least this far in their journeys. (Let’s hear it for that!)

Phase III, Social awareness: The ability to allow empathy to influence business decisions.  Companies at this phase understand that doing well is not only about them, but that there are also many other human relationships involved – and in a wide range of ways.   As it stands, tackling the environmental/operational issues first in a sustainable business’s journey seems to be the most usual route, while  the raised awareness of how people interrelate with all decisions (hopefully) comes in time.  Tending to diversity, community engagement and social justice, for instance, is likely a lesser corporate priority due to inherent complexity (i.e. it is not the lowest-hanging fruit).  If I were to predict, I’d say this Phase will start to get much more emphasis over the next few years (so check back in 2017, and monitor conference session topics for their attention to the “social” in the meantime).

Relationship management: This is the ability to use the empathy you’ve been practicing at the Phase 3 level to better understand all stakeholders and see/tend to interconnections and innovative teamwork to tackle problems that may even go beyond any one corporation’s borders.  Better communication and more creative partnering and collaboration are heavily in play at this point.  Patagonia is one company leading the way on this front (their recent “Don’t buy this shirt” ad campaign and their founding member status with the Textile Exchange are two examples).

***

So, here we are.  2011 closes with wrap ups and best cases, and 2012 begins with hopeful predictions for the sustainable business movement.  While such lists can certainly inspire, your company may more effectively advance its sustainability action and training practices by examining its unique set of circumstances through the EQ lens.

Wherever you find your business currently rests within the four EQ-related phases, think about how to bring it, sustainably, to the next phase.  If your company is resting comfortably in “self-management,” what do you need to work on to achieve, and get comfortable with, “social awareness,” for example?  Perhaps more importantly, are you willing to not concern yourself with any New Year’s reflection or prediction list for at least a few years? I ask this because having longer-term vision is part of your emotional intelligence learning process.  There is no need for you to get distracted by what everyone else is doing, or not.

So, for 2012, and for the sake of helping to further the sustainable business movement, why not work on your company’s emotional intelligence?  If you do, you will be building, in wise, deliberate phases, toward the dramatic sustainability shift we all want our kids and grandkids to thank us for in the decades to come.