Better CSR Comes from More Relational Traits
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!) [...]
Sustainability 2012+: Emotional Intelligence Changes Everything
'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 [...]
Question Assumptions. Be The Sustainability Vanguard.
“The most impressive thing about them as scholars,” says David Easley, an economist at Cornell University, “is that in recent years they have questioned the assumptions of the models they helped to create, and they have been at the vanguard of the efforts to go beyond them.” The above quote from Jeff Sommer's New York [...]
More Women, Better CSR?
If yours is a business striving to become more sustainable, one of the systems worth review is the strength and resiliency of your human capital. That more women at executive and Board levels will help make an organization more adaptable through challenging times should be common sense. This is perhaps even more true in tending [...]
The Atlantic Conversation
The Atlantic recently published an interview with me that included some good questions on trends and innovation in sustainability. Here's an excerpt: What's something that most people just don't understand about your area of expertise? How thinking big about the connections of cultural trends, consumer behavior research, and other-things-that-don't-seem-to-relate-at-all can give meaning and help build [...]
Studying Up on Women and Sustainable Business
I'm excited to share that I have just launched a regular column on women and sustainable business for the SustainableBusinessForum. The introductory piece is simply a call to study up on women. I don't suggest this solely because women are likely to be a crucial consumer market for your company, but because understanding how they [...]
Sustainability Thought Leadership: Shift or Show?
Photo by Robert J. Pennington, courtesy RhizomeImages.com Originally published in The Huffington Post, September 13, 2011 What if your thought leadership got you very little recognition today but contributed to an incredibly significant cultural shift that made a positive difference for generations to come? It is an interesting question at a time when business leadership [...]
Employee Engagement: Nurturing Internal Partners
Thinking sustainably is about seeing the interconnections of systems around a particular business problem or issue. Since, among other things, the people involved, the natural world, and government regulations are ever-changing, there’s no way for a business to solve the sustainability issue once and for all. Businesses must embrace the fact that there will [...]
Gender and the Sustainable Brain – My Solutions Journal Piece
The following first published in the March 2011 issue of The Solutions Journal. The crucial move toward sustainability may not come easily for either huge corporations or the average consumer, but we can hasten this evolution by identifying and nurturing the personality traits that most naturally drive sustainable living. Those qualities that we’ve long called [...]
Could Sustainability Finally “De-Gender” Business?
If you were ever knee deep in research about traditional business leadership traits and sustainability leadership, like I am due to my Master's thesis work, you'd see the very clear connection between the two. Being a forward or future-oriented thinker, and being able to see issues as interconnected, in a more holistic manner, are two [...]
Notes from a Sustainability Change Agent: Interview 1
Since I'm starting to interview internal corporate sustainability change agents for several projects, I thought it'd be a good time to just launch a series of "initial insight" note posts. I have a feeling, like this time, I'll get off the phone or complete the interview and be really excited by what has filtered out [...]
VPR Commentary (and HuffPost): Seeing Through A New Lens
If you follow me on Twitter, you could likely tell I was pretty excited about being able to attend the University of Michigan's (my alma mater!) commencement in early May, where President Obama spoke. It was an incredible experience, and I left inspired to think differently and to see life through a new, more socially [...]