Having worked on Accelerated Sustainability directly for many months and indirectly for much longer, one of my new colleagues asked me to frame its principles. In truth, I misunderstood him and gave him something entirely unsuited to his purposes, being at once verbose, dense and academic; what he’d wanted was something more elegant, stripped down and useful as a selling message.
Nevertheless, I’m going to rework what I first gave him here as it’s never bad to put down a marker.
So here we go.
This site basically stands for driving more companies, faster, along the Dunphy scale towards strategic sustainability – that is, a state at which they are innovative, flexible and use the creativity within their ranks more effectively and systemically.
To achieve this requires deft people management and new forms of leadership that recognise the value of humans above all as the resource that drives competitive advantage.
Readers here will know it as the effective management of “human capital” and Rupert Murdoch used the expression often in his six-week Boyer lecture series on Australia’s ABC’s Radio National towards the close of 2008.
In a knowledge economy, building human capital must become one of the future preoccupations of industry, as the workers now own the means of production and the “transaction costs” of them self-organising have dropped effectively to nearly zero.
Zero transaction costs greatly lower the costs of entry to business. In businesses which aren’t especially capital-intensive, don’t need to hold significant physical stocks and don’t have high equipment costs (and the costs of computing really are dropping through the floor as software moves off the desktop and into the internet “cloud”), employees can theoretically rearrange themselves, at speed, into new units to compete against their former employers.
In a networked economy, those comprising a company’s prime human capital have an increasing array of choices.
Whatever the business, however, in one that is making a purposeful attempt to advance along the Dunphy scale, enabling the sharing of knowledge and insight in the cause of fostering competitive, collaborative innovation will become critical.
Innovation drives improvements in business practices, customer preference, publicity and profitability. Or it can when it is managed as a systemic capability. Most companies, however, don’t have this in their DNA.
But, only effectively engaged workers can deliver this advantage, which means that morale, motivation and reward must also be closely aligned within the management system. Customer loyalty and employee commitment will not thrive if they are increasingly at odds with turning community sentiment.
Workers, and particularly those now entering the workplace for the first time, may now manifest a growing streak of environmental idealism. So, how is a company with a record for despoiling its environment going to engage employees? With such a reputation, who will want to work there?
Sustainability, effectively managed, is about cutting unnecessary costs and driving better utilisation from fewer resources. That’s lesson 1.01, perhaps. Nevertheless, even at the level of driving better efficiencies, no company will optimise its results without seeking, and rewarding, the best ideas.
The best ideas can come from anywhere within a business and don’t reside only in the minds of the bosses. Traditionally the gatekeepers - or bottlenecks - on ideas filtering up from the shopfloor to realisation in new products, services and ways of doing things, managers’ roles are now to uncover and bring to life those better ideas, even if they are not of their own conception. That is a significant shift.
Those businesses managing for accelerated sustainability are better able to mine the capacities of their employees and the deep seams of creativity and capability that lie within their teams.
They also recognise that it is harnessed resourcefulness that builds reputation; a worker’s ability to leave the workplace proud of their employer and of the creativity it both draws from and instils in its teams is a powerful force. Best brains, effectively engaged, equals better business, no?
Alignment is everything. The road of sustainability is riddled with barriers and misalignments. One of the first is people being rewarded for doing the wrong things. The need to report ever-higher sales quarter in and quarter out regardless of the underlying health of a company’s resources is surely at odds with building a steady and sustainable business under many circumstances.
The hero chief executive who axes the jobs of a thousand workers in a cost-cutting drive, in the process earning a huge bonus while destroying culture and hollowing out a company’s long-term resilience is another.
Finally, here’s a key underlying assumption: innovation most often results from chance conversations and insights, and that the immediate future can only be built on ever-more effective collaboration to this end, using the best available technologies.
Getting those conversations going and causing others to be concerned that they should continue is another primary concern of accelerated sustainability.
And here endeth the sermon, for the moment, at least.
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