Sustainability Service Offering
Sustainability Service Offering
If you ask ten people to explain the implications of environmental sustainability for their own job and for the organization that employs them, you will get ten different answers. They will differ according to what business each person is in and the role that each plays within their company. Some will hone in on the goal of building more efficient factories, or cutting down on industrial waste, while others will talk about marketing and drawing customer attention to the company’s green activities.
While all of these topics need to be part of the discussion, they are just pieces of what it means to implement sustainability across a large organization. And if this complexity were not enough, the process is often disrupted by misunderstandings and culture clashes. These inevitably occur when different sectors of a company try to work together on a paradigm shift that will transform not only their operations but our economy as a whole. Wrestling with these issues is crucial if we are to move beyond what Barb Baetzhold of the Sustainable Performance Institute calls “random acts of sustainability” to a more integrated, strategic approach. Email ron@silverprofessionals.com for more info.
We give you perspective
The goals of integration, strategy, and a transformational mindset are what define the high-level overview of sustainability provided by Silver Professionals. Rather than diving right away into one of the many sub-topics within sustainability—and thereby running the risk of mistaking a few trees for the forest—we address three broad categories of issues that shape how each company, in its own way, should go about implementing sustainability.
The first of these categories is strategy and planning. Efforts to implement sustainability are most successful when they are formulated in terms of the overall strategy of the company. And although this can happen via any number of pathways, the nature of each route needs to be taken into account. It makes a big difference whether, in your efforts to green your organization, you are acting on a mandate from the executive suite or are on a reconnaissance mission from your perch within the company’s operations.
One reason for strategizing carefully rather than approaching sustainability piecemeal is the fact that it needs to combine mandatory, compliance-based approaches to some issues with voluntary, values-based approaches to others. Both of these approaches have their virtues. Although the former is externally driven, it tends to be more thought out in terms of process and the set of prescribed actions that need to be taken. The latter, by contrast, is generally better linked to core business functions and characterized by principles and goals that can generate innovation. Silver Professionals wants to help you draw on both of these approaches.
We help you build a sustainability toolkit
When a planning process is well-managed, each key moment in the process will have served as an opportunity to communicate about the increased and more thoughtful focus on sustainability within the organization. This will lead to what social scientists call “norm activation”—that is, it will generate broad support for factoring sustainability into all business decisions going forward. Silver Professionals helps you design these communications so that they are not one-way. Every company needs to listen to its employees, customers, competitors, and other constituencies.
This listening process will often generate new ideas, as those with operational expertise and others contribute their own ideas about where and how sustainability could be implemented. New employee orientation and ongoing employee education, marketing plans, performance incentive programs, the annual report, brand awareness—these are just some of the communications moments where sustainability needs to be addressed, and Silver Professionals helps you develop the tools to do so.
We help you reach for the future
The third category of issues addressed in the Silver Professionals sustainability overview is operations. There can be no cookie-cutter approach to going green. An engine parts manu-facturer, an investment bank, and an enterprise software company will each focus on different aspects of what sustainability means. A consumer products company will want to look very closely at its product packaging. An internet service provider should dive into the growing body of information on building energy-efficient data centers. A marketing firm needs to consider where sustainability enters into its design development process and how to define the sustainability-related services it can provide to its own clients.
In the course of covering these three broad categories of issues, Silver Professionals will also touch on topics that are not frequently discussed but where climate change and other environmental issues are already having an impact. In a move that should have caught the attention of every public company’s law department, for instance, the Securities and Exchange Commission recently issued guidance on the need for companies to disclose risks related to climate change in their Form 10-K and other securities filings.
Another area that is less familiar but crucial to the transformation in how we view sustainability is ecosystems services—the ways in which your company can generate value, rather than simply reduce costs, through skilled use of its environmental resources. Fortunately, there are sophisticated tools such as the Corporate Ecosystems Review developed by the World Resources Institute to help companies detect untapped potential for environmental impact.
We show you how sustainability generates value
Perhaps most important, Silver Professionals promotes an understanding of sustainability as a value proposition. Sustainability is no longer something that a company can decide whether or not to prioritize. It has become part of the business landscape. This is not a bad thing, however, and it should not be viewed merely in terms of meeting new regulations or responding to customer demands. If implemented wisely and with a clear sense of its potential, sustainability can help any company stay at or move to the cutting edge of its industry, and thereby play a part in the second Industrial Revolution that is now underway.
3 Great options
1. Half-day customizable seminars
that drill down into the various aspects of strategy, communications,
and operations, with content customized by industry sector or
organizational component to meet the needs of specific audiences
Live or via webcast
$1975
2. 60- or 90-minute speeches or presentations providing an introductory overview of sustainability to board meetings, corporate retreats, and other gatherings
Live or via webcast
$775/$975
3. One-on-one consulting to provide advice, planning, and staffing support$95/hr.
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