Search

As a society, we are a long way from having an information technology industry that is anywhere near a closed-loop system, but Dell has been among the companies at the forefront of this movement.

The Round Rock, Texas-based personal computing trailblazer has long been a leader on environmental stewardship within the computer hardware industry. Recently the $57 billion company showed the IT sector that a circular economy is definitely possible with an announcement that it is doing even more to boost plastics recycling and the reclamation of carbon fiber materials.

According to Dell, this revamp of its supply chain will include 35 products, increase the recycling of what have already been 4.2 million pounds (1.9 million kilograms) of plastic since January 2014, and divert 820,000 pounds (372,000 kilograms) of carbon fiber material from landfill. The company already recycles plastic components from over 30 flat panel-monitor models and three models of its desktop computers.

Partnering with Dell on the carbon fiber front is SABIC, a petrochemicals and plastics company based in the Middle East. The $51 billion conglomerate, which ranks in the top 10 global manufacturers of resins that are used to make plastics, certainly is in a position to advance the recycling of carbon fiber. Carbon fiber has become increasingly popular with Dell and its competitors as it reduces the weight of laptops, but it is not the easiest material to recycle. The partnership with SABIC, however, promises to include more carbon fiber material in Dell’s Latitude and Alienware product lines.

With this announcement, Dell says it will also join the Ellen McArthur Foundation’s Circular Economy 100 Program, an initiative working to bring large companies across various sectors together to make a circular economy the reality. The result of efforts such as that of Dell’s, according to this organization, would be the rapid acceleration of global waste-diversion efforts and develop what it says is a long-term $2 trillion global economic opportunity.

Dell’s latest program builds upon a long history of innovation in waste diversion and recycling. The company has long experimented with more sustainable packaging materials in attempts to reduce the consumption of paper and plastic while eliminating the 'wrap rage' that often infuriates consumers. The efforts have included everything from incorporating wheat straw into packaging to instructing customers which of its shipping materials can be composted. Even mushroom-based packaging has been on the company’s radar.

These programs have contributed to what Dell says is the company’s use of 21 million pounds of recycled plastics since 2013 and a goal to increase that figure to 50 million pounds by 2020. With this recent announcement, Dell should approach that goal easily in less than five years.

Image credit: Dell

By Anuradha Wadhwani

According to an August 2015 report published by the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, India's palm oil imports totaled 9.2 million tons, a spike of 200,000 tons over 2014 owing to a steep increase in the demand for vegetable oil.

India is the largest consumer of palm oil in the world. However, the world’s second most populous country also relies heavily on imports to satiate its thirst for palm oil – trading mostly with Indonesia, where environmental activists and conservationists are up in arms against the palm oil industry’s unbridled deforestation.

In India, while well over 90 percent of all palm oil is used for cooking, a small percentage is consumed by the personal care products and chemicals industries. Sustainably-produced palm oil forms only a negligible percentage of the total palm oil imported by India. Surprisingly, as the largest importer of palm oil, India has done little to influence a shift toward sustainably-produced palm oil.

India now wants to cut back on palm oil imports – at what expense?

The Indian government isn’t pleased about the country being the largest importer of palm oil globally. It wants to change the status quo by taking steps toward palm oil self-sufficiency. And it plans to do this by promoting oil palm cultivation on Indian soil. But as the country clears massive swathes of land for oil palm plantations, questions are now being asked about whether India will face the same deforestation problems as Indonesia.

Being a highly water-intensive plant, oil palm is unsuitable in regions where the monsoon is erratic. Additional investments in irrigation will thus become an unavoidable cost for the farmer – if not immediately, then certainly in the next few years. In a country with 220 million rural poor, even the slightest cost additions can impact livelihoods. The government, on its part, has already earmarked $50 million for incentives and subsidies to farmers under the Oil Palm Area Expansion (OPAE) program introduced in 2011-2012, and a thrust on sustainability doesn’t figure prominently in this program. At least, not yet.

This has compelled activists to believe that India may not put sustainability at the forefront while promoting oil palm cultivation.

However, there’s reason to believe that sustainably produced palm oil might gain more attention in the coming years – especially if the rise in the number of Indian palm oil producers signing up as members of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is any indicator.

According to the RSPO website, the organization had 43 Indian members as of September 2015. This number has progressively increased every year, indicating that more and more Indian companies are willing to go that extra mile to ensure that certified sustainable palm oil reaches the market.

What is stopping more Indian companies from opting for certified sustainable palm oil?

In a country where over 20 percent of the population still lives in poverty, even a marginal increase in prices can cause consumer behavior to change. As the Indian agriculture industry takes its first steps into large-scale palm plantations, it knows that Indian consumers don’t care as much about deforestation as they do about their monthly budgets. Unlike countries in the West, unsustainably-sourced or -produced palm oil will still be consumed in India, especially if it’s cheaper than the certified sustainable alternative. It can thus be assumed that till the time the focus remains on the domestic market, certified sustainable palm oil will continue to form only a very small percentage of Indian palm oil production.

However, with India’s presence in the RSPO increasing and many Indian palm oil producers supplying to leading corporations such as Unilever, a sweeping change can certainly be expected in the not-so-distant future.

Image credit: Pixabay

Having extensively worked as a journalist with leading national dailies in India, Anuradha Wadhwani now writes for Transparency Market Research, a market intelligence firm. Anuradha is passionate about tracking (and questioning!) market trends across areas such as sustainability, innovative materials and chemicals.

Can a luxury car company make a difference in a country with a per-capita income of $1,200 and where many of its citizens lack access to safe water? Jaguar Land Rover believes it can. Yesterday the United Kingdom-based premium automobile manufacturer kicked off a new project in western Kenya that adds to what the company describes as its “ambitious” worldwide corporate social responsibility program.

Working with the social enterprise ClimateCare and the Swiss company Vestergaard, Jaguar Land Rover will provide smart water-filtration systems that the company claims could provide up to 300,000 students in the Bungoma region of Kenya with clean, drinkable water. Over the next five years, 375 schools will benefit from these water systems, which Jaguar Land Rover says will improve the health, education and employment projects of students who live in this corner of Kenya.

The key to this program’s success is Vestergaard’s technology. The company has been in business for almost 60 years, and is known best on both sides of the Atlantic for its water filters coveted by hikers and trekkers. This project in Bungoma will deliver Vestergaard’s LifeStraw water filters, an easy-to-use contraption the manufacturer estimates is used by as many as 780 million people worldwide. The filters in these LifeStraw products filter out pathogens that cause diarrhea, improving the health prospects of those most vulnerable, including children, pregnant women and people living with HIV.

Vestergaard has a long history in Africa, which started with the manufacture of mosquito nets. Once a textile and uniform manufacturer, Vestergaard has expanded its business into a bevy of product lines. It is committed to a social mission as well; for example, a similar program last year expanded access to LifeStraw water filters to 125,000 Kenyan students.

That focus on impact is also what led Jaguar Land Rover to develop a relationship with ClimateCare. One of the United Kingdom’s first B Corporations, ClimateCare has been in the middle of several global environmental initiatives, from the expansion of access to cleaner-burning cookstoves to researching new ways to finance clean-energy technologies in East Africa. The organization has also worked with Jaguar Land Rover and Vestergaard to improve clean water access throughout other regions in Kenya.

For Jaguar Land Rover, partnerships with organizations like Vestergaard and ClimateCare are integral to the success of its Global CSR Program. Its strategy has a two-pronged approach: First, the company wants to bring educational opportunities to at least 2 million young people. In addition, Jaguar Land Rover says it seeks to improve lives, whether in public health or environmental stewardship, for 10 million people by 2020.

The “doing good” portion of this initiative may seem counterintuitive to outsiders. The company insists such efforts help to ameliorate its carbon emissions and environmental impact. But whether you buy that angle or not, one has to admit that allowing employees to immerse themselves in programs such as what is ongoing in Kenya gives them the opportunity to build new skills and work under a different type of pressure. Furthermore, the perspective gained from being involved in such a project is invaluable. Too many employees’ minds wander because many want to make a difference and cannot see how it would ever be possible from their office or cubicle. A program like this opens many doors, with the effects going far beyond cleaner air and water.

Image credit: Jaguar Land Rover

He sounds like a happy teenager navigating his way through the sophomore year of high school. But Adam Liszewski is not your typical teenager. He is the Founder and effectively the CEO of Stokes Natural Firestarters in Wayland, Massachusetts.

How many youth entrepreneurs do you know who can claim more than $125,000 in sales during their first two years in business, and a sustainable business to boot? Here is how he got there.

In 2011 Adam, then age 11, and his mother, Pat Reinhardt, were using egg cartons, lint from the family clothes dryer, and melted candle stubs to make holiday gifts to easily start a fire in wood stoves and fireplaces: “egg-nighters,” the family playfully called them.

Recipients of the gifts liked them so much, they offered to pay Adam to make a bunch more the following winter.That’s when it ‘hit’ him: Why not produce a lot of these and sell them for a profit? He knew he had hit on something when he brought a couple of dozen to the local farmers market and they sold out. The idea of a natural firestarter using recycled materials with no chemicals resonated with the crowd. It helps that the product is made locally.

Adam substituted the lint with hardwood sawdust supplied by a family friend in the natural furniture business in Vermont. That’s when he realized with the ingredients – recycled egg cartons, candle wax, a recycled paper box and sawdust from sustainably-harvested trees -- together offered a true natural product. That led to a family brainstorm session with aunts and uncles, which produced the company’s namesake, Stokes.

Today, Adam – still without a driver’s license -- presides over a 2,200-square-foot commercial warehouse and is running Stokes as a limited-liability corporation. He receives three or four bags of sawdust every week from Pompanoosuc Mills in Vermont and delivers it to his assembly line at the warehouse. There six to 10 employees on any given day -- provided through Charles River Center, a social service agency nearby -- assemble the firestarters. Adam works with them at least every Wednesday during the school year. During the summer, this is his full-time job, if he isn’t out merchandising, delivering or selling Stokes.

With 12 firestarters per box selling at $6.99, Adam has achieved what some college-educated entrepreneurs might dream about. Stokes are now selling through retail outlets such as Whole Foods Markets in the Northeast, numerous Stop & Shop stores in Massachsuetts, some ACE hardware stores, and more than 40 other local food, hardware and retail store in the Northeast. Recently Wegmans agreed to sell them as a beta test in their Massachusetts stores.

Jack Russell, of Russell’s Garden Center in Wayland, is the first retailer Adam pitched with an early version of the product. “Adam presented the product very well. I bought a bunch [Adam’s whole inventory at the time]. It took off immediately,” Russell said. Wary of selling out this fall and winter, his Garden Center had 44 boxes of Stokes for sale on Oct. 1.

Adam accepted early on and has since repaid the $3,000 in seed money his parents loaned him. Soon after he met Adam, Chris Ferrier, a local marketing pro, created the artwork gratis for bags which initially packaged the firestarters. Adam revamped the packaging with the help of Atlas Paper and Romanow Paper because Whole Foods Markets wanted shoppers to be able to see the firestarters inside (photo).

Asked what his response would be if someone offered to buy the company, Adam replied that he has “no idea.” Pat Reinhardt chimed in that his high school diploma “most definitely comes first.” Adam says he is focused on growing Stokes and has no desire to sell it.

Image credit: Jim Pierobon

By Shannon Houde

Informational interviews are one of the sharpest tools in the jobseeker’s box, but, to my constant bewilderment, they are among the least used. Maybe it’s fear, maybe it’s simply lack of awareness, but if you’re looking for a new role in sustainability or corporate responsibility, listen up!

You can sit down and pick the brains of someone whose career trajectory you covet. You can use the opportunity to get insider info and contacts. And – most helpfully, I’ll argue – you can set yourself up for an internal referral for the next vacancy at Dream Company X. All you have to do is ask.

Part of the joy of social media is that it puts you in direct communication with people you wouldn’t otherwise have the chance to connect with. Whether you’re a Twitter fan or a lover of LinkedIn, today’s jobseeker has the benefit of targeting the right person to speak to from the comfort of their laptop, and, making the opening approach via every introvert’s favorite medium: email. The days of stuttering awkward conversations over tepid conference coffee are over!

1. Make your hit list

Finding the right person to reach out to is the first step. Maybe you already have somebody in mind? If not, go through the ‘who’s who’ lists on the websites of your wish-list companies and look for people who are in the job you want five years from now. Ideally, you’ll find someone you have some sort of connection to: perhaps there’s an alumnus from your old university, or someone who did the same undergrad degree as you at a different school, or maybe you have contacts in common on LinkedIn.

Speaking of LinkedIn, here’s a super-smart way to use the network to target great contacts from a previous blog of mine: On LinkedIn, click on the Advanced Search option, select “people” and set the location to your country. In the “title” field, type the title of your dream job. From the drop-down menu, select “current.” Use the “company” and “industry” fields to narrow down your search. Up will pop a list of potential informational interviewees in your network.

2. It’s all about them

I’ve already mentioned that you can make your initial approach via email, and for many this will be the preferred option. However, if you can summon the courage to pick up the phone, then do so: Connecting with another human being voice-to-voice is worth a thousand emails. (I wrote a blog recently on phone etiquette – check it out here.)

Whichever option you choose, don’t jump in without doing some research on the person, what they do, and the company they do it for to help you make a compelling pitch and show them why it’s worth their while giving you their time. You may have personal motives in contacting this person, but remember that the primary reason you’re doing it is to find out more about them and learn from their experiences. Keep the ‘I’ statements for later.

3. Plan ahead

Once your preferred interviewee has accepted, prepare in the same way you would for a regular job interview. One of my favorite strategies for this is as follows:

• Take an A4 piece of paper and fold in it half top to bottom


• On the top, list the things you want this person to know about you by the end of the interview – your skills, your education, your passions and values, your USP


• On the bottom, list what you want to walk away with. These can include specific information or insights, or perhaps further ideas of people to talk to or follow on social media

Doing this will give you a structure for the conversation, ensure you get the most out of it, and also help to avoid any awkward silences. But don’t forget to listen first and foremost!

4. Keep building

After the interview, it goes without saying that you’ll extend your interviewee some common courtesy and write a note thanking them for their time. But don’t forget that now you’re connected, it’s up to you to build and enhance the relationship.

Try sharing articles or insights you think they might be interested in to keep the conversation going, or help them find something (or someone!) they mentioned they needed. The more you give, the more you’ll receive. That way, when a job comes up at their company or with another organization you know they have links to, you’ll be in a much better position to ask them to consider passing your CV directly to the hiring manager. Internal referrals are 50% more likely to get the job, so in the ultra-competitive world of CSR and sustainability where CVs get a ten second speed-read from busy HR execs, this is a major count in your favor.

So, there you have it – a four step guide to help you shimmy into the next phase of your sustainability career. For some bespoke advice and training on networking and developing your personal brand, get in touch.

Shannon Houde is founder of Walk of Life Consulting, the first international career and executive coaching business focused solely on the impact, sustainability and corporate responsibility fields.

Image credit: Kris Hoet, via Flickr

By Jeff Hayward

Forests are an indispensable piece of the climate puzzle, which is why they’re prominent in the U.N.’s new Sustainable Development Goals, and why they will also loom large at the COP21 Paris climate talks. The land sector  -- agriculture, forestry and other land use -- is the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after energy.   It accounts for almost a quarter of global emissions, including about 10 to 11 percent from deforestation, and the rest from agriculture, itself the main driver of deforestation.

Business is instrumental in transforming land use practices to stop deforestation. Sustainable sourcing of soft commodities grown on the land discourages converting forests to cropland and encourages sustainable management of forests.

Business had a hand in framing the SDGs, which include halting deforestation, conserving, restoring and replanting forests, and implementing sustainable management of all types of forests by 2020.  Business should have a greater role in implementing them, as highlighted in a recent UN forum.

Business is also focused like never before on the U.N. climate process. CEOs of 43 of the world’s largest companies, calling themselves the B Team, are urging world leaders to commit to net-zero emissions by 2050 instead of 2100. Thousands of business leaders will gather in Paris in December to make the business case for bold climate action, to seek clarity on the scope of a climate agreement.

But meanwhile, businesses aren’t waiting for an agreement. They’re already setting and pursuing their own goals for stopping deforestation.

Many major companies have announced individual “deforestation-free” pledges. Fifty-two companies and counting joined governments in signing the New York Declaration on Forests and pledging to halve natural forest loss by 2020 and halt it by 2030. Through the Consumer Goods Forum, the CDP/We Mean Business Coalition, and the public-private Tropical Forest Alliance 2020, hundreds of major companies have committed to eliminating commodity-driven deforestation from their supply chains by 2020, including companies that account for 90 percent of the global trade in palm oil.

What matters most is turning those declarations into effective action. Protecting forests is a multi-layered proposition touching on many interlocking issues -- forest community and worker rights, care for non-forest ecosystems, water resources, etc. So making supply chains sustainable with respect to forests requires active sustainable management on many fronts.

For suppliers of agricultural commodities, that can include a range of practices from agroforestry, planting trees and maintaining forest buffer zones to reducing pesticide use, conserving water and soil and protecting wildlife.  The coffee company Nespresso implements those practices on supplier farms, and is piloting a program to boost coffee farmers’ climate resilience through agroforestry.

“Since 2003, as part of our AAA Sustainable Quality Program together with the Rainforest Alliance, we have been committed to preserving biodiversity and reducing deforestation in coffee producing countries,” said Jérôme Perez, head of sustainability at Nestlé Nespresso. “Reforestation has also always been an important part of the program. We encourage farmers to preserve and plant shade trees in their farms, which enhances the quality, sustainability and productivity of their coffee, benefits the farmers and increases landscape resilience to climate change.”

For companies that source wood and pulp, a “deforestation-free” supply chain can’t mean that no trees were cut. But it can mean a company’s sourcing practices are sustainable and help reduce emissions if supplier forests are sustainably managed. Domtar, the leading North American pulp and paper company, is working to source all its fiber from Forest Stewardship Council certified sources.

"We welcome all sustainability efforts, and we believe anti-deforestation pledges are a good first step, but more comprehensive action is required,” said Paige Goff, vice president of sustainability and communications for Domtar.  “We’re focused on achieving sustainable forest management throughout our supply chain. Third-party certification is a critical part of that process because it looks not just at the quantity of trees, but the quality our forests.”

Avery Dennison, a global leader in labeling and packaging materials, sources sustainably produced paper, uses its scale and buying power to help move the entire industry toward responsible sourcing.  It collaborates with Domtar, the Rainforest Alliance, Staples and Columbia Forest Products on the Southeast Sustainable Forestry Project to help spread sustainable management among family-owned forests in the Southeastern U.S.   And it pursues a wide range of internal sustainability goals, including developing a 100 percent sustainable certified sustainable paper supply, and steeply cutting its emissions.

"Reducing greenhouse gas emissions while still growing as a company is one of the defining business challenges of the 21st century, and we're proud to be addressing that challenge head-on, starting with our new 2025 goal to achieve absolute reductions of no less than three percent year-over-year,” said Dean Scarborough, Avery Dennison’s chairman and CEO, who will travel to Paris this December to discuss climate change with other business leaders at COP21. “The talks at COP21 have the potential to be a historic turning point and dramatically raise expectations for companies everywhere to reduce emissions."

Whatever international goals or agreements are struck on forests, they will be only as good as their implementation.  It will take different actors on many levels, including national and local governments, and civil society, to make them a reality. But business has a special role.  Its self-starting leadership will be a key factor in stopping deforestation, making forest supply chains sustainable, and cutting GHG emissions from the land sector.

Image credit: Flickr/crustmania

Jeff Hayward is the director of the Rainforest Alliance‘s climate program.

To close out our series with CVS on disrupting short-termism, we checked in with the health company's SVP of Corporate Social Responsibility Eileen Howard Boone to see how the business was impacted by the decision to remove tobacco products from their product portfolio.

Image credit: Unsplash

Chicken of the Sea is a popular canned tuna brand, and Americans just adore its tuna. But there are big problems associated with that little can of tuna, as a recent Greenpeace campaign highlights.

Greenpeace just launched a global campaign against Thai Union Group (TUG), the world’s largest canned company, which owns Chicken of the Sea. Greenpeace is calling on the company to eliminate labor abuse and fishing practices that cause environmental damage from its supply chains.

Earlier this year, investigations by the New York Times and Associated Press revealed that TUG is connected to environmentally destructive fishing methods, human rights abuses and even forced labor. In the AP’s year-long investigation, Burmese men were interviewed who were taken through Thailand to Indonesia and forced to fish. The fish they caught was shipped to Thailand and sold globally, ending up in grocery stores “such as Kroger, Albertsons and Safeway,” according to the AP.

The New York Times investigation found that labor abuse at sea “can be so severe that the boys and men who are its victims might as well be captives from a bygone era.” In interviews, men who survived forced fishing labor reported horrendous abuses such as “the sick cast overboard, the defiant beheaded, the insubordinate sealed for days below deck in a dark, fetid fishing hold.”

“We can no longer allow Thai Union Group and its brands around the world, including Chicken of the Sea, to sacrifice the world’s oceans and jeopardize workers at sea,” said Greenpeace USA seafood markets lead, Graham Forbes.

“Chicken of the Sea is one of the worst US canned tuna brands on both sustainability and human rights,” Greenpeace USA oceans campaigner, Kate Melges, added. “As the largest brand owned by the largest canned tuna company in the world, Thai Union Group, it’s critical that Chicken of the Sea step up as a leader to ensure its products meet the standards it claims to support. That means working urgently to change to lower-impact fishing methods and guarantee oversight and traceability at sea.”

Last Friday, Greenpeace USA contacted TUG and demanded the company create a work plan and schedule to improve fishing practices and increase oversight and transparency. The environmental group also sent an investor brief to TUG shareholders, which outlined the risks to TUG’s operations, which include:

• The fishing methods used by TUG and its suppliers have serious environmental impacts and reputational risks.


• Forced labor and human rights abuses taint the company’s seafood supply chain and lead to social impacts and reputational risks.

Greenpeace is not the only group to notice a problem in Thailand with human trafficking. The U.S. State Department ranked Thailand at the bottom tier-three level in its annual 2015 Trafficking in Person’s (TIP) report. The report ranks countries in one of three tiers based on their efforts to comply with “minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.”

Clearly, it is time for TUG to fix the problems uncovered in its supply chain. Environmental damage and human rights abuses should not be associated with a little can of tuna. As a 2014 report by Fishwise put it, "The time has come for companies to take responsibility for both environmental sustainability and social aspects of their seafood supply chains." By doing so, companies not only improve their public image but make their supply chains more sustainable.

Image credit: Flickr/Mike Mozart

Are you happy at work? Are you engaged with purpose in your work?

We spend 35 percent of our waking lives working. Yet according to Gallup research, just 13 percent of employees are truly engaged in their jobs, which means “involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and workplace.” The remaining 87 percent of employees, reports Gallup, “are either not engaged or indifferent – or even worse, actively disengaged and potentially hostile – to their organizations.”

Last week, TriplePundit received an in-depth introduction to a company that epitomizes engagement and happiness. Celebrating its 25th anniversary, G Adventures is the world’s first and largest adventure travel company, connecting people across the world through responsible group tours that strive to generate positive impact on local communities where it operates. G Adventures can be found atop nearly every recent list released by the Great Places to Work Institute, an internationally regarded global research and consulting organization that meticulously polls employees to report on the world’s best workplaces.

What does happiness look like in business? G Adventures says it all starts with love -- the first of five core values etched boldly across the wall at Basecamp, G Adventures' headquarters in Toronto, Canada. Driven by love, the remainder of the core values include leading (with service), embracing (the bizarre), creating (happiness and community), and doing (the right thing). This is also a central theme in "Looptail," the New York Times bestselling book written by G Adventures’ Founder, Bruce Poon Tip. The book explores the power of a business that prioritizes love in its relationship with employees, customers and communities across the world.

Loving employees

As a unique travel company, G Adventures benefits from an inherently powerful tool to enhance employee engagement by offering each employee one week of free G Adventure-style travel anywhere in the world.

But G Adventures’ leadership cares deeply about how its employees feel during the other 51 weeks of the year. “I want people to love coming to work each day,” Poon Tip states enthusiastically. “[I want to] create a place where people don’t just come to work, but where they feel that they are contributing to something greater. Do that and their work, no matter what it is they do, becomes a calling.” This is especially challenging considering that G Adventures now has nearly 1,200 employees dispersed across 100 countries, representing a diverse array of cultural perspectives and preferences, about 30 percent of whom will never even meet their leader in their entire career.

His first step in this mission was to eliminate the company’s HR department in 2011. The death of HR, commemorated with an ad-hoc funeral at Basecamp, gave rise to two new entities – the Talent Agency, which handles recruiting, and the G Force, whose self-dubbed “Karma Chameleons” organize company events and promote company values through newsletters and broadcasts.

Don’t believe me? Ask the Mayor of G Adventures. That’s right, the company elected a mayor, whose job description, as the face of the G Force, is to spread happiness through the company and around the world. Mayor Dave Holmes explained the philosophy behind his role: “Happy employees are more likely to innovate and breath life into the company … and less likely to burn out. Life is too short not to be happy. We spend so much time in the workplace. Why not be as happy as possible in the workplace?”

Mayor Dave’s love and enthusiasm radiated contagiously through the building as he guided us along a tour that felt more like a theme park than the headquarters of a thriving global company – the same tour he hosts to indulge a variety of companies including the reputed masters of employee engagement at Google. After offering popcorn and ice cream, and challenging me to an arcade game battle of Street Fighter II, he introduced us to a series of conference rooms, each themed according to inspiring figures who have changed the world. We posed with a life-sized cardboard figure of Captain Kirk in the Star Trek room, lounged in cushy airplane seats in the Wright Brothers room, and donned striped hats and goofy wigs in the Dr. Seuss room. Unfortunately the light sabers eluded our grasp, held up securely in the Star Wars room, which was occupied for a meeting with National Geographic Society president and CEO, Gary E. Knell.

Then came our introduction to the Talent Agency, who was busy interviewing a new job candidate in the ball pit. As I reminisced on childhood birthdays spent diving into similar arrangements at Chuck E. Cheese's, the candidate spun a large Crown and Anchor wheel on the wall, which clicked ominously to a landing upon her next interview question: "How much of the theme song from 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' can you remember? Prove it." We watched in awe as she proceeded to do so without skipping a beat … in Spanish. The idea is to make sure the recruit is a good fit to contribute to company culture.

As we walked through the office, we were greeted warmly by members of each team, who graciously set their work aside and gushed about their respective roles in the company. It was not surprising to learn that staff turnover at G Adventures is a mere 5 percent annually, compared with the travel industry average of 35 percent.

Their happiness, we learned, is derived from a code that ensures four conditions which should be applied to both work and life: Freedom, the ability to grow, being connected and being part of something bigger than themselves. Poon Tip details his theory on management in "Looptail":

“I believe that if businesses what to want to be both sustainable and successful, they have to infuse their organizations with passion and purpose, as a way to engage the people inside the business, which will in turn engage people outside of it.”

Loving customers

Customer satisfaction ratings at G Adventures consistently register around 99 percent. Keep in mind that these numbers are based on a 50-percent customer response rate from more than 110,000 travelers per year.

Inspired by Disney, Poon Tip aspires to create a similar kind of magic by providing an immersive, transformational experience for his customers. “We lead people out of their comfort zones and into a place that is so different from anything they’ve ever experienced. For that moment, they are free and open to anything – whether it’s food, culture, music, or the outdoors. They become receptive to having a life-changing experience.”

The product in itself is transformative, however Poon Tip refers to G Adventures’ ongoing relationship with its customers as the transcendence of the business. “We pride ourselves on our ability to have a full ongoing dialog with our customers without even talking about the product.” One recent example was the outpouring of donations from customers and fans of more than $200,000 raised for relief efforts in the days following Nepal’s devastating earthquake.

The Incite Team, G Adventures’ in-house group of customer advocates, is tasked with understanding customers and collecting stories to improve connection with travelers. They are also the givers of ‘Random Acts of G,’ which empower every customer-facing employee with executive authority to shower customers with gifts and provide for customers’ needs. Tales of abound of special gifts given to loyal customers, including emergency packages mailed to sick customers. These customer service champions operate under mottos like “people will always remember how you made them feel," “we’re only as good as our next unsatisfied customer” and “if we don’t love and take care of our customers, someone else will.”

"Looptail" captures the company’s principles perfectly: “Happiness is about creating a movement, one that revolves around finding your happiness through the happiness of other people. This is a very powerful thing, to bring a group of people together and to motivate them to truly believe that their individual well-being revolves around what they can do for others.” In the case of G Adventures, “other people” live in communities dispersed across the world, to far corners often overlooked by multinational business and most of humanity.

Loving communities across the world

Out of every $100 spent on vacation by a tourist from a developed country, only $5 stays in the destinations economy. For 25 years, G Adventures has led a movement to transform the travel industry’s historically destructive effects on local communities, with a model that supports local businesses and seeks to maximize positive impact on the people who call these places home. In addition to carefully constructing responsible trips, G Adventures launched a nonprofit called Planeterra, which is funded by a mix of company profits and donations from customers with the mission to improve people’s lives by creating and supporting social enterprises that bring underserved communities into the tourism value chain.

Last week, G Adventures unveiled its ’50 in 5 Campaign’ -- a five-year plan to integrate 50 new social enterprise projects into its trips by 2020. This commitment will add to the 25 already existing projects to ensure that by the end of 2020, over 90 percent of G Adventures travelers will have the option to visit one or more of these projects on their tours.

In an exclusive interview, Planeterra Foundation president and VP of sustainability at G Adventures, Jamie Sweeting, touched on the recent success of such projects and their potential for future impact. Sweeting described projects ranging from support of locally-owned restaurants with training and investment to building and expanding carefully selected, high-impact organizations.

One of the most successful projects is what Sweeting called a “tourismification” and expansion of an already established and effective nonprofit in New Delhi, India, called Women on Wheels. Planeterra has invested significant resources in training and vehicles to expand an organization that empowers disadvantaged women to become drivers in the travel industry, while providing safe transport for female travelers.

Sweeting also shed light on Planeterra’s leadership in measuring the impact of travel on local communities, not only for G Adventures tours, but the industry more broadly. “Within our project with the Inter-American Development Bank, we developed a brand new way of monitoring and evaluating the impact of tourism enterprises. We’re also working with Sustainable Travel International to pilot the impact monitoring calculator and ground truth their methodology so that they can roll out for companies like Hilton and Royal Caribbean to use.” G Adventures' investment in Planeterra means that it's impact on communities is limited only by the company's potential to scale.

Last week, G Adventures celebrated its 25th anniversary with an announcement that will enable the company to expand its reach and spread its happiness exponentially across the world -- a partnership with one of the world's most iconic brands -- National Geographic. Beginning Dec. 15, National Geographic and G Adventures will release an initial lineup of 70 trips in a joint effort to make global travel more accessible, authentic, meaningful and sustainable, creating a happier and more interconnected world.

Poon Tip’s book, and the G Adventures' logo, was named for the belief that good karma “looptails” back to its source. It is a fitting image for a company founded by a 22-year-old who survived for three years by eating falafel and Doritos and maxing out multiple credit cards with a dream to change the world through travel. Twenty-five years later, that same company has grown to over $320 million in revenue, all in its mission to spread happiness around the world. Only karma will tell how happiness will looptail back to G Adventures in the 25 years to come.

Image credits: G Adventures, used with permission

More companies are aggressively pursuing what they describe as more attention to corporate social responsibility (CSR) for a bevy of reasons. More evidence suggests that a bolder CSR agenda can improve a company’s brand reputation and even boost its stock price. There is also the awareness that consumers are more discerning about the companies from which they buy goods and services. The result, of course, is that more companies, often guided by their external public relations consultants, are also more aggressive in building a perception than actually delivering on performance.

Therefore, a recent report on CSR rankings, recently released by the Reputation Institute, offers some compelling insights and plenty of room for debate. Like many rankings — all of which are open to interpretation — this report should spark discussion of who is on it as much as who is omitted or ranked toward the bottom 100. The top 10 is full of surprises, starting with the No. 1 company, Amazon.

Amazon’s position at the top of this listing will certainly raise eyebrows considering the company’s longstanding reputation as an opaque carbon emitter and this summer’s New York Times’ article on its alleged “bruising” work environment. But the online retail giant, which also has a sterling reputation for developing its (non-warehouse) employees, is now dabbling in clean energy. And let’s face it: The company has an ingenious business model that no one else out there has been able to come close to replicating.

So, it is important to keep in mind that this particular report is based on questions asked to the general public: 55,000 ratings during the first quarter of this year, according to Reputation Institute. The questions were centered on “trust, admiration and respect, good feeling, and overall esteem.” If a consumer knows his or her Amazon package consistently arrives with minimal hassle, those emotions toward the company will naturally rank high. Those scores remained high, in fact, even after the fallout that resulted from the Times article.

Meanwhile, Subway’s CSR reputation, according to the survey, took a nosedive due to the public relations hit it took after its spokesperson, Jared Fogle, was arrested on child pornography and prostitution charges. Lurid as those details were, that episode should hardly reflect on the company’s performance, whether one’s feelings about that company hovered in positive or negative territory.

So overall, the volume of questions asked is impressive and is a data mine for marketers. But when it comes to substance, this report is wanting, as in the assessment of Subway. After all, one or two bad, even hideous, sub-human apples at Subway has no bearing on how the company treats and pays its employees, sources its ingredients or works with its franchisees to improve its social performance.

And that is what makes Reputation Institute’s data stand out, as well as raise questions about the direction in which corporate social responsibility wants to go. Is this a movement that is truly about helping companies clean up their act when it comes to people in the planet, or one more concerned with good storytelling?

The value in Reputation Institute’s survey, however, is where perception and reality align. For example, many CSR advocates would agree with the high rankings of Levi Strauss and Panera Bread. UPS, Harley-Davidson, Campbell Soup Company and FedEx, firms that are also frequency mentioned in the CSR and sustainability space,  also appear in the top 25 of this listing. Yet other companies that have long been actively engaged in social and environmental responsibility, but are not necessarily well known by the public, rank relatively low. SAP and Unilever (which is less well-known here in the U.S. than abroad) are a couple companies that come to mind when combing through this report.

Reputation Institute is correct in stating that “reputation is an emotional bond” that engenders consumer loyalty and respect. Nevertheless, a track record is also important, and that is where this report could use more heft. Would these scores have been the same if survey participants had known about some of the well-documented actions of some of these highly ranked companies? While it is important to know what is important to consumers as they decide what comprises a responsible company, it is also important to hold companies accountable. Surveys such as those completed by Reputation Institute risk coming across as little more than popularity contests—and give companies more cover to engage in actions most of us would characterize as far from responsible.

Image credit: Reputation Institute