Watch Out for That Cliff: The Urgency of Driving Sustainability in Business

By Chris Librie

Picture Indiana Jones in the blockbuster film "Raiders of the Lost Ark." He’s galloping on a white stallion in hot pursuit of a convoy transporting the lost Ark. In true action-hero style, Jones leaps from the horse and drops himself inside the truck carrying the artifact. Eventually, Jones takes control of the truck. As the convoy continues down the winding jungle road, a car pulls up alongside — its occupants intent on taking out our hero. The two vehicles barrel toward a sharp S-curve. In the final second, Jones makes a sharp turn, narrowly avoiding the cliff. The second car and its passengers are shown falling to their demise.

What does this adrenaline-charged scene from the popular action film have to do with sustainability?

“We must have a sense of urgency,” said Brad Tomm, senior manager of campus operations and sustainability at Zappos. “We cannot merely slow down. We must steer completely away from the cliff.”

Tomm shared this analogy during a HP Living Progress Exchange (LPX) discussion forum at the recent SXSW Eco conference in Austin, Texas. The LPX, hosted by HP and moderated by GlobeScan, brings together sustainability experts and opinion leaders to learn from each other, inspire fresh thinking and share best practices. In addition to Zappos, I was joined in one of two LPX sessions by leaders from ZipCar, Conservation International, Adobe, The North Face, National Audubon Society, Chicago Botanic Garden and SolarCity.

And this week, HP is hosting two more LPX sessions at Sustainable Brands London, as well as launching an ongoing global online discussion — open to everyone — on the Convetit Think Tank.

It’s not that we spend a lot of time discussing 1980s adventure films in our HP Living Progress Exchange, but Tomm’s analogy is a good one.

We, as a society, are barreling full-steam ahead toward a future that can’t sustain us.

Like Jones, we have a choice:

• Take no action and meet the cliff quickly


• Reduce our acceleration, which keeps on a dangerous path but buys us a little more time


• Or turn the wheel and avoid the cliff

When you look at sustainability through this lens, our only real choice is apparent. We have to change course.

As our CEO Meg Whitman says, “Business as usual is not an option for anyone.” We have to think and act differently in the way we conduct business. We have to get everyone across our entire value chain thinking and acting differently, we have to innovate differently, and we have to make it easy for consumers and enterprise customers to make the right purchasing choices.

This is really the purpose behind HP Living Progress, which is our strategy for creating a better future for everyone through our actions and innovations. By integrating HP Living Progress into the core of our business strategy, we are focused on creating the most resource-efficient IT products and services through the most responsible value chain.

This integration of sustainability into our business strategy is essential not only for society, but for the long-term success of our business. As we discussed in the LPX, often companies come to this realization in two main ways: sustainability is the reason they exist — such as the car-sharing business model of ZipCar or the alternative energy provider SolarCity -- or, companies come to it out of urgency and necessity, as Nike did after its publicized supply chain challenges a decade and a half ago.

For HP, this realization came as the company faced its own challenges with our turnover of three CEOs in five years. While sustainability has been embedded in our DNA from the beginning, it wasn’t always completely intertwined with our business strategy. That changed when we began looking at sustainability as an untapped business asset that helps drive our turnaround strategy. It was then that we realized sustainability was no longer something that we could do alongside our business. It had to become one with our business. Our leadership recognized this is the way to build a sustainable business while solving the world’s toughest challenges.

Further proof that urgency drives action.

But as one of our LPX participants noted, the real win will come when we don’t think about or talk about sustainability any more or need a crisis to drive change — it’s just inherently the way everyone does business.

It’s then that an unsustainable future will be a fleeting image in our rearview mirror.

Image credit: Merrick Ales Photography

Chris Librie is senior director of strategy and communications for HP Living Progress.