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By Ian Edwards

There is an adage in crisis management that goes something like this: You don’t get to decide whether your company is in a crisis, your stakeholders do.

That means, regardless of how much control you might have over a situation, what your constituents think -- and how they might act based on those assumptions -- likely trumps your confidence. As a corporate executive, you might not believe the outrage is equal to the threat. However, you’ll respond in ways to manage the expectations of your stakeholders and your corporate objectives.

If that is a case, then we might ask Nature or The Future, from their perspectives, whether our current challenge with climate change or biodiversity loss or resource scarcity constitutes a crisis, since both have a stake in the outcomes. It’s not as crazy as it sounds, has precedent and could be a way to engage in more effective sustainability in society.

As a starting point, modern sustainability practice lacks the voices of these two critical audiences, and stakeholder theory – a mainstay communications strategy in managing day-to-day business growth, markets and overall stability – is broad enough, and creative enough, to include them.

With scant exception, modern sustainability only takes care of real-time stakeholders. Slow transitions to renewable energies from fossil fuels minimize the cost and inconvenience to present-day stakeholders without fully accounting for the cost and inconvenience to future stakeholders, who must deal with global warming from human enterprise. Resource extraction, driven by overconsumption by this generation of stakeholders, pays little or no respect to the finite reserves of nature’s capital.

The classic definition of a stakeholder, as defined in the early 1980s works of Edward Freeman, is “any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization’s objective.”

Explains Freeman more recently: “The 21st century is one of ‘managing for stakeholders.' The task of executives is to create as much value as possible for stakeholders without resorting to tradeoffs. Great companies endure because they manage to get stakeholder interests aligned in the same direction.”

Categories like employees, customers, regulators, competitors and vendors rank as stakeholders who need tending. In execution, “stakeholder relations” means understanding their concerns, addressing their needs and ensuring that they remain loyal to the brand. Happy stakeholders are a boon to business, perhaps even viral success. Unhappy stakeholders can strike, boycott and vote with their wallets.

Importantly, there are many other variants of the stakeholder definition, and in the 1990s, academics began to extend the definition beyond people.

In a 1995 paper that called the lack of recognition of nature as a stakeholder a serious omission, Mark Starik, then a professor of strategic management at George Washington University, asked, in all seriousness: "Should trees have managerial standing?" Another study, from 1997, points to the aftermath of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska as an early example of nature gaining stakeholder status. “We can show that several stakeholder groups had urgent and legitimate claims, but they had little or no power to enforce their will in the relationship,” say the authors of Toward a Theory of Stakeholder Identification and Salience. “Included in this category were local residents, marine mammals and birds, and even the natural environment itself. For the claims of these dependent stakeholders to be satisfied, it was necessary for dominant stakeholders – the Alaska state government and the court system – to provide guardianship of the region's citizens, animals, and ecosystems.”

In modern sustainability practice, this translates best as materiality assessment, a well-known sustainability tool that can measure business impacts through stakeholder expectations – though Nature and the Future are notably absent.

In 2013, KPMG and its colleagues produced the report Identifying natural capital risk and materiality, which asks an important question: Could the definition and understanding of the concept of materiality be evolving to incorporate new issues, inclusive of more stakeholders, and over greater time horizons?

The study found none of the 10 companies it reviewed, like Tyson Foods and Mondi, included future generations in its materiality. Meanwhile, the report concluded, “a company taking a longer view when assessing its material issues will be more likely to identify natural capital as a material issue.”

For its part, the Global Reporting Initiative is explicit about the need to broaden consultation.

“Stakeholder engagement … identifies the interests of stakeholders who are unable to articulate their views (such as future generations, fauna, ecosystems),” advises GRI’s G4 implementation guide. “[Reporting organizations] should identify a process for taking such views into account in determining materiality, including the interests of stakeholders with whom it may not be in constant or obvious dialogue.”

In society, we accept the need for proxies and advocates. An advocate can speak for a child in official proceedings, thereby ensuring that the child’s rights are observed and best interests maintained. Who speaks for Nature and the Future?

“We borrow environmental capital from future generations with no intention or prospect of repaying,” asserted the United Nations’ original sustainable development document, Our Common Future, in 1987. “They may damn us for our spendthrift ways, but they can never collect on our debt to them. We act as we do because we can get away with it: future generations do not vote; they have no political or financial power; they cannot challenge our decisions.

In 2007, Hungary created the Parliamentary Commissioner for Future Generations as a platform for environmental sustainability.

Meanwhile, the German NGO World Future Council promises “to do everything in our power to help sustain life on the Earth with all its beauty and diversity for future generations.” It submitted recommendations for Ombudspersons of Future Generations to the 2012 Sustainable Development Governance conference hosted by Stakeholder Forum.

As for Nature, she has the backing of Hollywood.

“I’ve been here for over 4.5 billion years, 22,500 times longer than you,” says Mother Nature, given a chilling, dispassionate voice by Julia Roberts in the brilliant "Nature is Speaking” PSA series produced by Conservation International in 2014. “I don’t really need people. But people need me. Yes, your future depends on me. When I thrive, you thrive. When I falter, you falter. Or worse. But I’ve been here for eons. I have fed species greater than you. And I have starved species greater than you. My oceans. My soil. My flowing streams. My forests. They all can take you. Or leave you. How you choose to live each day – whether you regard or disregard me – doesn’t really matter to me. One way or the other, your actions will determine your fate. Not mine. I am Nature. I will go on. I am prepared to evolve. Are you?”

Extending stakeholder theory to include nature and future generations puts sustainability squarely into an existing business process that would be done anyway.

Asking what nature or the future might “think” about a business impact brings materiality to a new level that perhaps changes the priorities and the direction of present-day operations. The implications for both strategy and sustainability become much clearer when key stakeholders, like the planet that creates our wealth and the future generations with less and less a share of it, are at the table.

Image credit: Flickr/Alice Popkorn

Ian Edwards is a sustainability consultant based in New York City. His earlier post was Sustainability: What’s the End Game?

Nokia's major investors are gathering in Helsinki, Finland, for the mobile handset manufacturer's annual shareholder meeting, which is to take place today. This year's meeting comes shortly after the multinational corporation announced the $16.6 billion acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent, a move that marks a major vertical expansion in the wireless and telecoms carrier equipment and technology market space.

A day before the event, GoodElectronics Network released an “alternative corporate history” of Nokia's rise and fall, the 2014 acquisition by Microsoft of its mobile phone business, and its latest bid to regain prominence in the mobile telecoms marketplace “from a workers' perspective.” Drafted by SOMO, the Netherlands-based Center for Research on Multinational Corporations, and labor research and rights organizations CEREAL-Mexico and Cividep-India, the study could serve as a proxy for the changes in global investment, employment and working conditions that have been taking place since globalization became a driving force in the 1990s.

According to GoodElectronics Networks' Nokia Disconnected: A corporate history from a workers' perspective report: “It turns out that workers’ interests never played a role of significance for Nokia, despite it being one of the world’s most successful electronics companies ever. Now that Nokia has taken over Alcatel-Lucent and is back in business, it’s high time for Nokia to start taking workers’ rights seriously.”

Nokia's corporate evolution from labor's perspective

The fall of the Berlin Wall and China opening its doors to the world economy led multinational corporations and governments the world over to craft strategic plans that have shaped what is now a globalized economy. These events were compounded by rapid advances in information and communications technology and highly automated industrialization.

The institution of an amalgam of government policies supportive of multinationals' strategic globalization plans facilitated an extraordinary surge in overseas expansion and an associated surge in global trade and commerce.

These fundamental changes also led to an unprecedented transfer of technology, manufacturing capacity and jobs from industrialized nations to developing-market countries -- the BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China in particular. The results, according to researchers, have by and large benefited corporate executives and investors at the expense of workers in developed countries and workers' rights in rapidly industrializing nations.

As recounted in GoodElectronics' alternative corporate history of Nokia:

“Nokia’s golden years (1998-2007) were characterized by a rush for the cheapest production locations. Workers in Nokia’s own factories and in those of Nokia’s suppliers faced poor employment and working conditions, as well as structural job insecurity and recurrent job losses due to Nokia continuously shifting production to countries with ever lower wages.”

Nokia's rise, fall and and revival

From the heights of market leadership, Nokia's fortunes fell dramatically in subsequent years, eventually leading management to sell its flagship mobile phone business to Microsoft in a $7.2 billion transaction consummated in April 2014.

During its decline, it was Nokia's multinational workforce -- excluding those at C-suite level -- that bore the costs, GoodElectronics' report authors found.

“When Nokia was eventually taken over by Microsoft in 2014, thousands of workers lost their jobs amongst others because production was shifted away from India to Vietnam. In the meantime, the proceeds from the Microsoft-Nokia deal were used to pay premiums to investors and bonuses to management” totaling some $5.44 billion.

Added Cividep's Jasoon Chelat: "The Nokia plant in Sriperumbudur was projected as one of the most significant instances of big-league company investing in a Special Economic Zone in India. Although the first signs of trouble in Nokia's presence in Sriperumbudur is often cited as tax issues with the Government, a closer look into its operations brings to the fore a lack of regard for labor rights."

With Nokia management looking to resurrect the company as a telecoms industry market leader, GoodElectronics says its time for management to repair the disconnect with its workforce, workers' rights and labor conditions, and time for investors to hold the company accountable.

“With the recent takeover of Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia is becoming the largest supplier of network equipment (such as masts) that connect mobile phones, tablets and computers. We hope this next phase for Nokia will be one in which labour rights are truly respected,” GoodElectronics Network's Pauline Overeem said.

The complete alternative corporate history of Nokia is available free for download on GoodElectronics' website.

*Image credits: GoodElectronics Network, "Nokia Disconnected: A corporate history from a workers' perspective"

By Marjella Alma

“We’re going backward in a field that is supposed to be all about moving forward,” Hillary Clinton said at the Watermark Silicon Valley Conference this past February. “We can literally count on one hand the number of women who have actually been able to come here and turn their dreams into billion-dollar businesses."

I’m not a feminist -- maybe you can call me an “idealist realist” -- and I believe in meritocracy in business. The best person for the job should do the job regardless of gender; but I am fascinated by how women in business and politics change things. In this blog, I am going to give credit to some amazing women I’ve come across along my journey as CEO and co-founder of eRevalue, albeit short.

I wonder if you will recognize this, but many times my husband (CFO at eRevalue) and I leave a meeting with completely different takeaways. “Were we in the same meeting?” we'll ask. Yes, we definitely were -- but with entirely different perspectives and emotions.

That mere observation, coupled with the fact that women are just now starting to climb the ladder, is at the very least remarkable and suggests how more women at the top may impact corporate decision-making. This will, I believe, lead to more well-rounded decisions -- why not call it “curvy decision-making” (I know, bad joke, I take it back) -- as issues will be analyzed and considered from more diverse vantage points.

Beyond a finger-counting exercise, the gender gap and related biases in Silicon Valley are palpable challenges that companies – large and small, established and emerging – face each day. A recent article in the Guardian noted that only 11 percent of executives and around 20 percent of software developers in Silicon Valley are women. To a large degree, this may have to do with personal preference, but I think our female data scientists at eRevalue would disagree.

What’s more, only 53 percent of big tech companies have women on their executive management team, compared with 84 percent for America’s biggest firms of all kinds.

Okay, so this is research that I like. Let’s deep dive into the facts, and have a good ol’ discussion on this one, as we do everyday at eRevalue.

A new study by Quantopian shows that women CEOs in the Fortune 1,000 drive three times the returns as S&P 500 enterprises run predominantly by men. How is this possible? The study compared the performance of Fortune 1,000 companies that had women CEOs between 2002 and 2014 against the S&P 500’s performance during that same period.

As you can see below, the 80 women CEOs during those 12 years produced equity returns 226 percent better than the S&P 500.

For some reason, at eRevalue, I have a lot of women around me. This was really not planned. These include our “women who code” in London, to our chairman in Toronto, head of North-American business development, and global Piloteers. We’ve built Datamaran -- our flagship software -- with many female thought leaders from HP, Onimpact Suncor Energy, Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship and more.

Breaking down silos has been the foundation of my professional life, and gender is undoubtedly a key part of that. I’ve witnessed and supported the efforts of business leaders to go beyond the bottom line and focus on both short- and long-term value creation within their companies. I realize now more than ever how important it is to break down the silos that exist between men and women in the tech sector, and keep an industry that is all about no-boundary innovation moving forward powerfully.

That’s why I am beyond thrilled that eRevalue has been selected as one of the finalists for TechCrunch Disrupt New York 2015. This is an incomparable opportunity to engage directly with other men and women who are positively disrupting business at the largest tech event in New York, and to bring ‘sustainable business and long-term value creation’ to the forefront of the conversation -- but we need your help.

Okay, so here comes the ask -- a small one but with a potentially big impact.

On Wednesday, May 6, the audience and our network can vote for us to participate in the Startup Battlefield. In this conversation, we hope to explain our business model and reinforce how we help businesses embrace the risks and opportunities associated with some of the most complex issues of our time -- climate change, modern slavery and boardroom diversity -- with confidence and foresight.

Voting runs from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. ET on May 6 and will all be possible via this link. Simply click on the “VOTE” button that will appear that day next to our company profile.

Let’s keep breaking down silos between men and women -- one positive impact at a time.

We're just about to set the sails of Datamaran V1, so you if you're interested in learning, feel free to get in touch to schedule a demo.

Image credit: 1) eRevalue 2) Quantopian 

Marjella Alma is the CEO and Co-Founder, eRevalue Ltd. She is a former Director of the Global Reporting Initiative - the most widely used standard for sustainability reporting. She has had a front row seat in the ESG space for the past 7 years. She believes technology will be a game changer and founded eRevalue in March 2014 to drive the role of big data in ESG.

By Randy Paynter

When you think of online petitions, protecting the oceans from oil exploration and wolves from hunters might come to mind.

Political parties, candidates and related advocacy groups are also using petitions as a way to build awareness for their platforms and reach prospective voters. A quick online search of current and former political petitions results in a growing number of examples.

There’s Ben Cohen, the Ben & Jerry’s co-founder who runs a group aiming to overturn Citizens United and garnered support for his petition to get big money out of politics before the 2016 election. No Labels, the Republican/Democrat hybrid group, is collecting signatures on a petition telling Congress we need a National Strategic Agenda. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is sponsoring a petition asking others to join Hillary Clinton in her campaign to fix the broken campaign finance system. During previous election cycles, supporters of Sen. Heidi Heitkamp used a petition to rally support around her campaign. In Wisconsin, Sen. Tammy Baldwin used petitions in the same way.

As we head into the early stages of the 2016 election cycle, I think that online petitions will grow in use, joining the candidates’ typical repertoire of advertising, websites and well-oiled stump speeches. The segment is expanding with new entries, including Stand United, a petition site devoted to conservative campaigns.

A few reasons politicians sponsor petitions include:

• Petitions make constituents aware of where candidates stand in a quick, powerful way.


• Politicians can use petitions to rally supporters around issues that people deeply care about.


• Petitions strengthen signers’ resolve. A person who publically states they support an issue is more likely to act in concert with that belief by voting or donating to the candidate in the future.


• Petition signers spread the word and influence their friends in ways a candidate’s ad could never do, free of media clutter and challenger distortions.


• Petitions connect on issues and ask for nothing more than an electronic signature in order to make an impact – a welcome opportunity to make an impact beyond the frequent email requests for donations.


• Petition signers are likely donors. Traditional advertising has relied on look-alike modeling to reach potential voters. Someone signing a petition not only looks like a potential voter, they are actually showing “intent” to support the candidate’s issue – a much more powerful indication of support.


• Perhaps most importantly, once someone has signed a petition, then the door has been opened to long-term support. It starts with signers receiving email updates on the petition itself. It can continue should signers opt to receive updates from the candidate or organization, the relationship can continue. Further impact comes through Facebook shares, widening a candidate’s reach along with the bonus of valuable third-party endorsements. It is conceivable that one petition can spur a lifetime of dialog and support.

Research of Care2.com petition-signers revealed high levels of civic and political involvement:

• A full 62 percent have voted


• 24 percent have addressed or attended a public meeting


• 26 percent have written an opinion letter to an editor, newspaper or magazine


• Further, 62 percent have contributed to a nonprofit organization

It’s for supporters like these that Cohen has directed numerous petitions to enlist support for a Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. A current petition has gathered almost 75,000 signatures in support. Human Rights Campaign, which lobbies for LGBT rights, drummed up 24,000 signatures in two days, along with media coverage, with a petition against Indiana’s controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Individual candidates take various tacks: During the 2012 elections, Tammy Baldwin’s team leveraged the public’s anti-Wall Street sentiment with a petition demanding the Justice Department intervene, which netted 5,241 signatures/emails and almost 200 Facebook and Twitter posts and aligned her with a cresting issue. The North Dakota Democratic-NPL (Nonpartisan League) Party simply asked people to sign its petition if they agreed it was time to elect a female senator in support of Heidi Heitkamp. It turns out, 14,906 agreed, and almost 6 percent of them shared on Facebook.

As candidates start to declare in the coming months for the next round of elections, I expect more political marketers will enlist online petitions to build their databases of supporters, market-test ideas and start that all important candidate/constituent dance toward the voting booth.

Image credit: 1) Flickr/Jason McHuff 2) Care2

Randy Paynter is the Founder & CEO of Care2 and helped pioneer online citizen advocacy with the launch of the PetitionSite.com. Randy holds an AB from Harvard University and an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Before starting Care2 and the PetitionSite.com, he co-founded one of the web’s first viral apps, electronic greeting card service eCards.com in 1995.

At the London launch of its Sustainable Living Plan progress report, Unilever has revealed that its sustainable living brands such as Dove and Lifebuoy, are growing faster than regular brands.

Indeed, the FMCG giant's sustainable brands grew at twice the rate of its regular business, according to Paul Polman, Unilever ceo. “In a volatile world of growing social inequality, rising population, development challenges and climate change, the need for businesses to adapt is clear, as are the benefits and opportunities. This calls for a transformational approach across the whole value chain if we are to continue to grow. Consumers are recognising this too, increasingly demanding responsible business and responsible brands.

"Our experience is that brands whose purpose and products respond to that demand – ‘sustainable living brands’ – are delivering stronger and faster growth. These brands accounted for half the company’s growth in 2014 and grew at twice the rate of the rest of the business.”

The company also confirmed that it is on track to meet most of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan goals, which it set in 2010 and reported significant supply chain progress: more than 55% of Unilever’s agricultural raw materials are now sustainably sourced.

Against the ambitious target to help improve the health and well-being of over 1 billion people by 2020, Unilever is nearly 40% of the way to reaching it. The company says that it has also enhanced the livelihoods of over 1 million people so far, having helped and trained 800,000 smallholder farmers since 2010 and provided 238,000 women with access to training, support and skills.

You can read the full progress report here. 
 

Fast food chains on the UK high street are being asked to add ethics to their menus in a new campaign by Ethical Consumer magazine.

In its latest product report, the magazine surveyed 22 of the UK's leading restaurant chains for their provision of ethically-sourced food including Fairtrade, free-range, organic and sustainable fish, discovering that not one fast food or restaurant chain is offering customers an ethically responsible menu.

Ethical Consumer says that of the restaurants which do offer an organic option these only represent a token effort  and include four organic yoghurts from Beefeater, organic milk from Nandos and organic coffee at Zizzi. And while over a half of restaurants offer free-range eggs, none offer either free-range or organic meat.

Tim Hunt, editor of Ethical Consumer's product guide to fast food and restaurant chains described the results as 'extremely disappointing': "Given that both Fairtrade and organic food and drink are now mainstream items and are regularly bought by large numbers of people, the country's fast food and restaurant chains need to wake up and provide their customers with what they want.”

 

Picture credit: © Flytosky11 | Dreamstime.com - Fast Food Photo

In constructing our modern world, we have exceeded planetary boundaries that we didn’t even know existed. From the perspective of design, this represents an under-constrained development. In the past, designers focused on what they understood to be important: the economic constraints of cost, performance and reliability. It is only now that we are beginning to take the broader constraints that define a product’s impact on the planet into consideration.

This was the theme of my recent conversation with Lynelle Cameron, Autodesk’s senior director of sustainability and philanthropy. Autodesk is a world-leading provider of computer-aided design (CAD) software. When asked why she decided to come to Autodesk after working in sustainability for a decade at HP and elsewhere, Cameron said: “I realized that this little design software company was sitting on a gold mine of opportunity.

"If we could embed ecological intelligence into software, that would make it easy for designers of buildings, highways, cities, consumer products, you name it, to make better decisions about what is being designed, without needing to be experts on things like energy, materials, water and all that.”

That has been Cameron's primary focus for most of her eight years at Autodesk, though it’s recently been expanded to include the company’s philanthropy. She has been working to better align giving with “Autodesk’s core business of design, as applied by those working in the social sector as well as early stage startups that are using design to tackle some of today’s most epic challenges.”

This builds on earlier efforts by the company to make its software available to clean-tech companies.

Cameron speaks of designers almost in Rodney Dangerfield terms, as being overlooked and under-appreciated. But at the same time, she recognizes that the door is beginning to open for designs that embrace and embody sustainability principles to become more fully appreciated in the marketplace. Autodesk is well-positioned to help creative types tackle sustainable design with tools that provide the electronic equivalent of a sustainability guru looking over their shoulders and guiding them as they produce their solutions.

In the world of buildings, for example, Autodesk offers multiple tools for new high-performance buildings that include energy analysis, lighting and daylighting, simulations, and airflow modeling, all of which are aimed at optimizing the design. Additional tools, such as Rapid Energy Modeling Software, are aimed at retrofitting existing building to improve their performance. This application will enable users to create a complete 3-D model of a building directly from photographs. The model can then be used to optimize a retrofit.

With tools like these in hand, those aiming to make better, more sustainable products might be limited only by their imaginations.

Autodesk is also helping a number of startups get off the ground. Qbotix makes robots to adjust the positioning of solar panels. A few robots can take the place of tracking systems on dozens of panels, which can help reduce the overall system cost. That’s not to be confused with Q-bot, a small robot that can be used to perform jobs like spraying insulation in difficult-to-reach places like beneath floorboards. D-Rev develops and distributes bio-medical devices such as prosthetics for people living on less than $4 per day, while SolePower makes a shoe that captures energy produced by walking. The energy can then be used to charge a cell phone. MASS Design is an architectural design group that pushes the envelope on buildings with its holistic approach to design. Finally, there is Proximity Design, a group in Myanmar that develops affordable and useful items for local farmers that improve productivity while reducing environmental impact. Its work has reached over 2.5 million people, adding over $50 million of additional income.

As all products have embedded energy that went into their production, they also have embedded intelligence bestowed by their designers. Smart tools can help designers work smarter, worrying about the hundreds of details for them and thereby unleashing their creativity. A world comprised of smarter products will likely be more efficient, more sustainable and a better place to live.

Image courtesy of Autodesk

Long credited with putting fun — and sustainability — into home cleaning products, Method has taken a step that goes far beyond “zero waste” and has become the mantra of other cleaning products and CPG companies. One year after announcing its plan, the iconoclast company opened its South Side Soapbox factory last week in the Pullman Park district of Chicago. Cradle to Cradle pioneer William McDonough + Partners designed the factory, the first such LEED Platinum certified facility within this sector.

The factory’s opening is just another step for Method as it has shaken up not only the cleaning products industry, but also the way business is done period. The company has held onto its “weird” corporate culture, even after its acquisition by the Belgian cleaning products company Ecover. Instead of focusing on its products’ “green” features, Method has made them cost-competitive, as well as cool, chic and artistic, nudging consumers to keep those sleek bottles on display in kitchens and counters instead of hidden under the sink with the bug spray. Plastic from the Pacific Garbage Patch has found its way into Method’s plastic bottles, and the company has also been active in pushing Congress to update federal chemical safety laws. Its products have long been available to the mass market; they have been on for sale at Target for years. The new factory in Chicago proves even more how forward-thinking this funky soap company has become.

Clean energy will power the South Side Soapbox, which sits on 22 acres. A refurbished turbine onsite will provide wind power, while solar energy trees will contribute electricity as well; the company says it will buy renewable energy credits (RECs) to ensure the facility runs on renewable power for at least two years.

Additional features also help make the factory operate with maximum energy efficiency. A 1,500-square-foot covered walkway will keep workers and visitors cool; the light-reflecting concrete and roof will reduce solar gain; a 120-gallon (455-liter) solar heating system will reduce dependence on the local grid for heating; and skylights will also keep the facility light and airy during the day.

Another cooling feature is a 75,000-square-foot green roof and urban farm, designed in a partnership with Brooklyn’s Gotham Greens. According to the company, the urban farming operation will be able to produce up to 500 tons of produce annually while reducing energy consumption and storm-water runoff.

Method is positioning the factory as a way to have a positive impact on Chicago. This is not the walled-off factory laced with barbed wire of your grandparents’ generation; the public will have access to the space, which includes 19.5 acres that are undergoing restoration as a wildlife preserve. The company also says it will plan to lead public tours focused on clean energy, hydroponic farming and sustainable manufacturing.

Method’s latest venture goes above and beyond the zero-waste plants that have become the narrative of companies such as Unilever, P&G and even GM. Method is going many steps further, leading by example, making as many investments as possible to make its operations lean and green, and becoming an active stakeholder within the local community. This factory truly represents the three Ps of sustainability: people, planet and profit.

Image credit: Method

“To make a market is very difficult,” José Román Carrera told me as we walked the grounds of Forescom, a Rainforest Alliance and FSC-certified timber processing plant.

No Joke. Román Carrera runs the Training, Extension, Enterprises and Sourcing (TREES program) in Latin America for Rainforest Alliance. His job is to save the rainforest by helping people who live in protected areas to collect, sort and sell timber and non-timber products. This is easier said than done since the people he works with often lack any formal education, and the products are things most Americans have never heard of. Yet, despite the odds, Rainforest Alliance -- together with local partners -- developed 182 collectives, each with their own registered "concession" or product. More than 100 of these collectives are in the Petén region of Guatemala, on the edge of the Maya Biosphere reserve.

"When we started, very few people believed these communities would be able to manage the concessions," Marcedonio Cortave, the founder and director of ACOFOP, explained through a translator. "They thought it was better to give the concessions to companies and let them hire the locals to do the work."

But groups banded together to express their desire for concessions to be awarded at the community level. "We proved that if you give the communities the opportunity to learn, they do learn," Cortave shared with pride.

The Maya Biosphere reserve is divided into three zones, which allow for varying degrees of human interaction. The core zone (which makes up 36 percent of the reserve) is a national park where only scientific research and tourism are allowed. In the multiple-use zone (40 percent of the reserve), low-impact natural resource activities are allowed with approval on a project-by-project basis. Finally, in the buffer zone (24 percent) -- a 15-kilometer band that runs along the south border of the park -- a variety of activities are allowed, including agriculture.

Rainforest Alliance projects exist in the multiple-use zone. Local communities have called this area home for generations, and many lack the global connections to build a market for the products they have at their disposal. That's where the TREES program comes in: TREES helps the communities get set up to harvest and process non-timber rainforest products like xate, chicle and ramon nuts, as well as hardwoods like mahogany. To meet the strict requirements of the multiple-use zone, communities can only cut two trees per hectare every 25 years, and each concession faces similar limits to ensure re-growth. These limitations mean that the groups must get creative and add value wherever they can to maximize revenue.

"Learning by doing"

This has all been a work in progress with a lot of "aprender haciendo," or learning by doing, to find buyers and prepare materials to spec.

In the case of timber, Rainforest Alliance helped to start Forescom, a timber processing facility to add value to the timber in country, so that it could command a higher price. Forescom works with the 12 forestry collectives in the multi-use zone. The value-add can be everything from drying the wood, to cutting a tree into beams or other lumber, to actually building furniture.

In the process of "learning by doing," there have been mistakes. The first iteration of Forestcom was a lumber-buyer or distribution function. But without buyers already selected, the wood went unsold and the company lost money. Now they work on spec, securing purchase orders -- which then go out to the collectives, before any wood is even cut down.

Forescom had to learn which wood species were best for each type of application, from flooring to decking, demonstrate that suitability, and dry wood to the appropriate moisture level for maximum durability. Even drying the wood was a learning process. The organization spent $60,000 on a kiln and used trial-and-error to determine what temperature and for how long to heat each type of wood.

Now, Forescom has 14 buyers all around the world and employs 16 workers during peak season. "They've got more money than Rainforest Alliance," Román Carrera joked.

Ensuring transparency for maximum value

The fact that Forestcom only works with the certified collectives is an important piece of the puzzle. It helps maintain the chain of custody that allows international buyers to feel confident that they are buying responsibly-harvested wood.

The chain of custody begins deep in the rainforest. We traveled three hours on a bumpy dirt road to reach the community of Carmelita, where 380 people reside; it is Rainforest Alliance's largest and most successful collective in Latin America. The collective was formed in 1996 to extract wood, and now the community is also certified for chicle, xate (an ornamental plant) and allspice. The wood Carmelita residents extract is the community's most lucrative product. It is FSC and Rainforest Alliance certified, and each log the community extracts can bring in as much as $3,300. Seventy percent of the community's income came from timber last year, and the community only had to fell 356 trees.

To get a premium like that, each tree is carefully selected for size, age and location, noted on a rainforest map, and felled by three men. The lumberjacks carefully plot how to bring down the tree in order to maximize the amount of high-quality wood they capture. The direction the tree falls is planned to precision to make sure that the tree doesn't take down other valuable trees or community members on its way down. Once cut, the stump and tree are marked with the same number that is noted on the map. This number will stay on the wood as it works its way through the chain of custody. All these careful measures are worth it, as there is a 66 percent premium for the certified wood.

Juan Antonio Perez y Perez, vice president of the collective, told me through a translator that he is very happy to be with the collective. "If I wasn't vice president, I know I can always take a bag and go collect xate." He earns enough money in one month to buy a 100-pound bag of corn -- something it would take three months to grow if he were farming instead.

Residents use the premiums they earn to further the community with projects like expanding health facilities, hiring teachers to educate the children of the community, and even sending some teenagers to Spain to learn carpentry so that the community can continue to add value to its timber resources.

What next?

As far as TREES is concerned, it's onward and upward from here. Román Carrera continues to seek communities that could benefit from a concession. If they struggle to get their collective off the ground, he sends them to Carmelita to learn how it's done.

While this program is clearly successful at its dual goals of economic advancement and environmental protection for rainforest communities, its future hangs in the balance. The contracts were assigned for 25 years, and Carmelita is already on year 18. Guatemala's political elite are known for corruption. The only thing that will stop them from selling the Maya Biosphere Reserve off to commercial developers is political pressure, both from inside and outside of Guatemala.

If you want to see this wonder of the world remain protected, reach out to UNESCO (phone and email addresses for the in-country contact in the link) and pledge your support.

Image credit: Jennifer Boynton

Travel and accommodations for this reporting were provided by Rainforest Alliance 

The minimum wage craze seems to have hit us from every angle. It seems as if every company is finding a few extra spare pennies to show us how deeply they care about their workers. Yes, it is time to rejoice! Minimum wages are hitting new highs!

Let's just back off slowly and take a closer look at this. Is it really all that good?

Do you know what $10 an hour actually means? It is roughly around $21,000 a year. Great, right? So, what do you think the official poverty line is in the U.S. for a family of four? $24,000 ... Yes, that is the poverty line and not the middle-class line. Not even the working-class line. It is the poverty line. Below that line, you go beyond struggling. You are officially in a state of deprivation. Yes, deprivation.

Doesn't sound so great anymore now, does it?

So, please excuse me if I don't jump up and down when I hear some company has increased its minimum wage to $10 or $11 an hour. Those workers are marginally "better off" than workers earning $9 an hour. But it isn't really much of an improvement in their lives. They are still dirt poor, still in a state of deprivation and will still have to work multiple jobs to get out of the poverty trap.

Let's rather applaud companies that make a real difference -- companies that take true leadership positions and don't just dole out pennies to make themselves feel better. Let's applaud the Container Store for paying its retail workers almost $50,000 a year. Or Costco paying on average $21 an hour. Or Ben & Jerry's paying $16.29 at entry-level positions. That is leadership. Not $10 an hour.

I will leave you with two more thoughts: Guess what the minimum wage would be if it kept up with productivity? Over $21 an hour.

And guess what the average hourly wage is for the CEOs of some of the top retailers out there?

Let that be your homework. But I am willing to bet $10 that it is a wee bit higher than $10 and hour. Or $100 an hour. Or even $1,000 an hour.

It might even be above the poverty line.

So, let's hold back on that applause when we hear someone raised their minimum wage to $10 or even $11 an hour. It's called a MINIMUM wage for a reason.

Image credit: Flickr/401(K) 2012

A series of quick & dirty opinion pieces by Henk Campher. Senior Vice President, Business + Social Purpose at Edelman (www.edelman.com) out in the Wild West of San Francisco. Disrupter of purpose. Engineer of big ideas. Slayer of myths. Social media junkie – @angryafrican. He never wears ties. Ever. But always wears an accent with a strategy and opinion in his back pocket. Please note this series will not focus on individual companies and any reference is purely to provide color commentary. His book, Creating a Sustainable Brand is available here.

Follow Henk Campher on Twitter.