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By Joseph Plummer

Since its inception in 1997, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has made grant payments totaling more than $33.5 billion. These grants have gone to things like polio eradication, the Malaria Vaccine Initiative and targeted education efforts in low-income communities. The Gates Foundation’s endowment is currently around $43 billion.

Harvard’s endowment is of a similar magnitude: around $32.7 billion, compared to the average university endowment of about $350 million. Harvard has used its massive endowment to fund professorships, financial aid and research. These endowments seem to be positive forces for good. Furthermore, they seem to provide perpetual funding for their chosen causes. So, why don’t we have more massive endowments?

Most endowments are the result of wealthy individuals setting aside money for a particular cause or set of causes. Or, in the case of universities, it is the result of an accumulation of donations and grants. So, it makes sense that we don’t have thousands of massive endowments of magnitudes similar to that of Gates and Harvard. On the other hand, we have witnessed numerous injections of capital into the economy by the federal government in the form of stimulus packages and quantitative easing.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which was introduced to the House on Jan. 26, 2009, and signed into law by the president three weeks later, injected roughly $800 billion into the American economy over 10 years. The legislation funded things like infrastructure, energy efficiency, education, healthcare and scientific research. The Federal Reserve has also been very active in recent years. The latest round of quantitative easing (QE3) started in September 2012 at a rate of $40 billion per month and peaked in 2014 at a rate of $85 billion per month. This money is injected into the economy when the Federal Reserve buys securities from banks thus giving banks more capital to lend. Quantitative easing and federal stimulus packages are shortsighted solutions to our economic problems. We need an effective long-term solution. We need more massive endowments.

Consider the money associated with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 -- $800 billion. That amount of money is the equivalent to about 18 Gates endowments or 25 Harvard endowments. Similarly, at the starting QE3 rate of $40 billion a month over two years, we could create 24 Gates endowments. At the QE3 rate of $85 billion a month over two years, we could create 62 Harvard endowments. That’s a $33 billion endowment for every state and territory in the Union. Again, endowments provide perpetual funding streams. These wouldn’t simply fund a road maintenance project and create jobs for a year. Endowments are designed to give ongoing support.

Advocates for smaller government should like this idea. While this wouldn’t necessarily shrink government, it would inherently shrink the market share of the government sector (perhaps a more accurate term for this would be 'sector share').

As a percentage of the economy (GDP), the government sector (government expenditures), which includes local, state, and federal government agencies, represents a significantly larger percentage (~40 percent) than the nonprofit sector (~5.5 percent), which includes charities, foundations, universities and hospitals.

Therefore, if newly injected money were funneled to the nonprofit sector, then the nonprofit sector would grow while the government remained close to the same size. It is also reasonable to assume that as the nonprofit sector grows, the government sector would not only shrink in sector share, but also in actual size. A lot of the work done by government agencies can be done by the nonprofit sector (think: education, healthcare and other social services).

It is clear that our societal challenges aren’t getting easier. Issues relating to food, energy, water, poverty, infrastructure, education and justice are becoming more and more complex.   A more robust nonprofit sector is necessary to address these challenges. Increasing the size and number of philanthropic and university endowments can very effectively address the social and environmental challenges of today and tomorrow.

As governments consider future rounds of economic stimulus and quantitative easing, they should consider the effectiveness and longevity of endowments.

Image credit: Flickr/Angela N.

Joseph Plummer is a degree candidate in the Executive Master of Natural Resources (XMNR) program at Virginia Tech, expecting to graduate in May 2016.

Over the past few years, many companies committed to make their egg supply chains cage-free. Add the chain with the iconic golden arches to the list.

McDonald’s will transition to cage-free eggs in its North American restaurants within the next 10 years, the company announced last week.

The fast-food chain's announcement is major. McDonald's has 16,000 restaurants in the U.S. and Canada. And the company will switch to 100 percent cage-free eggs for all of its U.S. and Canadian operations, which will keep almost 8 million egg-laying hens from being confined in cramped cages. As the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) put it, this is a “watershed moment for animal welfare.”

Consider that McDonald’s U.S. stores alone buy about 2 billion billion eggs a year and McDonald’s Canada buys another 120 million eggs to serve on its breakfast menus. Those Egg McMuffins that are so popular will one day never come from hens that are kept in confined quarters. Already, McDonald’s buys some of its eggs from cage-free sources. The company has bought over 13 million cage-free eggs a year since 2011.

McDonald’s is also no stranger to animal welfare standards. In 2000, McDonald’s USA became the first food service company to adopt a standard for hen housing systems so more space would be provided per bird. Ten years later, the company started research with the Coalition for a Sustainable Egg Supply on hen housing systems.

The cruelty of battery cages

Most egg-laying hens are confined in what are called battery cages, according to the HSUS. The average cage size gives hens 67 square inches. That’s smaller than one sheet of letter-sized paper. And the poor creature is confined in that small space for the rest of her life. She can’t spread her wings, or practice natural behaviors like nesting, perching and dustbathing. Those are all things she needs to do in order to be healthy and content.

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr. Konrad Lorenz explains just how devastating it is to watch a battery-caged hen lay her eggs. “The worst torture to which a battery hen is exposed is the inability to retire somewhere for the laying act,” Lorenz said. “For the person who knows something about animals, it is truly heart-rending to watch how a chicken tries again and again to crawl beneath her fellow cage-mates to search there in vain for cover.”

Even in cage-free systems there is still inherent cruelty. Here’s a list of things that occur under both caged and cage-free systems, compiled by the HSUS:

• Both systems typically buy their hens from hatcheries that kill the male chicks upon hatching. Over 200 million chicks are killed in the U.S. each year.


• Both systems burn off part of a chicken’s beak.


• Both systems typically slaughter hens when they are less than 2 years old, which is far less than their normal lifespan. They are transported long distances to slaughter plants without being given food or water.


• There are producers in both systems that still use starvation to force chickens to molt.

Although cage-free does not mean cruelty-free, it is a start to creating a more humane kind of egg producing system in North America. At least the hens are able to lay their eggs in nests and take part in other natural chicken behaviors.

Image credit: Flickr/Steve Lilley

By Kayla Matthews

Most of us don’t think about the stages of testing and design products go through before they become part of our daily lives. But environmental testing is a crucial stage in the process. It helps companies create the best possible products and, most importantly, ensures safety for the people who use those products.

From testing products in different weather conditions to determining the best packaging for hazardous materials, environmental testing is applicable to all industries and products. Learn about the benefits of environmental testing so you can demand it from the companies you do business with.

Prepare for a range of environmental conditions

Some products are designed for indoor use. For example, the machinery in a clothing factory is not intended to be used outside of the building. Still, that same machinery may be exposed to different temperatures depending on the country where it’s located.

Other products, such as airplanes, are operated outside, but they may encounter a wide range of weather conditions, from extreme heat and cold to severe storms. Equipment malfunction in bad weather can lead to disaster, as the crash of Air France flight 447 illustrates. Icy conditions likely caused the airspeed indicators to provide incorrect readings.

There are also products built to withstand a variety of conditions, both inside and out. Consumer mobile devices, for example, must be safe in all environments. Imagine if your phone overheated and burned your hand in temperatures above 80 degrees.

To ensure maximum safety, products should be tested for their ability to withstand not only their intended environment, but also any conditions they could possibly encounter.

Exceed legal requirements for safety

Surprisingly, legal safety standards are often more broad than specific. The product must be safe for use, but manufacturers have the discretion to decide which tests are necessary to meet that standard. It is always better to exceed legal requirements than to simply meet them, however. Doing so distinguishes your company from the competition and also protects against potential litigation.

Utilize every available safety test for your product, and you can tell clients and consumers you have the safest product in the business. Consumer trust can be hard to win these days, but once you do earn it, you’re likely to be met with loyalty in return.

Catch flaws in the incubation stage of design

Safety testing should not be limited to the final product. Simulated environmental testing can identify design flaws from the beginning, and catching those flaws early in the process benefits customers as well as companies. Finding potential issues earlier rather than later saves money because there will be less likelihood of having to replace broken products under warranty. A product that is thoroughly safety-tested before it goes on the market also reduces the hazards and inconveniences customers may face.

In addition to catching flaws early on, regular testing helps companies improve upon existing designs to keep customers happy with a regular output of new and improved items. Don’t wait for complaints to spread like wildfire across social media. Proactive testing protects your company from negative associations and a bad reputation.

The reasons to conduct a full range of environmental testing are clear and compelling.

We should call on businesses to go above and beyond the law to ensure optimal consumer and worker safety for all products and parts.

Product testing is important for people around the globe, and you can become an advocate for its implementation in companies across a variety of industries.

Image credit: Flickr/Library and Archives Canada

Editor's Note: This the second installment in a two-part post on the power of intentions. In case you missed it, you can catch the first post here. 

By Darcy Hitchcock

In my last article, I explained the problems with goal-setting and showed how intention setting can be a useful alternative when you want to tap into people’s passions or invent a future in an uncertain world.

My former business partner Marsha Willard and I experimented with corporate intention setting, what we referred to (a little tongue-in-cheek) as ‘strategic planning by wishing.’ And our track record for getting our big wishes for each year was much better than for all the goals we set (e.g., specific revenue targets), although the wish sometimes manifested in an unexpected way. We came to trust in the process.

"You've got to believe. Never be afraid to dream." — Gloria Estefan, singer-songwriter

Intention setting seems to fit well when goal setting doesn't. Earlier I said that goal setting works well when you know what the end-state should look like. Intention setting can help you discover an end-state. (For example, in 2000, Marsha and I wished to become clear about what role we could play in the sustainability movement ... a wish that you can see came true.)

I also said that goal setting works well when you have a lot of control over key variables. Again, intention setting brings with it a philosophy to let events unfold. It embraces the mystery of serendipity and invites you to explore the potential meaning of situations as they present themselves. Whether you believe in a spiritual force or not, this practice of reflection helps you see relationships that you might ignore if you were narrowly focused on your goal.

In his book "Wishing Well," Paul Pearsall argues that collective wishes have stronger power than individual wishes. What would it be like to make a collective wish with everyone in your organization? Imagine the process of discovering your shared wish, of voicing it together, and then periodically reflecting on the bounty that wish evoked. What an interesting ceremony that would be!

In "Wishing Well," Pearsall presents a five-step cycle, which I have laid out below in linear form so you can compare it to our typical approach in business on the right:

Wishing versus goal-setting

Wishing involves...	Goal-setting involves...
Purpose	Mission statement
Meaning	Goals
Compassion	Tasks
Serenity	Accountability
Delight	Rewards

 

The two lists have a completely different feel to them. Both start with what you want and end with the natural consequences of achieving that. But the experience of living through these two lists is entirely different. How would you like to live in an organization that did more of the list on the left? Of course, you probably need a bit of both.

How do you set an intention?

So, what do you actually do? What would a business process for intention setting look like? In the following process, I am blending practices from intention setting (which we have discussed at length) and visualization (which is used a lot by Olympic athletes and cancer patients).

1. Uncover your passion(s): This involves both knowledge about yourself (who am I? what am I passionate about?) and the world (what needs are there that I can fulfill?) In "The Cathedral Within," Bill Shore, the founder of Sharing our Strength, says the main event that propels people to act on their passions is discovering that they have something unique in themselves that can contribute to a solution. So you cannot discover this in isolation, on a mountaintop. Discovering your purpose(s) in life comes from the interaction between who you are and what is going on in the world. Most people are aware of themes or threads that connect most of their life, making them who they are: a love of nature, a passion for figuring out how things work, a love of teaching, a passion for music. Quiet your mind and discover who is behind the chatter. In "Callings,: Gregg Levoy counsels us to not look for one calling but many. Ask, "In how many ways can I..." 


2. Discover your intention: Next you have to figure out what you want to have happen. This may seem like an easy step but it is often not. Examine your motivation. Why do you want this? Be aware of the deeper need behind your intention. Sometimes this process takes minutes, sometimes a lifetime. 


3. Visualize it manifest: If your intention has a clear end-state, it can help to visualize it in some detail. What will it look like, smell like, feel like? What will you be wearing when you do this work? What will your customers or clients do? Where will your intention show up in tangible form in letters or policies or purchasing decisions?


4. Create an icon: Create some visible, tangible artifact that symbolizes your vision. It might be a collage, an object, a phrase. Place this where you can contemplate it daily. One governmental agency in New Mexico summarized their strategic plan into a picture and printed it on mouse pads for every employee. For years, I posted directly in front of my desk a sign I made that read, “Sustainability isn’t just your work; it’s your life’s work.”


5. Put your intention “out there”: It seems to help if you take tangible actions, do something to stir the universe. Many consultants talk about "serendipitous marketing." If you just sit in your office, no new business comes your way. But if you get out and talk to people, work will come your way (but usually from somewhere else, unrelated to your conversations.) So talk to people about your intention, take some action toward it. You don't need a detailed action plan but invest some energy into your intention. Make a verbal commitment. Say, "I am ready and am willing to take whatever is next."


6. Reflect on what happens: Finally, be observant of what comes next and how you feel about what happens. View obstacles as part of your journey. Stay firm in your intention but flexible in your means.

 

"Yet, in this state of intention we must have the integrity, as Francisco Varela puts it, to stand in a 'state of surrender,' knowing that whatever we need at the moment to meet our destiny, will be available to us.

"It is at this point that we alter our relationship to the future. When we operate with this kind of intention and in this state of open commitment, we see ourselves as an essential part of the unfolding of the universe, of life itself and we seek to bring an unborn possibility into reality as 'it desires,' to serve humankind, not to serve our own narrow selfish desires." — Claus Otto Scharmer, MIT Sloan School of Management

NOTE: This is excerpted from Great Work: 12 Principles for Your Work Life and Life's Work. Quotations are from BrainyQuote.com unless otherwise noted.

Image credit: Flickr/Randy Heinitz

Darcy Hitchcock is the author of a number of award-winning business books including The Business Guide to Sustainability (now in its third edition). In her latest book, GREAT WORK: 12 Principles for Your Work Life and Life’s Work, Darcy shares what she has learned about finding a calling, making a difference and leading organizations. It’s available in print and also three e-books: “Finding Your GREAT WORK,” “Designing Organizations for GREAT WORK,” and “Leading Others to GREAT WORK.”

Learn more at https://DarcyHitchcock.wordpress.com.

By Graham Sinclair

Are you a superhero or a supervillain? The Late Show’s new host, Stephen Colbert, put the question directly to the enigmatic CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk. In his first week of the Late Show franchise, the "real Tony Stark aka Iron Man" analog was a high-profile win for the show. No doubt heavyweights like Uber and Tesla are looking to benefit from Colbert's sway with millennials, as Institutional Investor highlighted. Colbert playfully aimed to pinhole Musk as supervillain or superhero as the two flicked through subjects like Tesla cars, exploding Falcon 9 rockets and thermonuclear explosions to “warm” Mars. Colbert ended by saying Musk’s “vision of the future is very hopeful, that is, it is fixable." It was an uplifting end to the interview.

Back here on planet Earth, we have much to be bleak about. The WWF Living Planet Index tracking humanity blowing through the earth's annual resources flagged Earth Overshoot Day on August 13, 2015, six days earlier than in 2014. According to Steven Nerem of the University of Colorado, we are "locked into at least 3 feet (1 meter) of sea level rise, and probably more." It has me wondering: How optimistic are sustainable investment practitioners about the future?

Whether in Boston, London, Singapore, Sao Paolo, Johannesburg or Melbourne, sustainable investment practitioners have access to the latest data from science, business, economics and policy analysts. They also have access to business leaders' thoughts and actions, so investors should have a very sophisticated perspective. For example, each of the more than 315,000 Bloomberg terminals worldwide has over 30,000 functions delivering a firehose of data to the minute. Increased demand is confirmed by Bloomberg, citing a substantial increase in the number of customers using environmental, social and governance (ESG) data (from 2,415 in 2009 to 17,010 in 2014).

With so much information, investment practitioners have some of the most nuanced and fresh perspectives on what is the state of business-as-usual. Investment decisions are about future forecasts as investors make bets on uncertain futures calculated using their best predictions, from the certainty of data on the current and the past.

Are we screwed?

So, investment practitioners' hopefulness -- or lack of it -- may say a lot about the state we're in. For me, it’s been a little depressing. In my seminar at Duke Fuqua MBA last week, I found myself confessing to graduate students that I am coming out of a dark season in the past year or two. And I am not alone. There’s an exhaustion, a chronic climate change political fatigue, that has many saying, "We're screwed, bag it!"

The black mood is fostered by each new report mapping out negative sustainability trends (whether in endangered species or a dirtier planet), the realpolitik of contingent policies and misapplied regulations, the few businesses that are authentically good corporate citizens, the great inertia of institutional investors, and the malaise of talking heads shouting at each other, only some of which make sense.

For every new dollar added to sustainable investments through industry-wide initiatives like PRI (US$59 trillion assets under management (AuM)), or sector-wide initiatives like the Access to Nutrition Index (US$2.6 trillion AuM), are we that much closer to a brave new future? Or are we simply getting better at figuring out how much has to be done?

Progress has happened. It may be measured through the advances in data, analysis, education, investor demand and investment services supply, even some seachange in conventional wisdom on how investment practitioners do their job. My conversations in the industry with experienced professionals offers points of view that are more sanguine, sometimes more positive, sometimes more snarky.

The CFA ESG survey in August 2015 polled 44,131 CFA members and reflected back changing attitudes: The main reasons survey respondents take ESG issues into consideration in their analysis were firstly, to help manage investment risks (63 percent), and secondly, because clients/investors demand it (44 percent). But will this be enough, soon?

Pivot to investing in sustainability

What will it take to pivot to aggressive investment in a better future? We will need sustainable investment practitioners may shift from "less bad" to "more good." Less money into companies tidying up things on the business-as-usual vector, and more money into new businesses or models that design for a sustainable future. Less GM, more Tesla. Less General Mills, more Luvo.

The excellent longform Institutional Investor Magazine piece by Imogen Rose-Smith on pure-play sustainable investment boutique Generation Investment Management (“David Blood and Al Gore Want to Reach the Next Generation”) is new required reading in an industry better known for whispers than words. Her piece maps the evolution of the investment philosophy and the adaptation of the investment talent to changing investable opportunities and the business of asset management. It also flags career transformations like Erika Karp's from UBS research head to founder of Cornerstone Capital in 2013, switching from an internal agent in a global investment machine to the leader of a pure-play sustainable investment boutique.

Maybe impact investing offers some hope. This investment theme maximizes social and/or environmental "returns" with investment returns ranging from commercial rates to zero. Since the term “impact investing” was coined at The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in 2007, impact investing has been shaped by new framing of investment philosophy, new policies, re-modeling of intentional investment and funding, new talent and some newly-expressed demand for asset management.

Eight years later the glow of the new is fading into normal, but the blue ocean strategy possible in impact investing has generated new positive energy. It's so pronounced that executive recruitment firm Korn Ferry even has a dedicated recruitment theme for it. But the super-positive estimates are for a $1 trillion market in 2020, still a tiny fraction of the institutional investment universe: In 2011, the combined holdings of all institutional investors represented was US$84.8 trillion.

How are you feeling about sustainable investment in the future? When Colbert described the hope in Musk's engineered widgets and business models, he reminded his audience ("Hello Nation!") of the human propensity to think tomorrow will be better, a Darwinian bias described by Prof Dan Ariely in The End of Rational Economics. Maybe Colbert’s millennial fanbase will add some new positive energy through their career, consumption, investment and voting patterns. Sustainable investment professionals who have been doing this for a while have more lines and more silver hair.

Hopefully the evolution of sustainable investment - new talent, new models, new investable opportunities, new entrepreneurs - may add as much optimism. More superhero, less supervillain.

Image credit: NASA, public domain

Graham Sinclair is Principal at SinCo LLC – Sustainable Investment Consulting LLC. Connect with him @ESGarchitect or LinkedIn.com/GrahamSinclair.

Swedish fashion retailer H&M is partnering with Humane Society International (HSI) in a bid to improve the welfare of animals in its supply chain.

HSI is one of the largest global animal welfare organizations globally and works to promote the humane treatment of animals.

“It is always exciting to partner with a company that shares our passion for animal protection. Working with H&M to end cosmetics animal testing, and improve the lives of animals on farms, will set a high standard for others to follow. It will show that it not only makes good ethical sense to treat animals with kindness and compassion, but it makes good business sense too,” said HSI’s ceo Andrew Rowan.

The collaboration aims to improve the welfare of animals on farms connected to animal derived fibres, as well as to achieve a global ban on animal testing in the world of beauty products.

Picture credit: H&M A/W 2015 collection.

• According to Clean Clothes Campaign, Turkish workers and activists globally are launching a series of protests this week against handbag brand Mulberry for failing to protect the rights of workers in its Izmir supplier factory. More than 15 store actions are planned to take place across Europe and the US on Wednesday and Thursday (16 and 17 September 2015).The brand, worn by celebrities including Alexa Chung and Emma Watson, is being criticised for refusing to step in to protect workers from union busting tactics at the factory SF Leather in Turkey, after management fired workers who had joined the union and only offered to rehire them if they gave up union membership. Mulberry has a set of 'global sourcing principles' [1], which includes commitments to international human rights such as freedom of association, but protesters say this is being violated by their failure to act.

 

Imagine a world in which cell phone chargers aren't necessary ... a world where charging your iPhone is as simple as plugging it into an outlet on your shirt. Or maybe you want to be able to monitor not only your sleep patterns but your general health. There's a ring being designed for that.

Or maybe music is your thing, and while you are listening to the latest release, you like to keep up with your health stats, which are all collected in the sweat-resistant buds in your ears.

Not your style? Are you too on-the-go? No problem. In the future there may be soles in your shoes that can track all this stuff, manage your phone calls and keep your toes toasty at the same time.

The burgeoning wearable technology industry offers huge opportunities for consumers who want to tailor their electronics to meet their needs and lifestyles. But this boom comes with a question: What do we do with that amazing paraphernalia when we're done with it?

In years past, the answer to new technology would be to find a way to recycle the discarded components, like metal casing, wiring or components made exclusively of polymer. But wearable technology doesn't always afford that option.

One reason is, very simply, size.

"I think one of the challenges with electronics and the end-of-life electronics is you are talking about materials that are truly mixed on the nano-scale," Dr. John Howarter, an assistant professor in Materials Engineering at Purdue University, told TriplePundit.

Often the materials being used consist of extremely small blends of multiple substances that would make it genuinely impossible to separate for processing. The ring that tracks your health stats likely isn't made of one material with working components, like watches used to be, but has a diverse blend of metals and polymers fused or mixed together. The shirt will likely have extremely fine filaments that are melded with polymers, perhaps even components that aren't visible to the naked eye. The working components can't just be plucked out of the composite and tossed into a batch to be recycled.

The question that is now before the designers who make our wearable tech, Howarter said, isn't just how to design the technology for consumer use, but how to design it for its end-of-life cycle as well - an end-of-life where some of those composites might be released into the waste stream or the environment, and others could be returned to the manufacturer to be repurposed.

This shift in approach, explained Dr. Carol Handwerker, a professor of materials engineering and environmental and ecological engineering at Purdue, has a lot to do with the increasing modification in what our tech gizmos are made of.

"One of the things that is happening in electronics overall is that the amount of precious metals is going down," Handwerker told us. "So gold, palladium, things that have intrinsic worth is almost nil. And what that means is ... one, that the cost of the raw materials is going down, because those are really not used." That means that the substances that have been the most damaging to the environment, either because of the way they are mined or the way that they respond when released into landfills and other environments, are being used less and less in consumer product applications.

"So, when you start to look at design sustainability instead of just design for recycling, you have a very different set of criteria one can use," Handwerker continued. "Ultimately what we would like is to have maybe almost all polymer" combined, of course, with that essential little chip.

"And you want it to be that you can use those [items] until basically they wear out, and there is a way to send them back and somebody at the company will re-manufacture the whole product, taking the little chip out and putting it in something else again. But in the end, we will have used all the energy and materials we have put into it very well, and in the end, it could even possibly be landfilled. Because you are simply disposing carbon then."

And there is another benefit to that shift in manufacturing science, Howarter said. "I think the other thing to keep in mind is, when we are talking about wearable electronics, what we are really saying is we’re going to have some sort of material that is going to be in contact with my body a significant amount of the day. And I think once you start transitioning to that now, it becomes really imperative to think about ... what the composition of that whole component will be." Making materials as benign to our skin and organs is as important as minimizing their impact on the land, water and air around us.

"And we want to eliminate waste at all stages. We’re talking about the gold mining. We’re talking about waste all along the supply chain, all along manufacturing. But there is also a movement right now to really reframe electronics in what is known as the circular economy," Handwerker concluded.

The big challenge for the future, said Dr. Bob Pfal, a consultant and former vice president of global operations for the International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative in Herndon, Virginia, will be batteries: those essential harborers of energy that is built into so much of our technology. Finding ways to nullify their toxicity would be important, Pfahl told us. "Trying to make these small products so they can go in the regular waste stream for the most part, and obviously there are exceptions, in my mind would be a very good design approach."

Pfahl says that from a market perspective, recycling wearable tech components will be impractical in most cases. "I really do think that in most cases the smaller [components] is not going to be a particularly attractive market for recycling."

The answer, he says, is "to use as little material as possible," and to design products that use less power -- steps that are already in place. "Designers are coming up with great applications that eliminate the use of energy and power from the way we are currently doing things," Pfahl said.

There are many challenges, Howarter said, but in the end, a more sensible way of harnessing potential in our wearable tech is within reach. "It is just a matter of putting the engineer or designer’s mind to work and saying, 'How do we design for the end-of-life?'  I think as we rethink how to make products and how to deal with them, these solutions will come."

Images credits: 1) Flickr/Keoni Cabral; 2) Flickr/Com Salud Agencia; 3) Flickr/SMI Eye Tracking

Hydrogen is a highly energy dense, zero-emission fuel that can be sourced from water using wind or solar energy. When it burns, it leaves nothing behind but water. If that sounds too good to be true, then it is -- at least for now. Currently, fossil fuels are the source for much of the world's hydrogen, and the dream of a sustainable "hydrogen economy" seems far away.

However, that gloomy outlook hasn't stopped the world's auto manufacturers from dabbling with electric vehicles powered by fuel cells. In the latest development, Toyota has taken things a step further, with the announcement of a new "full-fledged" carbon neutral hydrogen economy project involving two cities in Japan.

The hydrogen economy then

In 2003, MIT Technology Review published a scathing critique of the hydrogen economy, noting that hydrogen is typically manufactured from coal, petroleum and natural gas.

TriplePundit took a glance at the "hydrogen economy" concept back in 2005 and dug up this quote from The Energy Bulletin:

"Hydrogen isn’t an energy source – it’s an energy carrier, like a battery. You have to make it and put energy into it, both of which take energy."

That is the central issue. Hydrogen stores energy in a simple chemical bond, and although the energy density of hydrogen makes it an alluring fuel, manufacturing hydrogen involves a substantial expenditure of energy, and using it efficiently in a fuel cell involves technology costs as well.

For the record, until recently natural gas was thought to be a cleaner alternative to coal and petroleum, but a growing pile of evidence indicates that a long list of impacts, including fugitive methane emissions, water resource issues and earthquakes, is wiping out any advantage that natural gas has at the tailpipe.

The hydrogen economy now

Well, that was then. Despite an ongoing chorus of critics -- the latest being a quip from Tesla CEO Elon Musk to the effect that fuel cell vehicles are "BS" -- hydrogen fuel cells have been sliding into mainstream markets.

In 2012 TriplePundit took a somewhat more balanced look at the issue and assessed the pros and cons of fuel cells, and by last spring we were noting the growing popularity of fuel cell vehicles in the logistics industry.

Other recent developments in the U.S. include the creation of a national fuel cell vehicle refueling network spearheaded by California and a GM fuel cell fleet project for the U.S. Army in Hawaii. Stationary fuel cells are also being adopted by major corporations, notably Ikea, which just this past summer announced a solar-enabled stationary fuel cell system for its store in Emeryville, California.

On the global scene, the manufacture of hydrogen from renewable energy, known as power-to-gas, is taking shape as national policy in Germany and Switzerland.

The Toyota hydrogen economy experiment

That brings us up to Toyota and its hydrogen economy demonstration project in Japan, announced last week.

Yokohama and Kawasaki, coastal cities in the Keihin region, are the two cities involved in the new project. Local wind power will be used to manufacture hydrogen from water through electrolysis, which basically involves splitting water by using an electrical current, and the hydrogen will be stored for local use.

The project is still in the planning phases and, at least at this point, Toyota leaves room for the possibility that grid power will occasionally be needed. On the optimistic side, it's also possible that the system may generate more hydrogen than can be used locally, in which case excess wind energy could be sold to the grid.

Toyota lists these components for the new project:

• A system to produce hydrogen by electrolyzing water using wind power


• A system to optimize storage and transportation of hydrogen produced


• Use of fuel cell forklifts


• A hydrogen supply chain feasibility study (hydrogen price, carbon emissions reduction, etc.)

Also participating in the project are the Kanagawa Prefectural Government, Iwatani Corp. and Toshiba, along with Toyota Motor Corp. and Toyota Turbine and Systems Inc. The project is anticipated to begin in 2016 and last about four years.

Toyota is rolling out its new fuel cell electric vehicle Mirai in the U.S. this fall, so stay tuned.

As for the hydrogen economy, as American writer and satirist Mark Twain once famously cracked, "the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

Images courtesy of Toyota

Thirty-seven percent of employees say they have a clear understanding of what their organization is trying to achieve and why, according to Stephen Covey’s "The 8th Habit." If employees don’t know what their organization is trying to achieve, then customers sure as heck won’t know. What we have here is a branding problem.

At the recent Women in Green Forum, there was some talk about branding and communication. “Brands are really just a collection of people ... When we look at something we want it to sound like someone we know … not just a bot,” said Jenn Hirsch, founder of Marked Point.

“With more digital tools we have the expectation that we’ll be able to 'peek behind the curtain' and understand the inner workings of companies,” continued Hirsch, who specializes in helping companies tell their story. She was discussing branding with Leslie Ziegler, cofounder of Bitty Foods.

Their discussion caused the gears in my brain to turn, and I came up with a list of eight ways you can develop a kickass authentic brand.

1. Your friend, not a machine

Ziegler said she often gives a personal touch when replying to customers’ emails by including an amusing animated GIF, like a velociraptor on a bicycle.

When people talk about a company, they use the same pronouns used to describe people, such as they, them, their. That’s because the way we think about that company is in some ways the way we think about people.

People say “brands need to be humanized,” but I believe a brand should be like your ideal best friend: helpful, wise, intriguing, ethical, stylish, driven and fun to hang out with. It should be your role model, a person you look up to and want to imitate.

Typically, a company operates more like a machine. How often do you call into customer support and get a person who is obviously reading a script? Always and almost every time. How valued do you feel? As valuable as the gum stuck on my shoe. How likely is that rep to be able to solve a problem that requires any degree of flexibility? As flexible as a corpse with rigor mortis.

2. A meaningful story, not a math quiz or soap opera

Fonts, colors and logos are all part of branding, but they are peripherals and not the essence of a brand. When you strip a brand down to its core, a brand is a story. It’s a story about people: the people who work there and the people they serve. Your brand tells the world who you are, why you exist and where you’re going.

At the Women in Green Forum, Hirsch pointed out: “A brand is an ongoing story. To have a good story, you have to know who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, who the antihero is. So, really then when you approach something, ask what’s going to get people involved.”

If you attached GoPros to your product designer, materials supplier, factory worker, warehouse worker, transportation driver, customer service rep, CEO, potential customer and product user and merged those videos together, then you would have a video that tells your brand’s story. Your brand is the sum of these stories combined.

Hirsch also mentioned that, in the world of sustainability, there are so many actions we’d love customers to take. If your story is meaningful, then customers will care about your company’s mission so much that they act on it. When people don’t care, they don’t act. But if they care, not only will they purchase products and services from you, but they will also become vocal advocates and self-appointed brand ambassadors.

3. Honest, even when it hurts

Your closest friends are people you trust. They’re there for you when you need them. You can count on them to do what they say they’ll do. They’ve got your back. They apologize when they’re wrong and try to make things right.

A brand should be the same way. When Honda screwed up its airbag system and recalled 5 million cars, polls showed that the public’s perception of the automaker's product quality was hardly impacted. Say whaaat? It’s because Honda built up years of trust with the public, honestly admitted its mistake, and did what it could to fix it.

4. Compassionate, like a bouquet of flowers

Brands that are compassionate and help a customer during a time of vulnerability can turn a one-time customer into a lifelong fan.

Zappos has a great history of having compassion on individual customers. Once Zappos employees even sent flowers to a lady who purchased six different pairs of shoes because her feet were damaged by brutal medical treatments.

5. Respectful of earthlings, furry critters and trees

Would you be friends with someone who was very kind to you but never tipped a restaurant waiter or regularly had road rage and flipped off drivers? I’d rather befriend a porcupine wielding a light sabre.

Similarly, a brand’s ethics go beyond how it treats customers and extends to the way it treats everyone else. Customers want to be friends with brands that are throwing kindness everywhere like confetti. When a business treats workers poorly and customers well, the inconsistency makes the brand seem inauthentic and customers become disillusioned. Gone are the days when a company could be rotten on the inside while maintaining a beautiful exterior shell. The Internet is making the world of business increasingly transparent.

6. Considerate

A good friend values your time. So does a good brand. Apple and Amazon both allow customers to enter their phone number, and they promise to call soon. This way you don’t have to spend time on hold waiting to speak with a rep.

7. An exceptional communicator

Relationships are all about listening. If you were going to take a week-long trip with your friend, you wouldn’t decree, “We’re going to XYZ!” No, unless that place is unanimously spectacular like a trip to Mars. Instead you would make plans together and go through rounds of listening to each other and planning together.

Customers are not puppy dogs. They don’t love you unconditionally or follow you wherever you want to go. So, why the heck do companies make plans without communicating with customers, listening to their dreams and concerns, and what trips they want to take in life? Customers need to be asked to join the decision-making table so everyone can listen to their ideas.

8. So fun you can’t even

If hanging out with a brand starts to feel like hanging out with your mom during high school, there’s a problem. Funny marketing material catches people’s attention, says Thomas Cline, Ph.D., a professor of marketing and statistics. About 30 to 50 percent of ads use humor. Cline says that humor improves a person’s mood, and then they associate their good feelings with the product advertised.

The bottom line

When you think about your favorite brand, would you want to invite it out to chat over coffee? Do you want to introduce it to your friends? If the brand is like a friend, the answer is yes.

Image credit: Flickr/Kayla Kandzorra

By Darcy Hitchcock

In the U.S., one of the most common questions we ask when we meet someone is, "What do you do?" In other words, what do you get paid to do, what do you do for work? We spend so much time at work and derive so much personal identity from what we do that it is important to infuse our work with meaning. This is especially important in today's workplace if you want to attract good people. And our shift from an industrial economy to one based on knowledge-work only underlines this need even more, for we must rely on employees' mental energy, their commitment to the mission and task, to be successful.

All this said, we do not have particularly effective organizational practices to get at this more spiritual dimension of work. Sure, we do visioning, write mission statements and set goals, but these don't come close to embracing the experience of discovering meaning, setting intentions or developing commitment.

"Leadership is a personal quest you undertake, one based on a mission that troubles your heart." – Harriet Rubin, senior writer for FastCompany Magazine

Goal setting: One path to getting what you want

For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to clump a bunch of practices under the heading of goal setting: strategic planning, visioning, writing mission statements, setting goals, writing action plans. If you get down to the root, all these practices attempt to influence the future; they help you get what you want. You figure out what you want, make a plan, work the plan, and if you're really advanced, plan ways to reward yourself along the way. It's a behaviorist's approach to management.

"Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.

"Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning." -- Gloria Steinem, activist in the women’s movement and founder of Ms Magazine

So, what's wrong with goal setting?

Don't get me wrong; I'm not against goal setting as an organizational or personal practice. It is often useful to set a measurable goal, develop a set of actions that will lead you there, and reward your progress. This practice works especially well when two conditions are true:

• You know what the end-state should look like and


• You have control over most of the critical factors for success.

Losing weight, running a marathon, planning a merger or releasing a new product are all examples of when goal setting can be helpful: Set the goal, make a plan, work the plan.

"Organizations are now confronted with two sources of change:
the traditional type that is initiated and managed; and external changes over which no one has control." —Margaret J. Wheatley, author of "Leadership and the New Science"

However, there are many situations when the above two criteria are not met. In today's turbulent business climate, how can you know where you should be in five or 10 years? And even if you set a plan, there are numerous factors outside your control that can throw you off: new technologies, an economic downturn, a vigorous competitor, new regulations, etc.

I think it was Bernard Baruch (the "Park Bench Statesman," who made his fortune on Wall Street in the early 1900s) who said, "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." When all we have is goal setting, then we tend to use this same process whenever we want to influence the future.

But this can be counterproductive. I've often noticed that some people shut down when you ask them to set measurable goals. Suddenly, they're afraid. "Am I going to be evaluated on this? Is this part of my performance appraisal? What happens if I can't meet my goal?" Creativity, innovative thinking, and risk taking quickly devolve into safe, I-already-accomplished-it-anyway goals. And if you persist, it can feel abusive. Can you really expect your sales reps to set sales targets for the next two years when many of the success factors (the economy, the advertising budget, new product releases) are out of their control? The common alternative, setting process goals (e.g., number of sales calls per week) can result in people doing what you're measuring them on, even if that's no longer what's best for the company.

Used in the wrong situation, goal setting has a constipated feel to it: straining, forcing, teeth-gritting. It's about making things happen instead of letting things happen. It can grind out the joy, the discovery, and the openness to new opportunities.

It may seem obvious, but goal setting doesn't always work. We put so much faith into it that this fact is often denied. The next set of practices I will share with you also are not fail-safe. But I believe there are situations where they are more likely to get you what you want than goal setting will.

Intention setting: Another way to get what you want

Instead of making things happen, you can sometimes let things happen. This may seem over-the-top for many of you, a bit too ‘woo-woo,’ but there are many who believe and research to support that setting an intention does, in fact, seem to work. So hang in there with me a bit, experiment, and then make up your own mind.

Manifesting what you want as a thought can run the gamut from expressing a whim, making a wish or saying a sacred prayer. Unlike goal setting, you don't create a lengthy action plan; instead, you let it go and wait to see what comes back. MIT professors Claus Otto Scharmer and Peter Senge have made this the centerpiece of their Theory U or Presencing practice.

"Intention is not a powerful force. It’s the only force." — Brian Arthur, an economist with the Santa Fe Institute

Perhaps a personal story will show how intentions work. Over 30 years ago, I was moving into a new house, one I was purchasing with my husband-to-be. As I was unpacking boxes, putting books into the bookcase, a piece of paper fell from one of the books onto the floor. It was an intention setting exercise I had completed several years before which I had long since forgotten. It described our new house in eerie detail: 2500 square feet, chalet style, in the trees, on five acres. The only part of the description that wasn't accurate was the town I had listed (and if I had time to tell you my mud slide story, you’d know why I wish I had purchased a house someplace else!)

Many of you probably have similar stories. That's why we have phrases like, “Watch out what you wish for,” because wishes often seem to come true.

"When you broadcast such an intention, there is very little else you have to do. The broadcast of intention goes out and makes it happen." —Srikumar Rao, professor of business creativity at Columbia and Long Island University

Goal setting versus intention setting

Goal Setting	Intention setting
Deals with goals, measures, plans, rewards	Deals with personal passions, wishes, reflection, and discovery
Works best when: you know what the end state looks like and you have control over key variables; situations of low uncertainty, stable environments; when top-down directives can get you what you need	Works best when you may not know what the end-state should look like and/or you don't have a lot of control; dynamic/chaotic situations; when you need to tap into personal passions/commitment to get what you need.
Assumes you can make things happen	Assumes you can let things happen

 

In my next article, I’ll explain how to do intention setting with groups at work.

NOTE: This is excerpted from Great Work: 12 Principles for Your Work Life and Life's Work, Chapter 10. Quotations are all from BrainyQuote.com unless otherwise noted.

Image credit: Flickr/Ahmed Sinan

Darcy Hitchcock is the author of a number of award-winning business books including The Business Guide to Sustainability (now in its third edition). In her latest book, GREAT WORK: 12 Principles for Your Work Life and Life’s Work, Darcy shares what she has learned about finding a calling, making a difference and leading organizations. It’s available in print and also three e-books: "Finding Your GREAT WORK," "Designing Organizations for GREAT WORK," and "Leading Others to GREAT WORK."

Learn more at https://DarcyHitchcock.wordpress.com.