Wednesday 11 November was an enlightening day. I learned how DOW chemical transformed a $1bn investment into $5bn, and I came to understand why 88 percent of people would switch brands to a company with a cause.
The common denominator was a focus on sustainable growth – increasing shareholder value while decreasing an organizations environmental footprint.
The insights came from
AMRs Sustainability Exchange in Boston. There were over 150 attendees - people tasked with executing environmental initiatives within their organizations.
Dawn Vance of Nike talked about how they used a focus on the environment to innovate, integrate and mobilize efficiencies throughout their organization.
John Phillips of Pepsico talked about the need to change the physics of how you do business. As he put it, incremental change doesn’t help – you have to radically rethink how you do business. When you do that, as DOW chemical learned, you can make significant cost savings.
Think about it. We do many things purely because they have always been done that way. They’ve been handed down from one generation to the next. But who questions whether a process is still the most efficient? Who questions whether it still adds value?
Let’s take an example from Pepsico – rinsing bottles before filling them with Pepsi - a process that can use thousands of gallons a day. As many of you know, water is a scarce resource. Rather than work out how they could reduce water (incrementally), Pepsico decided to eliminate it completely. Such a radical challenge required a radical solution. And they got one – highly compressed, sterilized air. Now the bottles aren’t just clean, they are clinically clean - and not a single drop of water gets used.
This “radical” message was echoed at the World Resources Institute (WRI),
Courage to Lead dinner held in New York that same night. I was lucky to be one of the 350 guests that came to honor Dan Doctoroff, President of Bloomberg and Chad Holliday, Chairman of DuPont.
I’m Jonathan Hornby, a marketing director at SAS focused on Performance Management. This is my blog for discussing news stories that capture my attention and get me thinking about how they will influence tomorrow’s business strategies.
Radical Action presents ten respected thought leaders and their ideas for business success. Taken together, the strategies can help any organization succeed, regardless of the state of the economy. All royalties from the book are being donated to children’s cancer research.
