SAS and MIT Sloan share a similar mission when it comes to the topic of sustainability: To explore and share lessons on how sustainability challenges are transforming 21st century organizations. While we at SAS continue to refine our own practices in corporate social responsibility, we’re helping our customers measure, manage and report on the triple bottom line for their own organizations. At the same time, MIT Sloan is contributing research to the world through its Sustainability Initiative and its Beyond Green blog – and approached us about participating in some of that research.
In his first visit to SAS’ world headquarters, Michael S. Hopkins, editor of MIT Sloan Management Review, took a few moments to talk about his journey thus far through the wild and (organic, humanely harvested) wooly world of sustainability research.
Talk a little about what you mean by “Beyond Green."We see sustainability as more than environmental concerns—typically you hear that sustainability has three legs: environmental, economic and social. But we’d add another: personal. There is a lot of interesting research about the degrees to which how we work has become unsustainable as individuals. (Note: I’m thinking Hopkins is referring to this concept that we can’t be a sustainable society if we are burned out, overworked, and constantly driven to acquire material wealth.)
Is there a particular story that stands out in your mind as an innovative environmental corporate initiative?
I conducted an interview with a top exec at a giant South Korean manufacturing firm. We talked about the organizational capabilities that will be needed to compete—what do they need to do differently. He got very excited about his answer, and he said one thing we need to do in this culture is to get people to work less. There are too many incentives to appear overwhelmed and busy. As a consequence, he loses the most important parts of their ability to contribute: their creativity and imagination. He said, ‘If we get people to be less overwhelmed, we’d have the ability to innovate over all of our competitors.’ So he wants to know how to create the right systems to encourage people to think about their jobs differently.
Here’s another example: Many people describe sustainability as a shift from short- to long-term thinking. The COO at a large UK oil company, made the point to me that if that’s true, then we have to completely rethink individual compensation. We need to think in terms of a 10-year horizon, but when people are compensated by month or by year, how do you get people to think long-term?
What maturity level are most of your interviewees when it comes to putting sustainability programs into action?
I don’t know yet, we’re still in the early stages of this project. In the first phase, we conducted interviews to help shape the research. The second phase was to take the research guide around the world and conduct 60-70 hour-long interviews, two-thirds of which are executive practitioners and one-third of which are authors or thought leaders. So by nature of who we’re seeking out, they’re farther along in their maturity. The third phase is to survey the general public, and after that we’ll have better overall data.
If you take the survey, you’ll see the breadth of how we’re thinking about sustainability. Our key goal is not to replicate all the business and environmental content already out there, but to see how many different kinds of concerns create a changed competitive landscape, and how management strategy will have to adjust.
One thing that has already become clear to me is that companies that are ahead of the curve will claim a competitive advantage for attracting and retaining a higher quality of employee. And not just because of their own beliefs, but because of cascaded peer pressure: They want to work at these companies because of the pressure they’re getting from their communities, families and friends.
Do you have examples of how companies are reinventing themselves based on sustainability practices?
I talked to two mining companies that are taking very different approaches. They both extract minerals, make metals, they have both thought about sustainability in different ways. The first company decided it’s going to stay in the extraction business, but realized that for a mine to pay off financially, you have to run it for 40 years. They have to think long-term. They also know they can’t pick up the mine and move it. The community is where it will always be. That means they have a workforce to cultivate, and those relationships have to be healthy. They have an embedded interest in the community—the quality of the air and water, and how toxic materials are handled. So the social leg of sustainability has impacted them sooner, and more extremely, far more than the environmental leg. So they made the commitment to be the absolute best at sustainable mining and extraction.
The second mining company asked themselves this: What if we never mined another aluminum element? Most of the aluminum ever created is still out there in landfills, or in devices of some sort. So they decided to get out of the mining business and focus on reclaiming materials.
How do you respond to claims that corporate sustainability is a load of greenwashing?
I talked with Catherine Roche about that. She says that senior executives are wrestling with the decision about how much to discuss their sustainability practices because the public will find evidence of contradictory practices and call them out on it. Reporting sustainability is extremely complicated, but consumers have this need to be educated. Companies are then confronted with a conundrum: they know one of the ways to capitalize on what they do is to inform customers, but they’re afraid of the scrutiny that comes with the transparency. This is where any kind of software that enables the collection, gathering and monitoring of these efforts within companies is huge.
