Changing mid-stream

When I left University I focused straight away on finding a company to work for that already "got it" when it came in implementing sustainability practices. I did not want to waste my time working for a company where all the time and effort was spent convincing other people why considering people and the planet was important for the business. That was about changing mindsets and most of you know changing the way someone thinks and acts is an incredibly difficult act.
I was extremely fortunate and worked for two separate companies with strong values in social and environmental responsibility, so they type of work that I got to engage in was leading the field. However, in both situations either company did not start out this way.
If you look across the large organizations in the world, they didn't start out with a mandate to be socially or environmentally responsible. They started out in various ways, but mainly to see a dream fulfilled - to create a great product or service, to make money, to fill a need in the market. So when a company starts out with one direction, to change courses and start doing business differently is incredibly difficult.
It really does start with mind-sets because now the leadership of the business is being asked to think and behave differently than they ever have before. It is much easier when the incentive line up - like the company will be fined, or punished in some way if the change is not made. Like environmental regulations on water pollution. But when it is the "right thing to do" or will reduce future risk, it become s a lot trickier for leaders to make the changes. This is in large part because it is a unknown, we don't have a crystal ball on what the future has in store for us. So often companies take tiny steps, safe steps, in the direction but ignore their elephants in the room. What I mean by this, is that if your business relies on fossil fuels and unfair labor conditions to make your products, the office recycling center is not going to save your company in the long haul. Especially when the company structure and leadership in place is designed on making money in your existing system.

So even though I did get to work for amazing values based companies, they themselves where in legal/corporate structures that prevented a lot of decisions from being made because of fear of working outside the market economic system. So what are other companies to do even when the values based companies are challenged? Invite your leaders to be leaders to try staying in the sustainability solutions for a day - see what comes up and out of those ideas, take it step by step, but in the end make significant changes.

Taking off my blinders

I feel like I have a good balance with the amount of travel I do for my job. A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days in Cambodia and also in China. I visit factories to review their working conditions. I love this aspect of what I do because I feel like I get an insight into another part of a country that I would not see if I were only traveling as a tourist.
These workers in these factories are often considered the working poor, these jobs often pay just the minimum wage, or unfortunately often below minium wage and have long hours. Factory work is really hard and mundane and yet these people are the core of the global manufacturing industry which in turn produces all of the things we get to buy.
I find when I am in Asia I see the world a little differently than when I am at home. This is because culturally we are different and it gets magnified when you have a country that thinks slightly different about some things. And yet there are some things where we are all the same.
You get anyone talking about their friends or family people react the same - they all have eclectic stories, or when you see a child and smile at them, they smile back. And globally we think we can continue to develop and grow forever.
My role is to look at sustainability - how we can learn to live on this finite planet. I live in a country of 350million people and to find balance here is very tricky. But what happens when you have a country of 1.3 billion people who are trying to bring themselves out of a developing country lifestyle - how do you incorporate sustainability.
It feels overwhelming when you drive for hours and see nothing but sky rises and sky rises - knowing that people live and work here. And that they have a right to live and work there.
I am a big supporter of not throwing rocks while living in my glass house, so I don't want to focus on what China is or isn't. But rather focus on what this means for us. The idea of infinite of resources does not exist - and we are seeing that with increasing prices of global commodities. So how are we going to protect ourselves as the storm grows with a global sustainability crisis. The urgency grows when I leave the nice confines of grocery stores, heat and plumbing and see that the rest of the world lives very differently than we do. We have a lot father to fall.