Sustainable Brain Food #2

The hand-curated 'Sustainable Brain Food' series brings you insights and encouraging developments in the world of sustainable business. 

Our stories focus on creating the new, sustaining core business and enabling people to lead the change towards sustainable business. We help to build better businesses. 

Sustainable Brain Food #2 - shared with 2,200 peers – delivers food for thought, such as new perspectives of System Change: 

• Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz claims increasing GDP figures don’t reveal where we’re at in reality.
• A must-read is John Elkington’s wake-up call: He recalls his sustainability concept from the nineties, the Triple Bottom Line (TBL).
• The current gap towards creating a circular economy has been revealed once more by the annual Circularity Gap Report from the NGO Circle Economy. We recommend Imogen Benson’s comment on the most recent report of 2020. 

Let’s then dive deeper into a couple of best practice examples in Business Change: How are companies generating added value through sustainable value chain management?

• Henkel is again creating a great example of pro-active business change in integrating recycled material in its product packaging.
• How to implement sustainable cost reduction through Design-to-Value (DTV) and redesigning your Operating Model
• Successful crowdfunding for Sono Motors, the first solar Electric Vehicle that charges itself. Innovation in the automotive sector worth following.

And finally, let's look into a couple of methods that help you to lead the change:

• US giant Clorox is getting more agile through value chain segmentation
• New ways of complex project delivery - lean and agile

Happy reading!

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SYSTEM CHANGE: CREATE THE NEW 

Our business metrics need to look beyond GDP to drive the right conclusions

Joseph Stiglitz claims that in spite of the increase in GDP after the 2008 crisis, everything is not fine. We need metrics that truly reflect people’s lives and aspirations. According to the Nobel Laureate and Economic Advisor in the Clinton Administration, the world is facing three existential crises: a climate crisis, an inequality crisis and a crisis in democracy. The rosy picture of rising GDP metrics doesn’t include resource depletion and environmental degradation. Time to rethink the metrics in order to draw the right conclusions:

Recalling the triple bottom line concept

John Elkington, Chairman at Volans, is rethinking the triple bottom line: His sustainability concept, the triple bottom line (TBL), invented in 1995 to examine a company’s social, environment and economic impact, needs to be recalled, for it measures sustainability goals only in terms of profit and loss. His conclusion: We need to encourage companies to track and manage economic (not just financial), social and environmental value-add. Tomorrow’s capitalism needs to be spurring the regeneration of our economies, societies, and biosphere:

Our world is getting less circular, instead of progressing

Imogen Benson comments on the Circularity Gap Report 2020 published in Davos in January 2020: The reuse of resources has gone into reverse. But Benson also quotes examples of successful international cooperation on the circular economy, such as the International Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy (PACE):

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BUSINESS CHANGE: SUSTAIN THE CORE 

Closing the plastic loop for consumer goods packaging

Henkel is pursuing its sustainability goal, a closed-loop for plastic. By 2025, Henkel aims for 100% of its packaging to be recyclable, reusable or compostable.

Sustainable cost reduction through Design-to-Value

The DTV (Design-to-value) approach helps you to focus on future-proof decisions:

"We are “circular enablers” who help companies to transition to the circular economy: 80% of the decisions made during the design process determine the economic, societal and environmental impact."

Michael D'heur

Is your Operating Model future-proof?

Without a clearly defined and flexible operating model, companies will become irrelevant in the near future. Time to rethink, redesign and implement your operating model:

Crowdfunding the Electro Mobility Future

A true innovation in the automotive sector worth following is the successful crowdfunding campaign for Sono Motors, the first solar Electric vehicle that charges itself.

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PEOPLE CHANGE: LEAD THE CHANGE

Creating value through segmentation

The US $6 billion public company Clorox is an interesting business case on how Leadership of the change process in the supply chain really matters. Mark Hersh, Director of Supply Chain Strategy at Clorox, reveals the enormous results the implementation of the value chain segmentation brought. 

The patience to work through a strategy and to enable cross-functional teams is hard work, Hersh points out. Clorox shows us it’s worth the effort:

“There used to be a small core group with the ability to lead this process. The group is getting bigger.” Mark Hersh

Lean and agile: How to deliver complex projects

In times of increasing complexity and an accelerating rate of changes, businesses require ‘lean and agile’ delivery capabilities in order to adjust quickly to changing operating conditions. Here’s an insight on how to master complex project delivery:

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