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Sustainability |
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Sustainability Masters |
Blog: Strategic Leadership Towards Sustainability
How do you become a leader in sustainability? Follow Heidi Blankenship through her one year in the Master’s program for Strategic Leadership Towards Sustainability at the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden. Heide's Story: |
August 2006As a Master's candidate of Leadership Toward Sustainability starting in August 2006, myself and a team of sustainability students will be available to conduct a sustainability strategic management plan for you. Having consulted with many small start-up businesses, and worked in social change I will merge the two areas of expertise while attending The Blekinge Institute of Technology to learn from leading sustainability technicians. During the Strategic Management course in December I will be able to work with your organization to move forward with current sustainability goals, or work to develop a path for the future.
The program is built on a total systems perspective and a scientifically relevant world-view, widely known as The Natural Stepframework, an internationally recognized methodology for guiding strategy towards sustainability. It is a generic and therefore widely applicable approach to sustainable development at multiple scales (e.g. global, national, business, corporate, community and individual). It allows a systematic approach to:
For more information contact Heidi Blankenship |
September 2006The program and university: Lectures today were from Karl Henrik Robert, which in my short experience is always a treat. As the founder of the Natural Step most everything he says inspires me, and during all of this inspiration I felt compelled to connect back home with some thoughts on the program so far.
The Masters in Leadership Towards Sustainability program is a geometrical quilt, comprised of students from the world over sharing common themes and points of orientation but coming from very diverse places geographically and professionally. 60% of us are from North America, some coming from the same cities and never having met before Sweden brought them together. There is even another Madisonite in our midst. Gloria Moy works with Epic and showed up to my great surprise and delight. We are tourism and managerial professionals from China, entrepreneurs from France and Santa Barbara, a management consultant from Brazil, scientists and engineers from Sweden, Australia, and even a professional Canadian football player of all people.
The university is quickly building a program to rival the traditionally large and beaurocratic engineering programs that exist in large Universities like Stockholm, or Lund. The engineering program teaches both design and product-quality management with sustainability at its core. Within the next year they plan to expand the SLTS Masters to allow for an additional year of specialized study, potentially expanding the scope to allow for advanced research for a PhD tract. I find this small university without large resources to throw around, but very professional, organized, and a force of great esteem amongst the business and engineering worlds.
Systems and tools to learn from in Madison: The key that I have learned thus far is that it might seem like we need a fast tool to fix our problems in this unsustainable society that we are living in. We want to apply an accounting method, strategy type, or purchasing plan, celebrate and move on. But there is something we have to do first. We have to stop and take a few minutes to explain why we are in the situation we are in now. For instance we have been using the earth’s resources up much faster in the past 100 years, than in the previous 3 + billion years before that.
Because we live within a very complex system, we might not always be able to predict what will happen if we wait one more year to make the metro more accessible, or build the local tram system. We might not be able to prove that it will save the world to do so, but we do know that we have to change our orientation to the environment we live in and the people that we live in it with. The natural laws of this system prove that matter does not go away, so that coal that is dredged up, that ancient dead plant matter that took billions of years to bury in order to create enough oxygen for humans to breathe is out in the open it will not go away. It will pollute us here in Madison, and then it will float up higher and heat the earth a bit more, affect the ice fishing opportunities across the mid-west, and warm the oceans in Antarctica. This interconnectedness has to be understood before we can even understand where we begin to take action to becoming more sustainable. And once and for all, THE SCIENTIST DO AGREE THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS HAPPENING, and that we’re the biggest contributors.
Now once we understand how we are connected we can talk about the principles for sustainability and “begin to play the game” as Karl Henrik says.
Coming soon: **Leading economist Manfred Max Neef will help us understand the economic components of sustainability. **Applying the sustainability principles in depth> A few good resources on climate change
For more information contact Heidi Blankenship
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October/November 2006In the past two months our studies here at BTH have focused more narrowly on providing leadership toward a sustainable society. Understanding why we’re in a situation of decreasing natural capital, and realizing our short time frame to begin acting to improve our outlook for the future has made everyone eager to answer the, “But How?!” question.
Two weeks ago Bob Willard, past executive of IBM and current corporate sustainability champion, spent two days helping us to realize the amazing opportunity and capacity that large corporations have to affect sustainability. He talked about how many of the world’s resources are wrapped up in the supply chains of major corporations. When a company like Wal-Mart decides to cut emissions by 20%, for instance, it can have a major impact or global CO2 emissions. For this reason, Mr. Willard is on the road speaking to CEO’s and CFO’s the world over. And the exciting part is that they are taking notice!
For proof of global climate change Willard suggests creating vivid descriptions of the problems……. Or putting up silly photos
One reason that large corporations are taking tangible notice of sustainability concerns, Willard says, is that seemingly unrelated issues that were brushed aside two years ago when companies didn’t see their direct connection, are now converging like a “perfect storm”. Last year the Telecom industry could say, “We’re not causing climate change”. Prices for oil are rising and two years ago Nike could say, “It’s ok that’s not our fault, but we’ll have to raise prices”. Erosion of corporate trust, left some large companies feeling queasy, but they thought they were safe after the Enron scandal came to a close. However, now the big guys are starting to feel the crunch of all of these issues, and they are realizing that they do have an impact, and more importantly they are facing too much risk whether they’re causing the symptoms or not.
So companies are looking for clarity. Our class asked, “What percentage of large corporations are taking notice and how long before we hit a tipping point?” What we got, seemed outstandingly optimistic. Willard’s prediction was that about 3-5% of companies are currently in the advanced stages of implementing sustainability in their operations. In 5 years he predicts that the tipping point will arrive when we hit 17-23%.
If that is true, we’re in for an exciting five years. As those companies begin to change they would pull the rest of the market, because the smaller SME’s (small to medium sized enterprises) comprise the bulk of the supply chain for the big guys. That means that the sustainability impact falls upon the smaller companies to adjust processes to meet the new challenges that the large companies are posing. Managing the shift so that long term sustainability doesn’t suffer from short-sited actions will be the greatest challenge under this scenario.
For more on Bob Willard www.Sustainabilityadvantage.com, (can access free excel spreadsheets to calculate company’s potential profit increase by adding sustainability initiatives)
For fun and good resources: Our class mate Tony Thompson has been invited to participate in Al Gore’s climate change training in January. He is fundraising for his trip at http://www.fundable.org/groupactions/supporttony Informative student blog: Georges Dyer http://strategiesforsustainability.blogspot.com/ For more information contact Heidi Blankenship |
| A few weeks ago while in Stockholm during the Natural Step International annual meeting, I took a tour of what is fast becoming the eager face of sustainable development. The green neighborhood of Hammarby Sjöstad is shiny and new with wide sidewalks and broad windows allowing natural light into the living rooms of thousands of up and coming Stockholmers. Upon first glance it seemed beautiful.
We would find out over the next two hours presentation, that the shiny and new was not so long ago polluted and corrupt. It was an illegal dumping ground for many businesses that cast their waste aside in the prominently located lake Hammarby Sjö. After the city bought the polluters out, no doubt insuring they wouldn’t be fined for what they’d carelessly tossed away, millions of dollars were spent digging many meters deep to try and get to the bottom of the muck. All in all 180 tons of heavy metals were removed from the area.
On a walking tour later I ogled the clever rainwater drainage systems and photovoltaic solar paneling attached to each home. One of the most impressive aspects of the community is the work done to close the loop on waste and energy generation. For a diagram see http://www.stockholm.se/Extern/Templates/Page.aspx?id=87583 . It all seemed so clean and fresh, yet something felt off.
It was only later when speaking to my urban planning friend that I could identify the unease. As he put it, “It looked like it was spit right out of an architect’s brain. In 30 years it will look just as outdated and misplaced as the buildings built in the 1970’s do now.” Yes it looks shiny and new because it is. However it is the ancient streets on the island of Gamla Stan in Stockholm, built up in the early 1200’s and expanded upon over the following decades, which tourist flock to and locals frequent. This phenomenon of new “green buildings” and building, building, building is worth taking pause.
There is currently a smart growth and green building craze sweeping across North America and Western Europe. It has led to large developments of solar paneled, Energy Star certified suburbs, a wider array of reuse and recycled building materials, and increased awareness. CEO of the US Green Building Council, Rick Fedrizzi made it particularly clear at their November conference in Denver when he stated that LEED-certified buildings reduce carbon emissions by about 40% compared with conventional buildings. “But even that's not enough," he said. "We need to build more of them, we need to operate them properly, and we need to renovate the ones we have already built, because most of them are energy hogs of the first order." (www.sustainablebusiness.com)
He did intend to emphasize redevelopment as well, but do we really mean to encourage building more and more, often farther from the city center, and award the green built seal of approval? Sprawling development which increases commute times, exhaust pollution, oil consumption, and decreases quality time spent with friends and family is hardly slowing. So what can we do to focus on re-development of existing properties in central and transport accessible locations?
Three of my classmates came up with this: How can LEED-NC be used within Strategic Sustainable Development? If LEED-NC (new constructions) is proposed to be mandated, incentivized or simply used, stakeholders can ask the following questions to help guide the discussion:
Antoine Belaieff, Delphine Le Page and Kirk Tyler. Full info. on their project at http://antoinejcb.blogspot.com/2006/10/to-leed-or-not-to-leed.html
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After graduating with a Business Administration and Marketing degree from California State University - Sonoma, I spent three years working in Boston, MA with the Fund for Public Interest Research there I trained student leaders to run campaigns and hold their elected officials accountable on environmental and consumer protection issues. Leading up to the 2004 election I ran the Community Voters Project, where five offices in three states registered over 70,000 new voters in disenfranchised communities. Moving to Madison brought many pleasant developments. A shifting of focus while working with small businesses and the Wisconsin Women’s Business Initiative afforded new challenges and opportunities to connect to the Sustainability movement growing in Wisconsin. This fall while heading off to the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden I feel lucky to be going to the source of sustainability innovation for knowledge on how to develop eco-municipalities, and institutions that work toward the betterment of our society here in Wisconsin. I hope to come back with real experience and vision for what the US can do to move forward with successful sustainability initiatives, and find Wisconsin leading the way as we are poised to do right now. Please contact me if you have requests for information about programs that are happening in Sweden that you’d like me to gather information on, and just to say hi. Heidi For more information contact Heidi Blankenship |
