It wasn’t a new question, but amazingly, of the 40+ people in the room, only one person was able to think of an example (an Australian energy company which he had previously worked for).

I have been pondering the importance of senior leadership support for sustainability ever since and considering the implications of corporate power constructs for the success of sustainability.  I’ve been canvassing my contacts and the best example that I have heard so far of a company that drove sustainability through its operations without senior level support (at least initially) is BT.

But more interestingly, my question has lead to another-what qualifies as support?  If we wait for all of the global corporates to have leaders like Paul Polman, the ice caps will have melted and we’ll still be using Styrofoam packaging.  So what’s the solution? I don’t have the answer, but what do you – our London network – think? Maybe this is an area which a  follow up event can debate? All suggestions welcome!

The post Marzipan Management and Styrofoam Leadership appeared first on Net Impact.

We are looking for new members to join our team! The Leadership Committee is a great opportunity to cultivate and demonstrate your leadership as well as expand and deepen your network.

   The Commitment

• Voluntary posts; minimum 1 year term w/ opportunity for re-election
• Leadership team meetings on the first Monday of each month
• Attendance at monthly events on second Wednesday of each month
• Plan at least one event per year
• Volunteer to lead projects/support ideas to continue the growth, thought leadership and impact of Net Impact London Professional
• Time commitment of roughly 3-5hrs per week

   Roles

We are recruiting for the following positions:

Chair/President

• Leads leadership team meetings
• Responsible for ensuring the delivery of events and activities via the Leadership Committee members
• Liaise with Net Impact Central

Finance Manager / Treasurer

• In partnership with Chair and LT, create annual budget
• Maintenance of accounts
• Monthly finance report
• Event finance analysis; reconcile bank statements with EventBrite funds
• Reimburse LT for event-related expenses

Secretary

• Minutes and internal communication
• Manage internal communication platforms: Google groups, Google calendar, and Google documents. Includes managing access.
• Maintain LT contact information, and update LT info on Website
• Organize LT social activities

Communications & Marketing Manager

• Develop and manage marketing and communications strategy that will help enhance the Net Impact brand and generate awareness about Net Impact events and activities
• Collateral; maintain relevance of electronic and print marketing materials
• Responsible for bi-monthly newsletter
• Assist in marketing events; serve as a consultant to other Leadership Team members on strategies to attract an audience
• Work with web and social media coordinators to ensure all communications platforms are consistent, professional, and free of grammatical errors

Events Manager

• Coordinate annual events/programming calendar
• Develops event management procedures and best practice; provide support as needed around supplies, managing EventBrite, etc
• Work closely with Partnerships manager to identify venue and speaker partners

Web & Technology Manager

• Maintenance of website
• Technology strategy
• Maintain chapter webpage, uploading info generated by leadership team
• Analyze website form and function for improvement opportunities, including sharing traffic stats with leadership team
• Work closely with Leadership Team to identify opportunities to maximize web presence for events and activities
• Work with Treasurer to ensure that all web related services are paid for

Process of Election

Candidates should submit their applications to london@netimpact.org.uk by 7pm on Tuesday May 7th, in the format provided below. Candidates will be invited to attend the May 8th event to introduce themselves. Elections will be held online in the week following the event, if necessary.

Application format:

Subject:   Leadership Team – [Position Applying For]

Position Applying For:

Your Name: 

For questions, please contact any member of the current Leadership Committee or use our Contact Page

The post We are Recruiting for New Leadership Committee Members (Deadline 10th of May) appeared first on Net Impact.

Around the globe there are many examples of urban farming venturing away from traditional soil-based agriculture and using more innovative technologies such as hydroponics and aquaponics. Hydroponics involves growing plants in nutrient rich water rather than in soil.  Aquaponics combines hydroponics with aquaculture (fish farming) in a circulating system that uses the water from a fish tank (rich in nutrients from the fish waste) and pumps it around growing beds where plants absorb the nutrients and clean the water, after which it is returned to the fish tank.

This summer, a new London start-up GrowUp, aims to demonstrate that it’s possible, preferable (both for people and for the planet) and commercially viable to grow food in cities for the people who live there. The GrowUp Box is their first project which was launched at the start of this month on Kickstarter. The Box is a shipping container with a greenhouse on top, through which they hope to showcase the aquaponic technology that can be used to grow food at a much larger scale. The box will house tilapia in two tanks in the container and vertical growing columns in the greenhouse to maximise the amount of vegetables they can grow in a limited space. We caught up with Tom and Kate (aka GrowUp) to ask them about the GrowUp Box and what the future holds for GrowUp:

As our first project in the UK, the GrowUp Box is as much a labour of love as it is a showcase for our business. Growing food is hard work, and not everyone who lives in London wants to grow their own food – but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t focus on educating people about where fresh food comes from and what it takes to produce it. That’s one reason why we’re committed to making GrowUp a success – we care about the food that we eat, and we think that everyone living in cities should have access to healthy, fresh and environmentally positive produce – even if they don’t want to grow it themselves.

We’re not just interested in urban farming as a fad – it should be an integral part of the food system. Urban populations will continue to grow and cities are coming under increasing pressure to manage their resources. We need to start thinking seriously about how our cities can adapt to face the challenges of the future, and we believe that commercial urban farming has to be on the agenda.

Is this a utopian clean-tech future for feeding people in cities? We don’t think so; we just all need to GrowUp.

The post Fresh fish and vegetables in the city?…GrowUp! appeared first on Net Impact.

• Spend 10% of your day networking. Those connections are key to a successful career
• It’s increasingly hard to differentiate yourself academically – fitting in with the culture of the business is the key variable.
• To be a change maker you must know when to push and when to pull back – work with the system to make a difference.

One last tip from Shannon Houde, Walk of Life Consulting, to market yourself effectively – take the time to map your top five skills against the top five skills your dream job requires.

Our panelists shared the top skills they use everyday in their jobs: adaptability, communication and listening.

Share your top skill with us. @NetImpactUK #topskill

Finally, a few thought provoking questions to ponder: Is the CSR job function moving away from reporting to more strategy development? What does the future of sustainability hold? What’s the next big thing?

The post Sustainability Careers appeared first on Net Impact.

We covered a lot of ground. Although we are seeing signs of progress with more and more investors taking ESG factors into consideration, it’s clear that there remain many barriers and challenges to sustainable investing.

- Asset owners tend to have a longer-term time horizon and have been the primary drivers of sustainable investing; however smaller pension funds have limited negotiating power and end up being price & product takers, unable to enforce sustainable investment priorities.

- Asking questions on asset managers’ ESG investment practices is important; however AOs need to know how to assess the answers and what to do with them, which can be difficult without costly ESG expertise.

- Company CSR reports are often ignored due to ‘green washing’ – information on material ESG risks should be found in traditional annual reports – development of integrated reporting is nascent but moving fast.

- Continued challenges in measuring the impact of sustainable investments, particularly for intangible social issues.

- For asset owners, quarterly reporting is often blamed for perpetuating short-termism of asset managers – but is disclosure the real culprit, or could annual or longer term incentives be stronger for hitting LT returns.

- For asset managers, what value does quarterly guidance really add and is there a case to be made that we should end the default practice for companies to issue guidance on such a short term basis.

- We are seeing small signs of progress in integrating ESG across fixed income investments, but it’s been slow.

We could have spent hours on each of the above topics – watch this space for follow up events!

By Naomi English, MSCI

The post Overcoming Barriers to Sustainable Investing – Recap appeared first on Net Impact.

Due to a ‘perfect storm’ of economic, social and environmental factors, our business landscape is becoming more and more volatile.

The pace of change, too, is increasing. To succeed in business we must be agile, creative, alert, spontaneous and responsive – often operating in completely new ways. Today’s rapidly changing business environment calls for businesses that thrive in rapidly changing environments: businesses more akin to living systems. These ‘Firms of the Future’ can learn and adapt; they aren’t structured and silo’ed, which stifles learning and agility. These firms are also bottom-up, decentralised, interdependent, multifunctional, emergent, self-organizing units–not the centralised, top-down, hierarchically-managed monoliths of the 20th century.

Put simply, the business models and management approaches that served us well in the past, are no longer fit for purpose in a business context where dynamic change is the new norm.

‘Business Inspired By Nature’ (and the book ‘The Nature of Business’) explores how the answers to many of our pressing business challenges lie all around us in nature. Take a couple of points by way of illustration:

• Nature has been dealing with dynamic change for over 3.8bn years
• Successful species and ecosystems in nature are ones that are resilient, where living beings collaborate, forming niches within diversity.
• Whilst the strongest man-made material is Kevlar which is made at around 1000 centigrade in a complex chemical and energy intensive process, spiders make webs which are stronger than Kevlar at room temperature with no pollution.
• Waste and pollution is an immense problem for us. In looking to nature we realise that nature does not have waste – waste for one part of the ecosystem is food for another.

Biomimicry for Business Transformation?

• Bios – life
• Mimicry – to copy

Throughout our existence, we humans have been copying patterns and forms found in nature.

Leonardo Da Vinci and Pythagoras are just two of many well-known inventors who took inspiration from nature.  Einstein famously one said ‘Look deep into nature and you shall find the answer’.

More recently in 1997 Janine Benyus coined the term biomimicry in her book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.  This book led to the term biomimicry becoming popularised over biomimetics or bionics, particularly in the US.  In the UK and Europe, the term biomimetics is still widely accepted in scientific realms; however, biomimicry is creeping in via popular media. Benyus went on to set up the The Biomimicry Institute which focuses on innovation inspired by nature.

In 2010, a group of specialists in the UK set up a collaborative called BCI: Biomimicry for Creative Innovation on the following premises: business models and practices need transforming to become fit-for-purpose for the world we now live in; the knowledge, understanding and tools we need for business transformation can be found in nature; and business can create the conditions conducive for life (not just reduce its negative impact on life) and so business can ‘sustain’ and also ‘thrive’ in our lifetime and beyond.  BCI’s strap line is ’ecological thinking for radical transformation’.

Time to transform?

It is becomes patently clear to many that business is undergoing a metamorphosis.  Firms of the future can take inspiration from nature at all levels within their strategies and operations.  For instance:

Places:  intelligent buildings that sense and respond to their environment are effective, vibrant and healthy places to work.

Products: biomimicry is already well established in assisting the designing of sustainable products – just Google ‘biomimicry’ to come up with many examples. For instance, Velcro inspired by seeds hooking to clothes.

Processes:  industrial ecology and symbiosis, systems thinking, eco-literacy, circular processes, closed loop economics and cradle-to-cradle are part of a growing list of approaches applied to shaping business processes based on insights from nature.

People: traditionally the domain of humanists and psychologists, more and more we find nature’s inspiration positively influencing how we engage, empower and encourage our people to build resilience within their diverse stakeholder group.  For example eco-psychology and natural leadership are emergent approaches to help business people deal with complexity and unpredictability.  The more we require our firms of the future to be emergent and adaptive the more we need our people to be emergent and adaptive. Leadership of the future is less about dictation and command-and-control hierarchies and more about facilitating and empowering people to make emergent decisions at a local level, in an ever changing business context based on values aligned to the organisation’s culture.

Purpose: as organisations recognise the need to have a higher purpose beyond ‘short term profit maximisation’ in order to galvanise themselves for the stormy seas ahead, many in business question whether it is ‘good enough’ to focus on becoming ‘sustainable’ by focusing on reducing negative social and environmental impacts.  Some forward thinking businesses are realising that ‘reaching beyond zero impact’ means becoming restorative and net positive, where business creates conditions conducive for life, rather than merely reducing the harm inflicted.

To summarise: collaborative, innovative, networking, emergent, dynamic firms of the future are more akin to living organisms hence gain great inspiration from how nature builds resilience to thrive within dynamic change.

Two short articles that explore this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/blog/firms-future-business-nature

http://thenatureofbusiness.org/2012/11/03/companies-that-mimic-nature-out-perform-those-that-do-not/

In preparation for next week’s Net Impact event here are some questions we will be debating:

1) PURPOSE: How in harmony with Nature is Business? What are the challenges and opportunities Interface and other organisations face while focusing on short-term profit maximisation and sustainable value (social, economic, environmental)?

EXPLORE – the challenges (for instance: short-termism, externalities bring cost issues, shareholders require quarterly returns, business models focused on quantity of products shipped not quality or sustainability, profit-maximisation, empirical business mind-sets encouraging reductionism not interconnected thinking)

EXPLORE – the opportunities (for instance: galvanising a sense of purpose to attract and retain high talent, strong culture to bind and bridge diverse stakeholders, false choice between business & nature, externalities bring opportunities to innovate and transform, resilience across the business ecosystem)

2) PROCESS: Nature does not do waste – waste of one becomes food for another. What are the challenges and opportunities Interface and other businesses are faced with in becoming ‘zero waste’?

EXPLORE – the challenges (for instance:  the old paradigm ‘take, make, waste’ is ingrained, investing in changing production approaches and relationships with supply chain, increase cost without affecting price, cannot affect quality or performance, lack of customer interest in a consumer culture)

EXPLORE – the opportunities (for instance: collaborating with stakeholders – suppliers, partners, customers, innovating new value and new ways of operating, reduce externalities improves resilience and overall health of business ecosystem, investment reduces long term costs, waste creates opportunities for additional value, improved brand and holistic quality, good business sense)

3) PEOPLE & PRODUCT: Nature can inspire product design and delivery models. What challenges and opportunities do co-creation/open innovation/collaborative business ecosystem approaches bring Interface and other organisations in redesigning for resilience?

EXPLORE – the challenges (for instance: shifting from products to services requires systemic change in supply chain and customer behaviour/acceptance, barriers to change in market regulations and acceptance, ownership models resistant to open innovation, how do we compete and collaborate?)

EXPLORE – the opportunities (for instance: new ways of adapting in volatile times, services and life-cycle product enhancement can bring additional value and richer customer interactions, people empowered to sense and respond at a local level, more interconnected business models are more resilient in volatile times)

For more on Business Inspired By Nature see Giles Hutchins’ blog at www.thenatureofbusiness.org

The post Firms of The Future – A Business Inspired By Nature appeared first on Net Impact.

Here are a few of the themes which emerged from the evening:

1) The importance (and difficulty) of integrating sustainability policy into business strategy. To maximise on the impact of a sustainability plan, partnerships, community engagement and environmental policy need to be RELEVANT to your business. From a consultancy or NGO perspective this means developing a thorough understanding of the corporates you are working with and adding value in a unique and commercially oriented way.

2) Defining relevance. The importance of internal and external COMMUNICATION to the development of successful sustainability strategy and implementation. In order to produce a clear and coherent sustainability strategy, it is important to actively listen to
your stakeholders. Perhaps not a revolutionary statement, but there was a lot of valuable discussion about the distance between listening and hearing.

3) The difficulty of MEASURING IMPACT. One of the reoccurring themes throughout the evening was about defining impact. There were some really interesting questions about tangible change and influence that came out of considerations of individual positioning.

These are all themes that come up frequently on the sustainability agenda, but it was useful and insightful to talk them through with everyone and stimulate discussion. Thank you so much for participating! We hope to see you again at the November event, and please let us know what you would like to see from us in the future (event format, themes, issues, speakers, etc.)

The post October’s ‘Impact at Workshop’: Relevance, Communication & Impact appeared first on Net Impact.