A Transparency Tsunami

Companies are being forced to compete for new business based on who has the most ecological and socially responsible operations. Companies that lead in this area will thrive in the age of transparency and find increased customer loyalty and market share by positioning themselves on the “higher ground” of principled business practices. With the business transparency tsunami rolling across the corporate landscape the complacent and turbulent waters of “Business as Usual” have never looked more risky.

Driven by powerful undercurrents, including increased access to supply chain business practice data and a NGO’s ability to create a public relations tsunami with a simple viral video, company leaders are looking to stake out a higher less exposed corporate responsibility beachhead.  Business sales data is providing evidence that taking the high road also provides a competitive advantage in winning bids from government and corporate purchasing departments looking to move the needle on sustainability through the power of their purchases.

The lowest price use to be enough to secure a government or corporate purchase order, but now the lowest price, the lowest carbon footprint, the lowest energy and water use, and the fairest supply chain labor practices provide the greatest competitive advantage to secure new business and become a preferred vendor.

The HIP (Human Impact + Profit) Investor Guide contends that higher principled companies enjoy higher profitability  and increased attractiveness to hedge funds and institutional investors.  The innovative business leaders today know they need to refocus their mission and their message to one that has meaning and power in the world. The goal of true leadership in any organization is to have employees tell their friends and family, “This is who is I am, this is what I do, and I am proud to be a part of our organization’s mission to do something meaningful and worthwhile in the world.” A transparency tsunami of employee engagement and purpose. Now that’s a competitive advantage.

Where is the low hanging fruit? Try Lumismart and BuildingIQ

Every energy efficiency innovation company believes it has low hanging fruit waiting to be picked and handed over on a silver ROI plate for the company’s CFO to feast on. Investing in energy efficiency can be a smart business decision but the gap between “Pay-Back” and “Pay-Out” keeps most businesses on the sidelines.

What is a payback too good to pass up? 12 months? 24 months? 36 months? Investing in greening our operations is not about doing a financial good, it is about doing financially better. Otherwise it won’t pass the CFO’s investment hurdle rate. So again we are back to the proverbial question: Where is the low hanging fruit?

Recently I found two companies with fruit so ripe you hardly have to reach up at all. Both make for a nice fruit plate that will satisfy any skeptical CFO’s appetite.

The first product is Cavet’s LumiSmart, an adaptive lighting control system that works with most fluorescent lighting systems reducing fluorescent lighting power consumption by 30%.  Installed at the circuit panel by an electrician, Luminsmart requires no localized ballast or fixture retrofits.  Remarkably, through its use of  biomechanic processing, our eyes only see a .03% reduction in light output. The Luminsmart is ideally suited for Offices, Factories, Warehouses, Big Box Retail Stores, Malls, Parking Garages or any property that spends at least 15% of their total electricity bill on lighting. Depending on the hours of operation (12 hours or 24 hours), the voltage and the number of lamps managed, the ROI can range between 12 months and 30 months. An impressive piece of financial fruit low enough for a CFO to think very seriously about reaching for it.

The second fruit choice is BuildingIQ’s new and highly innovative BuildingIQ Saas Software that supplements existing building energy management systems to turn today’s smart buildings into smarter buildings. After gaining product validation and serious traction in Australia’s commercial building market they recently brought their top team and service offering to the U.S. confident the market is ripe (pun intended) for a breakthrough in building energy savings.

What sets BuildingIQ apart is that it is the only energy management system that predicts energy demand by factoring in weather forecasts, peak demand factors and demand response signals–directly adjusting heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system parameters to continuously optimize energy use. The secret sauce of BuildingIQ is its patented Predictive Energy Optimization™ technology that automatically learns a building’s energy performance and adapts to changes in internal or external conditions while always optimizing tenant comfort.  Building owners achieve 10-30% reduction in total energy spending by continuously maintaining high HVAC efficiency – increasing operating property income – and valuation. The company also provides an ad-on module that optimizes a building’s response to any Demand Response agreement the building owner may have further increasing marginal revenue.

Is there an opportunity to improve building “energy use intelligence” in the US commercial building market. The United States Energy Information Administration provided this evidence:

• America spends more than $500 billion per year on energy.
• 39%–$195 billion–goes to powering buildings. In its “Smarter Planet” initiative, IBM pegs building energy consumption more in the neighborhood of 70%, which would put spending more in the range of $300 billion (but why quibble.)
• In a study conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it was determined that 30%-or between $27-90 billion–of the energy use in a commercial building is unnecessary or inefficient.

Energy audits of commercial office buildings and corporate campuses conducted by the Department of Energy found that actual energy consumption was fully 40% higher than they expected and that the demand for electric power for corporate facilities and campuses continues to increase at a rapid pace throughout the U.S.

What does this have to do with low hanging fruit?

It is validating that ripe fruit is everywhere for the picking as long as we pick it before it falls to the ground as waste. Buildings with Higher Efficiency Energy IQ’s are going to be more predictable revenue generators – and lessen the financial uncertainty and risks associated with continued rising energy costs – which is all good news for a forward thinking and risk averse CFO.

Apollo 13: A Parable of Humanity’s Flight Into the Future

One space mission captured the world’s attention like no other, the mission of Apollo 13. Apollo 13 is a story of near-catastrophic technological failure threatening all life on board, and of miraculous escape with one amp of power to spare. It is the cautionary tale of our age.

Just think about it. The Saturn V rockets represented human ingenuity at its technological, gas-guzzling, brute-force best. Trusting their lives to that technology, the Apollo astronauts represent us, as we roar into the future towards our goal. Their goal, of course, was the moon, but even that goal was symbolic of greater things: human beings were taking the first steps towards the colonization of space. Nothing it seemed could stop us: and so we seem to believe today, as we march on blithely up the exponential curve of economic growth, discarding stage after stage of our Saturn V rocket (i.e. our world’s resources) in the faith that we’ll splash down safely at some point in the future.

Today, however, even the most blinkered optimist has reason to harbor subconscious doubts about the wisdom of our untenable and unsustainable ecological path. The remarkable true story and lessons of Apollo 13 writes those doubts large. Something goes wrong. Significantly, it’s the oxygen supply—a metaphor for the Earth’s atmosphere—which has been sabotaged by human error. The astronauts are suddenly faced with a desperate race against time and diminishing resources to get safely home. The higher goal—the moon (or the techno-nirvana goal of a world of 200-odd fully-developed countries)—is abandoned, and the use of resources (the ship’s power supply) is shut down to a bare minimum, just as we fear we might have to do back here on Earth in the in the coming decades and beyond. The results are depressing: without power, the astronauts’ world gets extremely cold, and there’s still no guarantee of a safe return in exchange.

The Apollo 13 astronaut’s unforgiving reality is combined with hope upon hope that a technological solution will be their ticket out of the crippled ship.   As they wait for “a fix from Houston” they tell of a cassette-player that hangs in zero-gravity as the sound of the music playing slowly runs down as its batteries die. Meanwhile the carbon dioxide content within the ship’s atmosphere continues to rise to dangerous levels. Their biggest fear is that the heat-shields will fail them upon reentry, causing the ship to become untenably hot, making it unable for them to survive—global warming, anyone?

The underlying take away of Apollo 13, given this environmental reading, might be a dangerously optimistic one–being that human ingenuity will rescue us from our predicament of continuous ecological “human errors”.  The experience of Apollo 13 shows that the know-how of the NASA staff at Houston safely pulls the mission through. We are all like the astronauts in the lunar module hoping that human ingenuity will similarly save us from disaster back here on earth.

The happy ending story of Apollo 13 is that there is a definite time-limit to a crisis (in this case, a few days), and at the end of it, if all goes miraculously well, you can sit back and relax in safety and comfort—and even carry on as before. And this, surely, is what a lot of people hope will happen with the global environment and economy. With a bit of temporary sacrifice, we’ll fix everything up, and then we can get back to business as usual.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t necessarily work like that. Today’s environmental problems along with our rapacious depletion of the planet’s resources will be humanity’s challenge for centuries to come (if we should be so lucky to last that long), and there’s no safe splash-down at the end. Life in the future might be a lot more like huddling together in the cold lunar-module, realizing we squandered our only way home.

Edited from Apollo 13 film review

An Ecological Asteroid

 

When you distill it all down, the fundamental question people have about Global Warming is: how bad is it going to be?  A more useful question might be—would it make any difference if we knew? Here in California we live knowing “the big one” is coming—an earthquake the likes of which none of us in California have ever experienced, and yet most of us don’t even have a can of beans tucked away in preparation for it. We just can’t be bothered. So how can we expect the whole world to respond to Global Warming with any more preparation or urgency than 95% of us in California are responding to the certainty of an 8.0 earthquake?

If the top scientists and astronomers held a worldwide press conference to announce that a large asteroid was, with absolute certainty, going to hit the earth on November 15^th 2020, it is safe to say that future reality would change everything about humanity’s focus and priorities. The world’s governments, scientists, engineers, great thinkers and brightest minds would all come together aligned towards the single cause of diverting the asteroid from hitting us. The world’s massive armament business would be re-focused towards stopping the asteroid. No equivocation. No nationalism. Just an absolute determination to save humanity from having to experience the unimaginable, catastrophic impact of the asteroid.

It is the inability for humanity to grasp the consequence of unchecked CO2 emissions pouring into our atmosphere that makes Global Warming seem like an asteroid no one can truly imagine is coming. Some assert the temperature of the planet is rising because of changes in the chemistry of the sun. Worldwide scientific consensus says the planet is warming from humanity’s burning of fossil fuels. Regardless of the cause of Global Warming (2010 is projected to be the hottest year on record), one thing is unequivocally clear–the hotter the planet becomes, the harder the Ecological Asteroid of Global Warming is going to hit us.

Are all the world’s governments, scientists, engineers, great thinkers and brightest minds coming together aligned towards the single cause of minimizing Global Warming’s impact on the planet?   Many are certainly trying. But for the most part, people are responding to Global Warming with the same level of concern Californian’s have for the certainty of their coming 8.0 earthquake.

Can you and I do something more than just shrug and put our head in the sand?

I think one thing is for certain.

We should get an extra can of beans?

The Few. The Proud. The Brave. Today’s Entrepreneurs

Maybe it is wrong to take the tag line of the marines and apply it to today’s entrepreneurs, but the courage and service entrepreneurs provide our country is surprisingly similar.  We send our marines into battle to protect our country from threats.  We send our entrepreneurs into battle to protect our country from threats too: the threat of a stagnant economy, the threat of millions of people not having a paycheck, and the threat of a shrinking tax base to fund our schools, city services, and infrastructure. Today we are relying on our entrepreneurs to protect us from our near total dependence on oil for all our transportation vehicles. Entrepreneurs are at the front lines of the battle to use our energy more efficiently, find innovate new ways to conserve our water resources, and reverse the trajectory of climate change.  They grow our food and protect us from hunger.

Entrepreneurs, along with our best government funded scientists, are taking great entrepreneurial risks to bring us new drugs to defend us from disease and extend our lives. Entrepreneurs are finding ways to free us from the pervasive isolation people feel in our society with social media and online communities. And now, with web-based “crowd-sourcing” platforms, entrepreneurs are giving us innovative tools to create new solutions to build upon our “collective intelligence” to collaboratively produce insights and ideas so we can effectively navigate the challenges we face today.

Recently, I graduated from an innovative MBA program focused on sustainability and innovation. It was called a Green MBA. It was akin to a “green” beret program for people to make positive change through entrepreneurship.  I knew little about entrepreneurship when I started.  Now I have the knowledge to start a new business.  Marines have a code they live by.  So do entrepreneurs:

Starting a business is very risky, just as heading into battle is.

Your business idea may fail, but do it anyway (just be very smart about it).

Do not just talk about your products. Talk about your principles.

Entrepreneurs are the key to America’s prosperity and they are the hope and promise of each country’s future. A friend of mine travels to Saudi Arabia and Russia and teaches a powerful course on entrepreneurship. Both those countries at one time scoffed at “free enterprise” because they had a lot of oil or a lot of government bureaucrats who knew best. But they are quickly learning that the best hope for new jobs and a thriving economy is an army of entrepreneurs who receive the education, tools, and financing they need to bravely and innovatively lead all the world’s economies forward into a more promising future.

The Great Persuader

On Monday, during the last week of September 2010, Oakland CA, had the highest temperature of any day in its history—ninety-six degrees.  Downtown LA made history on the same day with a midday temperature of 113.  One might think these temperatures are proof Global Warming has arrived.  But during this same year, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and the Bay Area had the coolest summers in decades. It was overcast and cool in the Bay Area for months. Summer temperatures were lower all over the state. This inconsistency is why the terms global warming and climate change may not capture what is occurring in our biosphere. Some believe “climate destabilization” best describes the complexity of what we are now calling climate change.

Climate destabilization sounds less comforting than climate change. I think we all hope climate change and global warming will be like the Y2K scare in the late nineties. We were warned on the nightly news that when the clock struck “2000” millions of computers would stop functioning, and so would our banking system, phone system, airplanes, hospitals and every technology driven by a computer.  Companies and governments spent hundreds of millions of dollars to avert this catastrophic scenario.

But as the final seconds of 1999 came to end, and the ominous computer clocks all struck 2000, the computers kept running just fine.  The takeaway for everyone was, “experts can be wrong.”

Today many people believe the experts are wrong again. They think the global warming scare is a story created by climate scientists looking for new sources of funding. The greater the threat of global warming, the more research grants they can get to investigate the threat.

I think there is some global warming denying going on in all of us. Global warming sounds ominous. Climate destabilization sounds even worse. It seems like it is not an emergency today so we have time to kick the can down the road a little longer. But the evidence where we live is beginning to mount. Something is amiss in our climate system. With the crazy weather we had in California, and the examples of once in a century flooding in the central US this year, and the record sweltering temperatures on the East Coast this summer, it seems wise to be smart about where we are headed.

Are we putting in motion the destabilization of our planet’s climate system? If you study all the facts available, especially the most compelling ones, it looks like we are. As a global warming denier, you can feel smug knowing you are not falling for another Y2K. It is nice not to be fooled again.  But, the great persuader is personal experience.  And with the unusual weather I have experienced personally this year, and have seen happening in so many places throughout the world in 2010, it seems wise and prudent to reverse our course.

A Hundredth of an Inch