Business Insight Zone

My college classmate Michael Webber is now on the faculty of our alma mater, and he’s been writing up a storm over the past few years in support of innovative ideas for the energy future of Texas, the United States, and the world.

In this Texas Monthly article (free registration required), Michael lays out several pro-business, pro-environment, non-Flash-Gordon-esque ideas that could move Texas away from its position as the country’s top contributor to global warming, and make it instead “the leader in reducing air pollution and greenhouse gases.”

Green Star State

What I like so much about the article is that Michael has focused on non-partisan approaches that would use limited government activity (sometimes simply in the form of getting out of the way) to open the door for waves of entrepreneurship — something that Texas has always had in spades, and especially in the energy sector. One passage makes this point especially well:

Contrary to the fears of some politicians, our incipient greenness has not been bad for business. The clean-technology sectors are booming, creating jobs and revenues in many locations that needed them badly. But we’ve barely begun. Texas used its natural gifts to become the leader of the world’s energy industry, and we can once again use them to lead the green energy revolution. Just as we were blessed with the nation’s greatest allocation of oil and gas, we have also been graced with the nation’s greatest collection of renewable resources. Arizona and Nevada have the most sun, the Dakotas have the most wind, and Iowa is the most prominent supplier of corn ethanol. But Texas has the most combined wind, solar, and biomass sources of any state. We can make a lot of money putting these resources and other clean energy capabilities to work.

The piece goes on to give details on everything from underground carbon sequestration to algae-based biofuels. If you have any interest — even a purely commercial, non-environmental interest — in the future of alternative energy, it’s well worth a read.

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Photo by cjc4454, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

A couple of weeks back I spelled out my crazy dream for business. Since then I’ve been thinking about which companies are already living that dream.

Within a few days of writing that post, the mailman brought me both the latest Patagonia catalog and my annual REI membership report — complete with my annual dividend.

Both of these companies promote healthy outdoor activity and active ecological stewardship. Both of them put their money where their mouths are on these issues, both of them make good money, and both of them are known for treating their employees well (although REI has laid off some employees during the current retail slump).

So, I nominate Patagonia and REI for membership on the Crazy Dream List. What do you think?

And which companies would YOU add to the list?

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Image by Rick McCharles, used under a Creative Commons license.

My college classmate Michael Webber – now on the engineering faculty at our alma mater — recently published this fascinating article in Scientific American magazine:

Energy versus Water: Solving Both Crises Together
Water is needed to generate energy. Energy is needed to deliver water. Both resources are limiting the other—and both may be running short. Is there a way out?

I’ll give away the ending of the article by telling you that the answer is a qualified Yes — qualified by the need for enlightened governmental policies (hey, anything’s possible, right?) and “innovative technologies that help to boost one resource without draining the other.”

Although I’m interested in many aspects of Michael’s article, for the purposes of this blog I want to highlight the business wisdom embodied in this sentence:

“The inventor who discovered a way to purify water using minimal energy could become the world’s richest person and be forever enshrined.”

Michael mentions several other technologies that seem ripe for continued development by entrepreneurs looking to blend the green sensibility of ecology with the greenbacks of commerce. These include:

• efficient drip irrigation systems for agriculture, which waste much less water than spray irrigation methods;
• better systems for reusing municipal and industrial waste­water;
• computerized and sensor-based systems that monitor and control industrial and residential water use; and
• solar water heating — a simple technology that needs less in the way of R&D and more in the way of savvy marketing.

Here are other excerpts from the piece, with my highlights added.

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“Many people are concerned about the perils of peak oil — running out of cheap oil. A few are voicing concerns about peak water. But almost no one is addressing the tension between the two: water restrictions are hampering solutions for generating more energy, and energy problems, particularly rising prices, are curtailing efforts to supply more clean water.”

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“The strains between the resources manifest themselves in tough choices at the local level — especially in land- and water-locked regions such as the desert Southwest. Is it better for a city to import fresh­water or to import electricity to desalinate brackish water in deep aquifers below? Or is it better yet to move the people to where the water is? With infinite energy, freshwater can be reached, but even if the public coffers were unlimited, policymakers are under pressure to limit carbon emissions. And with climate change possibly altering the cycles of droughts, floods and rainfall, burning more energy to get more water might be doubly dire. The challenges get even tougher because the U.S. has finally conceded that the best way to fix its energy and security problems is to break its dependence on imported oil.”

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“Whether proponents realize it or not, any plan to switch from gasoline to electricity or biofuels is a strategic decision to switch our dependence from foreign oil to domestic water. Although that choice might seem more appealing than reducing energy consumption, we would be wise to first make sure we have the necessary water.”

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“More than anything . . . we need to value water. We must move away from a long-standing expectation that water should be free or cheap. If we think water is important, we should put a realistic price on it. Without that, we send a confusing signal that everyone can be blasé about wasting water.”

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It seems to me that the dilemma that Michael discusses here relates to a broader observation I made a while back, about how “business evolves to incorporate elements that were previously regarded as externalities.”

Over time, our business ventures — whether because of social pressure, technical breakthroughs, or something else — can incorporate multiple benefits that might once have been seen as mutually incompatible. To take a handy example, cars of today are more efficient AND safer AND faster than Henry Ford’s Model T.

What I’m really talking about is Both/And thinking. And Michael’s absolutely right to guess that some entrepreneur is going to perfect a both/and technique that meets our water AND energy needs . . . and that entrepreneur will make a mint.

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Related posts:

• Designing a low-carbon future: building the new yacht.
• The greatest challenge of business: Both/And thinking.
• Bringing externalities inside the system.

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Photo by Frank-Bernard.

In this case, the gleaming windshield of an immaculate 1962 Studebaker GT Hawk.

Other days, as the saying continues, you’re the bug. While today wasn’t a bad one, it’s been more on the “bug” end of the spectrum than the “windshield” end. No special reason — and I’m not even a traditional hater-of-Mondays.

Here, then, are a few things I’ve been thinking about today, in no special order besides how they’re arranged on my desk or the browser of my computer.

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–Item: Bloglines gets the heave-ho from yours truly. My once-trusty Bloglines RSS reader has been reallly spotty of late. Turns out it’s not just me, as this TechCrunch item makes clear:

Destruction Of Bloglines Now Complete; Founder Prepares To Switch To Google Reader

Users who hadn’t already left Bloglines for Google Reader and other functional RSS readers are doing so now, largely because Bloglines has stopped working and the company has done absolutely nothing to communicate to users what is going on or when it might be fixed. . . .

At the recommendation of a friend, I used the easy-peasy option of exporting all my RSS feeds to an OPML file (like HTML, but for feeds), then uploaded the same file to the free NewsGator online reader, which works much like Bloglines, with the difference that it actually works. The export was simple — and believe me, if I can do it, you can, too — and it even kept my feeds organized in the folders I set up in Bloglines. The OPML process is explained in more detail by the estimable Marshall Kirkpatrick here.

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–Item: Sometimes, ONE LITTLE WORD can set me off. Thanks to P.R. visionary Brian Solis and Austin’s own social-media-realty maven Lani Anglin-Rosales, I’ve been trying out all sorts of tools to improve my Twitter usage. (By the way, this is not just for fun — besides its other benefits, the Hoover’s Twitter account has already brought us some warm leads for new customers.) Two of these tools, however, earned a demotion in my book with their thoughtless use of language — even though I acknowledge their potential utility:

1. follow cost lets you see how “expensive” it will be to follow a particular Twitter user by telling you how often they tweet (i.e., how often they circulate messages to everyone following them). But on their lovely, minimalist home page, they don’t say “How much attention will it cost to follow X” or the like. No, they say, “How annoying will it be to follow _____ on Twitter?”

Annoying? Where did that come from?

Far from being annoyed, some people enjoy reading frequent tweets. On the other side of the coin, some tweeters manage to be annoying by tweeting very little but being a jerk in each and every tweet. Others tweet all day every day in a delightful stream of free association.

In short: what does frequency have to do with annoyance?

2. Qwitter has a good idea — if it’s used right: who stopped following you after which tweet? This could help you figure out which topics (or tones of voice, etc.) tend to drive people away, and if it’s used to reform your own behavior, good. But the tagline for the service is “Catching Twitter quitters” — which stinks.

My own experience tells me there are many reasons to quit following someone on Twitter: too many tweets, too much anger or cynicism or whatever, lack of shared interests, and so on. Once in a while, I go through the whole list of my Twitter followers and tidy things up along these lines; at other times, seeing a tweet from someone reminds me that I’ve been meaning to stop following them, even though the tweet of the moment is unobjectionable. (I’ve made this point before.)

This is no different than the decision to stop reading a particular opinion columnist, or to stop keeping in touch with a particular acquaintance, or to let a magazine subscription lapse. And it’s senseless to talk about “catching” such “quitting” in any of these contexts, because readers are always free to leave when they please.

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–Item: Jason Zweig talks sense.

Take a Deep Breath, Turn Off the TV, Calm Yourself
With Stocks Swinging Wildly, It’s Easy to Panic; Some Advice for Fighting the Herd Mentality

Fear is a defense mechanism. It bursts forth in our brains the instant we sense that we, or others near us, are threatened. When fear leaps from one person to another, it turns into panic. . . .

Viewed this way, today’s financial markets — in which tens of millions of investors watch each other’s fears unfolding in real time on television and online — constitute one giant panic-transmission machine.

We’ve talked before (twice) about Zweig’s take on the irrationality in the markets. His advice is well worth keeping in mind as the markets continue to gyrate around us.

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–Item: Rio Tinto sees biodiversity and profitability going hand in hand. It’s amazing to read this NYT interview with CEO Tom Albanese and remember that the words are coming from the mouth of the head of one of the largest mining outfits in the world.

Madagascar is a great example because it is known to be incredible for its biodiversity. But what is less known is that most of the natural forests have already been degraded. In some cases they have been completely removed largely as a consequence of overpopulation and poverty. It’s important to recognize that the worst villain of biodiversity is poverty.

To the extent that mining opportunities can bring jobs into areas, you basically create alternative solutions that can help with forests. It has to be very holistic. It’s not just recreating or replacing the biodiversity that will be impacted by mining, but also providing for those local communities alternative sources of, say, forest products, that, as we regenerate forests, stop them from being cut down again.

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–Item: Larry Dignan takes the pulse of IT executives. If you’re interested in where IT spending is headed, read Dignan’s writeup at ZDNet:

State of the enterprise tech economy

. . . Despite this perfect storm it’s hard to generalize the enterprise technology economy. Simply put, it’s not all gloom and doom. And technology executives seem calm–in IT there’s no panic. But there is a general feeling that the tech sector and all the executives in the ecosystem have been here before and will manage through a downturn again.

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–Item: Jay Walker’s library is super-awesome. I’m not related to entrepreneur Jay Walker (he started Priceline.com, among other things), but I wish I were if it meant I could hang out with him in his spectacular home library, which is something like a cross between the British Museum and a medieval “cabinet of wonders” . . . if it were built my M. C. Escher. Be sure to check out the pictures here:

WIRED: Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker’s Library

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(Photo by Dave_7, used under a CC-Share Alike license.)

Recently I got to attend an information session held in Austin by John Viera, director of sustainable business strategies for Ford Motor Company. His audience included journalists, Ford dealers, local politicos, environmental analysts, and alternative-energy industry players. After we all ate lunch and got to know each other a bit, Viera took us through a slide deck as he explained Ford’s projects over the near, medium, and long terms.

Start with available technology

Ford believes that it must build more environmentally friendly vehicles using technologies that are affordable and attainable at volume. This makes sense to me: even though Ford CEO Alan Mulally has said that he intends for the company to be smaller but more profitable in the future, it’s clearly not going to become a bit player in the industry. So even if the company might like to flip a switch and skip a couple of generations of technology, the reality is that it has to move at a pace the mass market will stand.

Viera made it clear that Ford is also dedicated to offering a full product line going forward. This includes the SUVs and pickups that he himself spent years of his earlier career designing; there still is demand for these vehicles, even with the price of fuel as high as it is. Viera said that Ford’s challenge now is to deliver the F-150 and other models with better environmental performance — including better fuel economy.

Going forward, many of these vehicles will be built using updated components, especially the EcoBoost engine that is the centerpiece of Ford’s plans. The company expects that EcoBoost engines will power 90% of its North American fleet by 2013.

Two key technologies are involved:

• Direct injection (DI). Over the past few decades, cars from makers around the world have shifted from carburetion to fuel injection, with attendant improvements in power and fuel economy. Now Ford is touting its DI technology, which injects pressurized fuel directly into engine cylinders. Viera says this technique is more efficient than older fuel-injection methods.
• Turbocharging. The DI technology works in concert with improved turbos that deliver compressed air into the engine’s chambers. According to Viera, EcoBoost engines burn cleaner as compressed direct-injected fuel combines with the compressed air. This means better engine performance across the board: higher torque, better fuel economy, lower emissions.

From the standpoint of vehicle design, the EcoBoost will allow Ford to get comparable performance from smaller engines. EcoBoost V-6’s should perform like old V-8’s, and EcoBoost inline-4’s should perform like old V-6’s — all while using less gasoline, and while costing less than hybrids.

The company is also tweaking the designs of its vehicles to make each of them 250 – 700 pounds lighter — which would make them more fuel-efficient even without the new engines.

Alternative engines and fuels

Although its emphasis is on the EcoBoost, Ford continues to expand its production of hybrid engines; Viera said that the company is doubling annual production of hybrids from 25,000 to 50,000 units for 2009. Although this still puts the company well behind hybrid industry leader Toyota, Ford does expect hybrid-engine vehicles to be a permanent part of it product mix. These cars should be especially attractive to drivers (e.g. taxi operators) who do most of their driving in cities, since hybrids’ mileage advantages are most pronounced for in-town driving. The company is experimenting with plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs) as well, but won’t introduce them at scale until the technology is more affordable

Viera also talked about the company’s long-range efforts to improve and expand its offerings of cleaner-burning diesel vehicles, as well as vehicles that run on biofuels — including corn ethanol today, and cellulosic biofuels in the future.

He also talked briefly about the future of hydrogen vehicles. Ford has a small test fleet of hydrogen-powered cars for R&D, but Viera agreed with the sober independent analyses that I’ve seen: hydrogen vehicles are a looooooong way from being “affordable and attainable,” much less at volume.

Realigning global production

Ford has also announced big changes lately to make its manufacturing operations more flexible. For now, it is shifting production away from pickups and toward smaller cars, but Viera said that in the long run the company plans to make its plants easier to retool quickly in any direction so that the company can better keep pace with market shifts.

In concert with this, the company has realigned its product design operations. Instead of having separate suites of vehicles for sale on each continent, Ford will mix and match its offerings globally. As a first step, it has announced plans to bring six of the small, fuel-efficient designs it sells in Europe to the North American market for the 2010 model year.

In the future, Ford should be better able to make changes like this regularly. As an example, Viera talked about a diesel version of the Ford Focus that is popular in Europe, where gasoline and diesel fuel sell at about the same price. Ford doesn’t market that model in North America because diesel sells at such a premium here. But if, hypothetically, Congress changed fuel taxes in a way that made diesel more attractive to U.S. motorists, Ford would be able to respond quickly to sell the diesel Focus in the United States.

More bad road ahead

Ford has had a hard go of things lately. For the second quarter of 2008, when even the best performing auto makers experienced flat sales in North America, Ford reported a loss of $8.7 billion — the largest quarterly loss in its long history. Viera didn’t talk about that, of course (nor would I have expected him to), but it’s the headwind against which he and his mates at Ford must labor. The company’s plans sound good, and I think that Ford is much improved since Mulally took the helm two years ago, but it’s not in the pink yet.

Viera himself is an impressive advocate for the company — energetic, intelligent, and approachable. He’s been with the company, mostly as an engineer on the truck side, for 24 years. His enthusiasm for the technology was obvious: he joked that he would have to keep himself from talking for an hour about each one of the engine diagrams and other technical slides.

The presentation that I attended was all about Ford’s efforts to be greener on the consumer-facing side of its business — i.e. in the vehicles that it sells. But since a big chunk of a car’s lifetime environmental impact comes during the manufacturing process, I hope to talk with Viera more in the future about what Ford is doing to improve the environmental footprint of its manufacturing operations.

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Related posts:

• American Airlines, Ford Motor, and the price of oil.
• What does the future hold for the Detroit car makers?

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* Sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun. But in fact, the Focus came up several times in the presentation as a key piece in Ford’s fuel-efficient product offerings.

A while back, I went on a binge of commenting on other blogs. This week I did it again. It’s a good exercise for at least three reasons:

1. It fosters dialogue, which is exactly what I want to promote here.
2. As a blogger, I get a kick out of choice comments — even in dissent — so I like to give that little gift anytime I can.
3. By appealing to friends, Twitter followers, etc. for their suggestions on what to comment about, I get exposed to many new blogs and many new thoughts.

Here, then, are some of the most interesting posts that I commented on this week. Whether you agree with my comments or not, I recommend reading the posts themselves.

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Adele McAlear at Marketing Monster: Yammer Wins TechCrunch 50 with Twitter-like Enterprise Service

Yammer is like Twitter, but intended to be used within the walls of a single company for communication and collaboration. Adele has a great write-up of the service, which could overcome Twitter’s biggest advantage. (I discussed that advantage in this post.) Here’s part of what I wrote in my comment:

[A]t a strategic level, Yammer has neatly side-stepped Twitter’s greatest advantage, which is its entrenchment in the lives of its users. In other words, no one wants to have to convince all their Twitter friends to migrate with them to some other service. But in the corporate setting, you *expect* to set up a new social graph limited to your workmates. Nifty.

One of my buddies has kicked off a Yammer group internal to Hoover’s, so I’ll tell you more about how it works after I’ve had a chance to play with it.

BONUS: read the comment thread in this post by Chris Brogan — and especially Damon Cortesi’s exchanges — for more thoughts on how Yammer might work (or might not be the best choice) within the enterprise IT environment.

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David Valentino at FG SQUARED: Corporate Evaluations of Social Media

David offers a sober-minded and straightforward account of how social media is adopted in enterprises, not by enthusiasts, but by the senior decision makers in IT and other departments. I said, in part:

I think that a lot of social-media devotees would nod their heads at this and say, “Okay, but what’s new about any of this?” But these early/avid adopters (I’m one of them) are like early radio enthusiasts, or the people who bought Altair computers in the mid-1970s: their passion is great, but social media won’t “grow up” until it percolates across the broader culture — and particularly the broader business culture.

This ties back into a point I’ve harped on before (more than once): like other truly groundbreaking media, the social media offer entirely new ways of doing certain things. But we can also look to the history of the other mainstream media (print, radio, television, etc.) to get an idea of how these new media may be adopted, and especially within traditionally go-srow corporate environments.

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Tom Raftery at Greenmonk: What are your top tips for helping RedMonk/GreenMonk become carbon neutral?

When you’re in the analyst business, you do a lot of air travel. So for all the other steps you take to attain carbon neutrality, you still run up against what seems like a carboniferous brick wall. In his post, Tom wrote, “I know that in my own case, my travel footprint will likely far exceed all my other activities and unfortunately, this is not travel which can be avoided.” I tried to (gently) chip away at this with my comment:

I know that your business is built on trust with & thorough understanding of clients, and on networking your way to new clients. But I would still challenge you to take an engineer’s approach to the problem, with targets to reduce the number of flights and the number of flight miles within a certain timeframe — e.g. by 10% of each over the next six months in comparison to the past six months.

This may, by the way, offer you a better chance to educate your clients: you reinforce the importance of bit-miles versus human-travel-miles by, for example, always charging the client for travel including offsets, and by charging extra fo physical trips taken above a certain threshold.

In terms of work philosophy, this may lead you to a sort of mega-batch-processing over the course of the year. That is, you each spend longer continuous periods working from your home bases, then longer, more intense periods traveling, with more client engagements per mile traveled. (In fact, that could give you another metric to ponder: hours of client/networking facetime per air-mile traveled. Seek to improve the ratio my meaningful amounts during each half-year.)

By no means do I think that this nut will be easy to crack. But for a green-minded company — and especially for a green consultancy like Greenmonk — I’ll bet that the effort will be worth it.

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Tom Peters: Spontaneous Discovery: F.A. Hayek, U.S. Grant, Herb Kelleher, and I

Tom uses this post to harp on one of his favorite ideas, which is to minimize the importance of systems thinking in favor of the philosophy of “Action! Now!” One of his heroes in this vein is Herb Kelleher, who built Southwest Airlines. I commented, in part:

Kelleher had enough “strategy” to get started when he had the napkin sketch of the triangular routes between Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Supplement with the strategic idea that Southwest wouldn’t fly loss-making routes for the sake of “footprint.” Build everything around people giddy at the opportunity to work at such a fun place. And then just do things do things do things do things.

That “strategy” beats the heck out of many a 200-page document, with more devoid-of-substance bullet points than anyone could ever digest.

What I’m really getting at, now that I’ve had more time to digest, is that you need a simple set of “algorithms” — centered on relentless forward progress via trial-and-error action — that take the place of overly fancy strategies. It’s too easy for a strategy to be treated as an individual project, rather than as the fundamental operating system of the company. The success of Southwest, Google, Toyota, GE, Berkshire Hathaway, and other “algorithm” companies suggests that the algorithm approach is a better way to go.

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(Photo by art_es_anna.)

Interior of a Sea Leopard yacht.

Dematerializing (parts of) supply chains

James Governor of Greenmonk Consulting is doing fascinating things to help businesses build more sustainability into their operations. His research takes him to many companies, including some of the biggest (IBM, Microsoft, Sun, etc.), to study their approaches to these challenges.

For instance, earlier this summer he got to visit the Bristol, England labs of Hewlett-Packard. He wrote up the findings of his visit in this post on the Greenmonk blog:

On HP Labs, Sustainability, Energy Demand Management and Bit Miles

HP most obviously impacts the 2% of global energy use — and greenhouse emissions — associated with IT hardware. Smart design of future servers and data centers can help reduce this impact. But IT’s 2% can also go much further when it helps to “dematerialize” other aspects of business supply chains. As James puts it:

I like HP’s narrative of dematerialisation, whether we’re talking about printed pages or processors. Don’t make things manifest unless you actually need to. That’s a key to sustainability.

The past luxury of waste

The Greenmonk/HP logic hardly prevailed in the past. From the Industrial Revolution through the 20th century, the fundamental cheapness of energy meant that you could “make things manifest” with regard mostly to the cost of their materials and labor; this often went along with limited regard for energy use, and no regard for emissions and other “footprint” metrics. But that was before energy got expensive and stayed expensive, and before concerns about climate change and other environmental problems became widespread.

In other words, we had more than 100 years of being able to think, “Ah, let ‘er rip — we can afford it.” So that’s what we did. But now we’re constrained like never before.

If we want to successfully navigate this fundamental change, it’s going to take much more of the kind of thinking that HP and Greenmonk are doing.

Designing a yacht means working with constraints

Here’s the metaphor that’s guided my thinking about these changes:

• The past century of widespread, unconstrained wealth-building has been like designing and building a house.
• This new century of globalized, constrained wealth-building is like designing and building a yacht.

Whether you’re building a house or a yacht, you can do it across a wide range of budgets. You can include or exclude a huge range of features based on what you want and how much you can afford to spend.

But when you’re designing a boat, your fundamental considerations don’t stop at “Do I want it?” and “Can I afford it?” You also have to consider “How much space will it take up?” and “How much will it weigh?” These concerns are often trivial for an architect designing a mansion; at the worst, maybe you build up the foundation to accommodate the weight of a flagstone fireplace. But on the yacht, you rule out the flagstones altogether, simply because you can’t afford to warp the whole design to accommodate one nice-to-have-but-inessential feature.

When you’re done building the boat, it could be cheap, it could be luxurious, it could be makeshift, it could be elegant — just like a house. But it can’t be indiscriminately large.

Now, when you transfer this metaphor into the world of sustainable design and business, you’ll run into plenty of folks who dig in their heels. They don’t want to admit constraints, even when you show them the math for why the constraints are beneficial, and show them all the wonders that are possible as we build this new giant luxury yacht of the global economy. They want that flagstone fireplace.

Time will tell whether they can afford it, I guess. My money’s on those — like James — who are figuring out how to achieve environmental sustainability while also doing very well for themselves and their customers.

What the boat-building mentality could mean

How will they achieve this hybrid success? Spelling it all out would take forever — after all, this is the stock in trade of Greenmonk, green building firms, profit-seeking solar energy companies, and so on. But here are a few points of reference to start us off:

• Savings. Years ago, Pasquale Pistorio of STMicroelectronics started the giant European chipmaker on the path of reducing its effluents — not, primarily, for environmental reasons, but because as an engineer he realized that exhaust gases and fluids represent waste in manufacturing processes. And waste costs money. Other big manufacturers like DuPont have jumped on the same train — and reaped huge financial rewards, not to mention good press and lower compliance costs.
• Innovation. Inspired by Kathy Sierra, I’ve written several things about how constraints can bring out the best in us. Just think of all the innovations that have come about in electronics by the desire to make radios, televisions, computers, etc. handheld, portable, and wireless. Constraints fuel creativity.
• Entrepreneurial opportunities galore. We’re already seen waves of startups in non-fossil-fuel energy. Likewise, there’s a long, rolling boom in many fields (green design, efficiency engineering, etc.) that will contribute to better sustainable practices in the long run.

Nautical versions of land-based amenities tend toward the compact and the nifty, and there are plenty of specialist firms that supply the world’s boat makers. I wager we’ll see the same thing happen — on a much larger scale — around sustainable materials, computing, supply chains, and on and on.

I’m not saying that this future will be easy to navigate — but if you’re a fan of innovation, what’s not to like?

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Related posts:

• The greatest challenge of business: Both/And thinking.
• Not logic, but culture.
• Proof of Concept for carbon-neutral futures.
• Expectations of waste.
• An ethic of waste.
• What we waste without worrying.
  

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(Photo by kidsire.)

At lunchtime today I’ll be attending a press briefing by some of the folks steering Ford Motor Company’s sustainability efforts.

What should I ask them?

Please enter your suggested questions in the comments below.

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Related: Ford’s corporate sustainability page.

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It seems bizarre . . . but what if it works?

Before Roger Bannister broke the four-minute barrier for the mile in May 1954, running a sub-four-minute mile was supposed to be “impossible.”

We’ve heard some of the same nonsense about remedies for the possible (but overwhelmingly likely) dangers of climate change — that it’s not possible to do anything meaningful about global warming, or at least not without devastating consequences for standards of living worldwide. (Here’s one example.)

Roger Bannister proved that a man could run a sub-four-minute mile without dying or breaking down. And in various corners of the world, individuals and groups are working to demonstrate the same things about living in a more carbon-savvy way. Two examples:

• SmartPlanet: Emirates to build zero-carbon desert city — “Foster + Partners has drawn up a master plan for Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, designed to produce zero carbon emissions, zero waste and to be car-free. It’s being built according to the ten sustainability guidelines called One Planet Living drawn up by the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) and environmental consultancy BioRegional. Guidelines for building include sustainable materials, sustainable food and water, support of habitats, wildlife, culture and heritage, and to promote equity, fair trade, health and happiness.”
• The New Yorker: The Island in the Wind, by Elizabeth Kolbert — In this article, Kolbert talks about how the little Danish farming community of Samsø has shifted completely to wind power in the past decade.

Will these particular experiments will work on a broad scale? Who knows? Because of the accidents of petroleum wealth and autocratic governance, the United Arab Emirates are able to carry out grand experiments like Masdar City that could be awfully hard to duplicate in, say, Japan. And, as Kolbert makes clear in her article, in Samsø the wind blows all the time.

But my bet is that one of these experiments, or others like them, will come to be regarded in future decades as harbingers for better ways of designing cities and the energy grids that feed them. And in any event, trying large-scale experiments like these is a heck of lot more fruitful than sitting around saying that nothing can be done.

The application for business

Smart businesses are making the same transition. Whether driven by a sense of social responsibility, by the high costs of fuel, or simply by a prudent regard for managing future risks, these firms are trying things to reduce their energy use and improve their carbon footprint.

To the innovators go the spoils?

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(Picture by Hiddenloop.)

There’s no special reason that a baseball game seems like the perfect thing for the Fourth of July . . . unless you’re one of the many millions of Americans (like me) for whom it is the perfect thing.

There nothing wrong with it, mind you, but it’s not logic — it’s culture.

Culture grows out of all sorts of things: religion, wars, landscape, historical trends, etc. But plenty of it is basically accidental. If things had been just a little different, for example, Americans might regard the Fourth of July as a perfect day for football or soccer or horse racing.

(For that matter, the Fourth of July was very nearly the Second of July, since that’s the day the delegates agreed on the Declaration of Independence. But they didn’t start signing it until two days later.)

The historical accident of cheap energy

Oil, just by coincidence, occurs naturally in abundant qualities in places like Pennsylvania, California, and Texas. It’s also a wonder-chemical when it comes to packing BTUs into a small amount of mass. Plus it’s easy to burn — in an oil lamp, a piston engine, or whatever.

If oil hadn’t occurred in abundance in the United States, or if it hadn’t been discovered until much later, or if it weren’t so easy to burn, Americans might have very different views about a lot of things: automobiles, the proper price of fuel, the Middle East, and so on.

Note that I don’t say which way would be better. Ultimately, it’s unknowable. I’m just observing that things surely would be different.

Japanese industrial cooperation

My friend James Governor, who’s a technology analyst with a focus on environmental issues, raises this issue with his latest blog post:

Collaboration On A Grand Scale: Japan and Carbon Capture

. . . Japan has a history of successfully retooling its economy to deal with economic challenges and scarcity . . . It’s a country with a particularly strong sense of duty and continuity.

Keep in mind that, in different settings, “collaboration” involving 24 power companies could be interpreted as “collusion” or “oligarchy” or something else. Keep in mind, also, that these interpretations would be culturally driven — because legal and commercial norms are parts of culture.

Getting back to oil for a minute, it might be worth noting here that the “Seven Sisters” of the 20th-century oil business were notorious for being brass-knuckle competitors, yet were also watched constantly for signs that they might be colluding to the detriment of consumers (or, later, oil-producing countries). So when, say, Exxon and Chevron pooled their resources into Aramco in 1948, they were careful to do it in a way that wouldn’t be construed as forming a trust by U.S. regulators.

Hospital patient charts

With a typically acid tongue, The Last Psychiatrist lays out

Six Quick Changes That Will Lead To Better or More Cost Effective Hospital Care

Since I’ve never been a doctor or a nurse, I can’t speak to the accuracy of the post’s suggestions. But the important thing to note is that TLP is suggesting changes that could be put into effect at any time by a change in rules, not a change in technology.

Rules are a piece of culture.

American hospitals have their own culture just like the international oil business or the Japanese energy business. TLP’s suggestions involve nothing more complex, in terms of logic, than using a pen and following some new guidelines. But TLP seems well aware that the suggestions would be resisted, in some cases tooth and nail, by doctors.

How to solve a big problem

Businesses are facing enormous challenges. Not just the forever-and-ever challenges of finding good workers, finding good customers, managing finances, and so on, but changes in the landscapes of whole industries. And many businesses — many whole industries — are figuring out that they must make huge changes of their own. But how to do it?

Unfolding the whole answer has already filled libraries. But one of the starting points to the answer is this:

Understand that you’re not just changing the reasons or the logic or the mechanics, but the CULTURE.

It’s the same for organizations as it is for individual people. Most folks don’t change their actions unless they change their whole way of looking at things. It’s true of heart patients trying to live longer. It’s true of people who want to fix what’s broken in their lives. And it’s true of organizations that want to embrace change.

Culture as a technical problem

We like to focus on technical challenges. If we can clarify specs, enumerate steps, compose a Gantt chart, we can often break down a big thing so that it seems manageable.

Culture? People issues? Not so much. Too sticky — and it’s hard to get people to change.

But in fact, steering the culture in a better direction is part of the technical challenge itself, because you can’t implement the world’s best technical solution if you don’t do it in a way that’s culturally doable.

The moral of this story: You can be as logical as you like, but until you get the culture right, you’re rowing against the tide.

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(Photo by jimcchou.)