Psychology Today just ran an article featuring Saving The World At Work.  It quoted me talking about the upcoming responsibility revolution and how it would transform the business landscape.

The article quotes Dr. Daniel Goleman (author of Ecological Intelligence) talking about the requisite need for ecological leadership, both in its development and distribution.

Read: Ecological Leadership For Sustainabile Companies

Read more from Tim at SandersSays and at the Saving the World at Work site.

Here’s an excerpt from Saving The World At Work that relates to the value of supporting local companies, even when a global cost cutting opportunity comes up.

The Law of the Long View says if you commit to your partners, you’re committed for the long haul. It’s your job to stick with them even if a short-term reason to change arises.

Too often we treat partners with a what-have-you-done-for-me lately attitude, or a lowest-price-wins-my-business mindset. Such thinking can result in product recalls, disappointed customers, and damage to the company brand.

For example, with its cheap labor, China can often undercut an American competitor, but unlike their Japanese counterparts in decades past, Chinese manufacturers are not accomplishing this feat with quality improvement. Quite the opposite. In 2007, millions of inexpensively made Chinese products, from pet food to toys, were recalled from store shelves due to their low quality and harmful ingredients. Mattel, Sony, Dell, and a host of pet-food companies have paid a penalty for working with such low-cost partners.

On the other hand, ice-cream maker Ben & Jerry’s cofounder Ben Cohen is committed to buying his milk from local dairy farmers. He believes that local farms are critical to sustainable agriculture, a belief codified in the company’s social-responsibility program.

Ben & Jerry’s loyalty was challenged in the late 1980s when industrial-sized farms, often owned by multinational companies, began offering lower wholesale milk prices. Cohen believed such pricing, driven by technological advances, was only a temporary cost advantage. So, remaining loyal to local dairy farmers, he actively helped them catch up with their larger competitors by, among other things, launching an ambitious set of educational programs to aid local farmers in bridging the knowledge/tech gap.

Working with the local farms cost the company a great deal of money in the short run. But it paid off in the long run—Ben & Jerry’s strategy helped the company offer high-quality products and lower average costs by maintaining consistent relationships throughout its supply chain—all because Ben & Jerry’s kept its promises.

Read more from Tim at SandersSays and at the Saving the World at Work site.

I am a huge fan of Adam Werbach (former President of the Sierra Club).  Back in 2004 he declared that “environmentalism is dead” and in 2006 he went to work for Wal-Mart.  Crazy guy? Not loyal? Hardly.  He’s a rock star in my book (literally).

In April of 2008, Webach gave a very important talk at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.  The content of the talk is aligned with my thinking. He believes (as I do) that we have to go beyond saving the planet to focusing on humans (as the planet will likely go on without us).

Other key points:

1.  We need to move from limits (guilt) to possibilities (happiness).

2. Each one of us needs to have a Personal Sustainability Project.

3. Nano practices are the key (it’s the little things).

4. We must shift from a thing-oriented society to people oriented.

Download the entire speech: The Birth Of Blue by Adam Werbach

Read more from Tim at SandersSays and at the Saving the World at Work site.

Whether you are a company, or just an individual, you must continually innovate to maximize your green-ness. The best way to do this is by focusing on a single weekly innovation. Think about everything you do as you do your workaday, and isolate areas where you can reduce your impact on the planet.

This week’s innovation is to reduce the printing that I create via my documents. Frequently, we author presentations (PowerPoint or PDF) that, if printed by the recipient, could create a massive print job. Each page we use makes a difference, so I’m beginning to review my outgoing documents to make sure that I’ve reduced the page count — making each page beg for its life. If the document is 3 pages, and the third page is just one paragraph, I reformat the document to expand margins or reduce the footer/header to turn it into 2 pages. Same goes with power points. I send them out in handout format, fitting 2 to 4 on a page if my recipients hit the print button without thinking.

Finally, I’ve started to use GreenPDF to add a little tag to my PDFs, encouring my recipients not to print out the document unless they need too.

If the automakers can green up by reducing how much gas they force their customers to use, I can think the same way as an information worker.

While I’m pretty excited about this new idea, it is only one of 50 that I need to come up with this year. I’ll give myself two weeks off this year for good behavior.

Read more from Tim at SandersSays and at the Saving the World at Work site.

Frequently, corporate meetings are held in remote locations that require mega travel by attendees. Truck loads of paper and a mountain of waste is generated (from full color Power Point print outs to bottled water). When regulations go after carbon emissions, the meeting industry will be under scrutiny by the business managers at companies around the country.

Today, I told several hundred meeting professionals about this in Chicago. My challenge was to re-imagine how meetings are organized, located and executed. It’s a matter of eco-financial-social innovation I argued. Reduce the waste, eliminate disposable products and integrate a community component. Those are just a few ideas on how to produce a “Green Meeting.”

Beyond their eco-footprint, meetings need to green up to set an example for the managers, sales pros and vendors that attend them. If a company purports to be committed to the environment its meeting needs to ‘walk the walk’. In fact, at some companies like Interface or Aveda, meeting professionals have influenced the culture to go home and innovate how products are made, packaged, marketed and delivered to customers.

I personally LOVE the meetings industry, because make the movies of the corporate world that help shape values, business innovations and culture. They have that much potential.

If your company or association brings me in to keynote at your event, I’m happy to consult with your meeting professionals about all the different ways to green up a meeting (and save a lot of money along the way).

Download my Dirty Dozen Rules of Green Meetings

Bring me to your next meeting

Read more from Tim at SandersSays and at the Saving the World at Work site.

If you feel a little bit green every time you remember to put your waste paper in the recycle bin, I’ve got bad news for you. It’s not good enough. Recycling is only “a little less bad” than pure wasting. It takes carbon based fuels to recycle paper. Only a small percentage of paper, for example, is converted back into usable paper. Every time you recycle, you actually suck technical nutrients out of a product, lowering its quality. In the book Cradle To Cradle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, call this “downcycling.” What do you think recycled recycled paper would feel like? How thin and easily torn would it be?

This is the fallacy of thinking that recycling is a magic bullet. Often, we take so much comfort in knowing that we religiously recycle, we print out a phone book worth of stuff a week. “After all”, we sigh, “It’s going to be recycled AND I use recycled paper to begin with!” There are actually studies and papers that demonstrate how much wasted energy goes into moving scrap items down the supply chain to be recycled, then hopefully redeployed later.

We’ve got to get out of the mindset of using too much in a socially responsible way and focus more on wasting less. Ray Anderson at Interface Floor has a brilliant definition of waste, “anything that does not produce Customer value.”

Remember the old adage; “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”? Don’t think of it as a set of options, think of it as a sequence of alternatives. In other words, recycling is a last resort if reduction and reuse fail to eliminate waste. Let’s stick with paper as the example. The greenest thing you could do is redesign your information intake from paper to plastic (I mean computer). Face it, you hit the print button far too often to facilitate convenience in taking in information you find important. You see a good article, print. You get a long email with attachment, print ‘em both. You print out power point presentations, maps and a gaggle of useless google results that you could just read on screen, save and avoid printing. The reason we do this is because we think that it is easier to read something on paper than on screen. That’s a design issue. You’ve decided that you prefer to read that way, so you print then hopefully recycle.

Redesign today by making every print job beg for its life. Develop folders on your computer desktop to hold articles you used to print. Scan more, print less — pass it on.

Read this study: (Is Recycling Good For The Environment).

Read more from Tim at SandersSays and at the Saving the World at Work site.

There’s a great new video on YouTube called Miles The Can.

It tracks the journey of an aluminum can as it gets reborn over and over again.  The story behind it is powerful: We need to realize how much energy is wasted for convenience.

If you liked The Story of Stuff, you’ll enjoy Miles The Can — a gift from The Natural Step organization.

Read more from Tim at SandersSays and at the Saving the World at Work site.

I believe that we should repackage being green into a quest to preserve the living environment for future generations.  Save the humans!

Here’s the bottom line: The planet will not implode, it will eventually become a terrible place for humans to live. New species, such as insects, will rise to power at some point, likely driven by climate change and pollution.

As long as we couch environmentalism into preserving Earth (because we love it, because it is sacred or beautiful), we keep it on the fringes of the public gestalt.  If we look at sustainability as an ethical issue of not stealing from the yet-to-be-born, we’ll resonate across political lines.

That’s the secret to Interface’s success in sustainability.  Chairman Ray Anderson sees environmental degradation as “intergenerational tyranny.”  In other words, it is about ALL of us, and not just those that prioritize nature above commerce.

Read more from Tim at SandersSays and at the Saving the World at Work site.

I think that company wellness programs are MONEY.

They create healthier employees and reduce insurance claims.  Many companies find that the few year return on investment is three or four to one!

They are also a source of innovation and and leadership at work.  When ex-Sierra Club president Adam Warbach helped Wal-Mart teach store managers eco-sensibility – he realized that wellness programs were the missing link.  When employees learned to take care of their bodies, looking out for the planet made sense (finally).

Here’s an excerpt on this subject from my latest book:

Wellness Programs Excerpt from Saving The World At Work

Read more from Tim at SandersSays and at the Saving the World at Work site.

Basketball is going from orange to green.

This week, led by all-star Steve Nash, NBA is having it’s first green week.  To honor this, league officials have conducted what I call “the green re-imagine” exercise.  Re-imagine your entire business operation as if green were the law OR the defining element of quality in the eyes of your customer.

They approached it with Reduce (Energy, waste), Reuse, Replace (organic shirts) and Recycle (using recycled materials for shoes).

While the NBA may not move the global needle, through their influence, it will make a difference.  I’ve learned the eco-compassion can be contagious — so what are you doing to get the word out front and center?

READ: NBA OBSERVES GREEN WEEK

Read more from Tim at SandersSays and at the Saving the World at Work site.

In the next few years, we are going to see two kinds of companies emerge from this mess:  Saints and Sinners.

A very recent survey indicates that CEOs are less popular than politicians — a sign of things to come.  In my book, Saving The World At Work, I predicted that the Responsibility Revolution would reshape branding as we know it.

My research indicated that the 2002 scandals, such as Enron and WorldCom, gave rise to the corporate social responsibility movement.  Consumers began to gravitate to companies that offered a social value proposition:  Green, community focused or good to employees.  This is a natural psychological reaction to scandals and the resulting landscape.

This will only get bigger.

This is why a recent article (Surprising Survivors: Corporate Do-Gooders) indicates that leading companies with sagging stock prices are holding firm to their commitments to the Triple Bottom Line.

So don’t give up on your commitments to connect your company with a cause bigger than surviving.  Your future brand depends on it.  Also, many companies will cement a social reputation over the next year or two, based on their ability to continue to ‘do the right thing’, when media pundits are suggesting they jump the shark instead.

Read more from Tim at SandersSays and at the Saving the World at Work site.

Even during these tough economic times, big brands are still investing in green.

They need to.  This is the future, long after this recession is gone.  As more and more reports about the impact of global warming roll in (such as the recent one predicting flooding in DC when ice caps melt), the panic will increase — along with a feeling of personal responsibility to be more conscious in how we buy, etc.

Pepsi just announced a carbon labeling program (How Green Is My Orange) that will calculate the carbon emissions of the product and list it along with nutritional ingredients.  This type of labeling, pioneered by Carbon Trust, is growing in Europe.  It makes a big difference too.  As time goes on, this type of labeling will only increase consumer consciousness and be a point of differentiation.

Read more from Tim at SandersSays and at the Saving the World at Work site.