The Impact of Diversity, Inclusion & Equity in the Workplace

Jonathan J. Halperin joins a panel to offer iinsights on what being an inclusive company means, why it matters and what you can do to bring diversity to your organization. (Washington, DC; May 15,  2017)

Event to be held at the following time, date, and location:

Monday, May 15, 2017 from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM (EDT)

Arabella Advisors
1201 Connecticut Avenue Northwest
Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036

Please join us for networking, some light refreshments from certified B Corporations and a lively panel discussion! Registration is free.  Please RSVP by Wednesday, May 10th.  

Are you a B Corporation, social impact business leader, or in your company’s HR department and thinking about how Diversity, Inclusion & Equity can positively impact your employees, the bottom line and your connection to your community? Are you implementing programs now that are bringing change?

If Yes is your answer to any or all of the above, B Local: Mid-Atlantic welcomes you to be a part of a provocative conversation on what it means to have a diverse workforce, how it can impact your organization and the community especially in today’s climate.

Our expert panel will offer insights on what being an inclusive company means, why it matters and what you can do to bring diversity to your organization

Meet the Panel

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Sampriti Ganguli
Chief Executive Officer
Arabella Advisors
Sampriti Ganguli is Arabella Advisors’ Chief Executive Officer. She oversees all aspects of the firm’s performance, including revenue, operations, strategic growth, marketing, and client services. Sampriti drives and executes Arabella’s business strategy, sets operational priorities, and manages senior staff. She is also responsible for enhancing systems and policies that enable Arabella to deliver on its mission—to help foundations, philanthropists, and investors who are serious about impact achieve the greatest good with their resources.  Prior to Arabella Advisors, Sampriti served in roles at Corporate Executive Board (CEB), JP Morgan Chase’s Emerging Markets Research division and as a consultant for the World Bank’s East Asia Environment and Social Development Unit. She has authored more than 25 major papers on topics ranging from risk and talent management to collaboration, benchmarking, and technology adoption.

Sampriti is the recipient of the Corporate Trailblazer Award from the National Black MBA Association in recognition of her focus on increasing diversity in the workplace, and she received a 2016 Brava Award from SmartCEO magazine for her focus on women and leadership in the charitable sector.

Jonathan J. Halperin
Head, External Affairs
Greyston

In addition to serving as the Head of External Affairs at Greyston—with responsibility for communications, development and digital assets—Jonathan Halperin is founder and President of Designing Sustainability, a strategy consultancy.  He has more than 25 years of experience in nonprofit and commercial organizations such as SustainAbility, Ltd., Resources for the Future, and FYI Resources for a Changing World.

In collaboration with international executives, nonprofit leaders, public officials and creative media producers he designs and executes projects to drive systemic changes in thinking and behavior.  Recent projects include research and design of communications on agricultural risk with The World Bank, creation of SNAPAlumni.org with Participant Media to dispel myths about hunger in America, and design of TeachFood! at Mundo Verde PCS which brings celebrity chefs to an inner city school in Washington, DC.

John-Anthony C. Meza
Senior Director Human Resources & Office Administration
Raffa
John-Anthony Meza is a human resource authority in the areas of corporate social responsibility, diversity & inclusion, and employee relations. He leads the HR and Administration functions for the Washington, DC based Raffa Companies. Raffa is one of the top 100 accounting firms in the US. The purpose-driven workforce of Raffa works primarily with nonprofits and socially conscious organizations.

In addition to his traditional HR role, he ensures the CEO’s vision of attracting and retaining an intellectually bright, inclusive, and socially altruistic workforce remains intact and a priority. The firm has been widely recognized for its quality, culture, diversity and overall workforce progressiveness.

Prior to Raffa, John-Anthony served in several HR leadership roles for nonprofit and for-profit organizations. He also spent over ten years with KPMG, where he oversaw their CSR program and led work in diversity & inclusion as well as work-life balance.

John-Anthony is a published author and a frequent presenter on progressive HR topics. He studied Industrial/Organizational Psychology at California State University, Long Beach and holds his degree in Psychology from California State University, Northridge. He’s served on several boards and currently serves on the Board of Advisors for Universal Giving and the Work Life Advisory Council at World at Work.

Jimena Vallejos
Poverty Stoplight Methodology Department – Manager
Fundación Paraguaya
The Poverty Stoplight Methodology seeks to eliminate the multidimensional poverty that affects families. It allows families to trace their own poverty map and develop and then implement a clear plan to overcome it. In her role, Jimena works closely with international partners, including private businesses, participants of the Fundación Paraguaya Microfinance program, and with local governments in Paraguay, that implement the Poverty Stoplight tool in their organizations.  She also leads a team in charge of developing new tools and equity solution strategies to highlight different Poverty Stoplight indicators, specifically the creations of training materials for women in various aspects of poverty elimination such as business development, microfranchises, and violence prevention.  She is currently working with IMAGO Global Grassroots to create a global scale up for the Poverty Stoplight methodology now used in more than 15 countries. To support a more inclusive workplace, Jimena has shared the findings of Poverty Stoplight at international conferences.

Prior to managing Poverty Spotlight, Jimena worked with USAID and coordinated a program to increase economic opportunities for people with disabilities through microfinance in partnership with the Center for Financial Inclusion of the microfinance network ACCION International.  

George Chmael II - Moderator
Founder & CEO
Council Fire
George Chmael II is a world-renowned management consultant who has spent 25+ years working with clients on a full breadth of economic, environmental and social issues.  He has counseled leading U.S. and international organizations in the mechanics of transitioning to sustainable operations to accomplish economic growth while simultaneously creating environmental and social value.  These organizations include leading non-profits such as Environmental Defense Fund, World Wildlife Fund, and Marine Stewardship Council; governmental entities such as World Bank, U.S. Army, USEPA, and NOAA; philanthropic organizations including Walton Family Foundation, Oak Foundation, and Oceans 5, and multinational corporations such as China Light and Power, AES, NRG and many others.

Trained as a lawyer and sustainability specialist, George possesses extensive expertise in a variety of areas including sustainable business, social entrepreneurism, community redevelopment, stakeholder engagement, and organizational assessment and improvement processes.  George is a leader and visionary in the global movement toward a more sustainable and inclusive economy. He is among a select group of business entrepreneurs chosen to grow the B Corporation movement worldwide as a B Ambassador, he leads a collaboration of private sector entities working to expand sustainable businesses in the Mid-Atlantic region, and he has guided his sustainability consultancy, Council Fire, to numerous designations as a “Best For The World” B Corporation.

A Peak Behind the Curtain

A Peak Behind the Curtain

Transitioning to an expanded role as “engine for change” in sustainability, environment, and energy funding, The Cynthia & George Mitchell Foundation invites external thought leaders to blog.

 (Full text below.)

When is it worth protecting a wetland or enacting a new safety regulation? Writ large, what is the role of government in promoting and protecting public welfare? Regardless of our political orientation in these divisive times, few would oppose basic government standards for electrical wiring in our homes or in the service of food safety, right?

But how much is enough or too much?

There is a nested suite of issues and assumptions that often go largely unexamined in the debate about the value of environmental protection and whether it supports or constrains economic growth. Let’s look at them one at a time.

On language

Since language both reflects and drives thinking, the words we use matter; they define the frameworks we apply to the world around us. And seemingly simple words such as “worth,” “value,” and “price” are often used interchangeably when they mean quite different things.

Price, an economic term, describes the numeric indicator of something for sale in the marketplace – a number that allows a buyer and seller to communicate. It is not, however, the same as value which brings into the equation ethical and moral considerations that might or might not be reflected in economic price.

And “worth” adds yet another layer of complexity. My view of what something is worth may be quite different from yours. The higher price a hotel might charge for a room with an ocean-view versus one with a view of the dumpster might be worth it for you because you are going to spend a lot of time in the room. For me (since I am only sleeping in the room), I don’t care about the view. We value the same things differently.

Core Assumptions

The current paradigm for evaluating environmental (and other) public policy proposals posits market failure as the driver for government intervention. We typically presume that the market, while imperfect, will nonetheless generally serve the public interest with modest government interventions. Over the long arc of history, however, that is very much a debatable proposition.

That the “free market” is the greatest mechanism for generating wealth and prosperity may well be true. But when we put either an equity, ecosystem, or time lens on this proposition it becomes very much a hypothesis rather than a statement of fact.

Leaving aside hard questions of morality and accountability, how well is public welfare served when 86% of all the wealth in the world is controlled by 10% of its people while the other 90% control only 14%?

How is the public welfare of future generations being served by the spread since World War II of persistent organic pollutants into every corner of the planet?

Whether long-term social welfare, globally, is best served by a loosely controlled marketplace or a more empowered government that truly creates a level-playing field for all actors in the marketplace is very much unclear.

And, at an even more fundamental level, the market/government duality obscures that prosperity and economic growth might not be the highest aspiration of a society. Entertain for just a moment the thought experiment that identifies equity or spiritual fulfillment as our highest social goal. Or, even more radically, what our world might look like if ending poverty was our core social goal around which policy, capital, and intellect were all united?

As a Practical Matter

Proponents of conventional thinking will assert that “as a practical matter” we need to price clean air, carbon emissions, fishing stocks, the value frogs contribute to ecosystem stability, and the agricultural value of pollinators like bees. While inarguably useful and important, the danger here is in how we assign value, who the “we” is that does the assigning, and whether we lose something that is invaluable in our efforts to monetize nature in order to protect her.

Before we become too attached to current practice, let’s remember that before Copernicus it was the practical consensus that the sun rotated around the earth; and it seemed crazy to consider renting your apartment to a total stranger before AirBnB’s business model. What seems impractical one day can become commonplace the next.

Our thinking is not sometimes but almost always limited by our imagination and the intellectual and operational tools we deploy are very much time-bound. Whether measuring particulate pollution, designing QA (quality assurance) protocols for process engineering, or marveling at the expanding storage capacity of a chip, today’s KPIs (key performance indicators) bear little resemblance to those of a mere decade ago.

Declarations of what we “know” should be tempered with a large dose of humility.

Benefit/Cost Analysis

One of the most powerful tools in our measurement arsenal, benefit/cost analysis, is mandated across the government; it is the means by which we assess the value of the previously discussed government intervention to address market failure. It is, thus, an immensely powerful tool. And while as a tool it may be seen as neutral, “as a practical matter” it is subject to manipulation and misuse.

What goes in the benefit and what goes in the cost column when trying to devise a policy to address climate change? Closing high emitting coal-fired power plants sounds great—unless you are a coal miner. The benefits of fracking once seemed to obviously outweigh the costs—but that was before we understood the extent of methane leakage, water contamination and possible fracking-induced earthquakes.

In addition to the accounting challenge of capturing all the costs and benefits, there is also the equity/distributional challenge when deploying this widely used tool. When we provide agricultural subsidies in the U.S. to grow corn for ethanol or high fructose corn syrup, do we need to account for what impact this will have on smallholder farmers across the globe?

Even more challenging is the issue of how we account for unintended consequences and the passage of time. While economists and investors have a suite of tools for this, what is a reasonable time frame over which to calculate costs and benefits? If we are talking about the habitability of our planet, how far out should we look: a decade, a generation, one-hundred years? In agriculture, for example, what looks like a terrific plan for increasing short-term yields to feed a hungry population today may be disastrous a few decades from now—if it is predicated on mining the soil of nutrients until there are none left to mine.

Value of a human life

As noted at the outset, it is and should be a sense of public welfare that drives consideration of policy. And public welfare is about people, but what I do, singly, as an individual, may seem benign until 300 million other people do the same thing. Think littering. The public consequence of personal choice is at the center of many critical debates today: sugary beverages and public health, antibiotics and food, for example.

How we value human life is another critical element of this debate which rarely makes its way into the public discourse—because it is complex and ethically awkward. But it has implications for everything from wrongful death settlements in hospitals to the height of guard rails on public roads.

As part of cost/benefit analysis policymakers routinely assess the value of a human life and factor that in to how much we spend on safety. When a lawyer guides a client in a suit against a hospital for wrongful death, they will assess how much money a court might award the surviving family members. Analysts will look at indicators like lost earnings, the value of companionship, past and potential social contributions. And they will tell the surviving family members what they think is a reasonable “value” of the life just lost. It in no way represents the worth of the person. As a practical matter, it is nothing more than a price in the marketplace.

Risk

As with cost/benefit analysis more broadly, who bears the costs and who enjoys the benefits are central to the calculus.

The death of a patient is, for a hospital, a cost of doing business; it happens. It is handled by folks from “patient safety” who are tasked with “risk management.” For a family member, the patient and the risk are profoundly personal.

So too with climate change, sustainability, energy, water, and all environmental-related issues. Risk and the perception of risk is another critical element in this suite of issues that are submerged beneath so much of our public discussion.

Risk is the intersection of probability and consequence. Risk is where they meet. If you think you don’t make risk calculations, have you ever crossed the street against the light? You made a calculation at that practical and metaphorical intersection. Low probability and low consequence decisions are easy; not likely to happen and if it does, low consequence. No big deal. High probability and high consequence, like jumping into the ocean without knowing how to swim, also pretty easy. Bad idea.

The tougher challenges are obviously around situations where there is some probability and some consequence. And around those decisions, the underlying question of who bears the risk and who is protected from them is again central if overall public welfare is the goal.

As we continue to address the wicked complex challenges of our time, how we think about them may well determine the extent to which we can or cannot successfully address them. We are, like all civilizations before us, constrained by the tools and mindsets we have at our disposal. We are not, for example, well practiced systems thinkers; we have trouble envisioning alternative futures and pathways.

If we want different outcomes, we need to change the systems we have created. And that begins with expanding our thinking to embrace new paradigms and challenging our own most basic assumptions.

Teach Food!

From an idea in a living room six years ago, Mundo Verde PCS has grown into a nurturing environment for 538 students in Washington, DC, with two buildings, cisterns, raised vegetable beds, and nearly 100 full-time staff.  It is a school, yet so much more.  Serving students from PreK – 4th grade, Mundo Verde is an Ashoka Changemaker School and recipient of the Secretary of Education’s Green Ribbon School award.  I am honored to have been involved as a founding board member and now as designer and champion of the TeachFood! program.

Mundo Verde is developing leaders for the next generation – supporting stewards of our common future with a foundation of knowledge that comes from bilingual immersion, expeditionary learning and sustainability. With wellness of self and empathy for others at the core of that educational experience, enabling a love of learning and intellectual engagement, Mundo Verde is cultivating deep emotional, educational, and environmental intelligence.  So much more than a school, with dedicated parents and community partners, Mundo Verde is emerging as a national model for what it means to be a 21st century community school – and then some.

With TeachFood! we have inverted the traditional model of a kitchen as simply part of the school infrastructure and are redefining it as a classroom where students and celebrity chefs collaborate to learn – and teach -- through cooking.   The program concept and expansion is described elsewhere on this page as are the gifted chefs participating in TeachFood!

We are proud to be pioneering this new program, building on the work of food and school innovators from across the country.    We expect this program to continue evolving as we balance the core needs of our students and their families with our commitment to both community and excellence is education. 

If you believe food matters; 

if you believe great teachers change lives;

if you believe that teaching personal wellness is as important as teaching grammar;

if you want to sponsor part of our food, cooking, learning ecosystem; then please contact us (email: jonathan [at] jonathanjhalperin.com).

Join us.  Create with us.

Let’s serve up a whole new world.

Merging tradition with innovation, the MV campus at P Street and North Capitol
includes the renovated JF Cook school building as well as our brand new building.  

La Casita was designed specifically for our youngest students.

Raised beds engage students in the hands-on experience of learning
what it means to plant, tend, and harvest our food.

Trust and Risk: A Key Challenge for Today’s Leaders

Five years ago today, as the consequences of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown were still emerging, The New York Times published my letter observing that “trust comes not from repeated and paternalistic proclamations of success, but rather from the humble admission of mistakes followed by demonstrable changes in behavior and attitude.”

Trust remains at the core of business success. For leaders it is essential - but elusive. Frustratingly, it is often easier to see trust as it slips out under the closed doors of of the executive suite amidst a swirl of headlines about food safety, burst pipelines, boycotts, shareholder resolutions, or the defensive cover-up of what might have been a manageable error.

Trust is hard to measure; it doesn’t sit on anyone’s dashboard next to sales and safety data. Yet it is interwoven with brand value, organizational culture, recruitment and retention, license to operate, regulatory challenges, risk management, public affairs and so forth. Needed throughout an organization and across key relationships, it is rarely owned by a singular leader or department.

Part of the challenge of trust is that it cannot just be created and distributed at will. A “trust initiative” is a bit like the suggestion box that appears in the midst of controversy; too little, too late. I cannot create trust by myself. It is bestowed on me and my organization by others. Trust rests in the attitudes and actions of other people. I can build muscle mass by working out alone; to garner trust, on the other hand, I need other people working with me. The trust a business enjoys is essentially on-loan from vendors, colleagues, customers, investors and other stakeholders.

• Greyston Bakery, for example, has a huge cache of trust among critical stakeholders who believe in the mission of this pioneering benefit corporation that is the sole supplier of brownies to Ben & Jerry’s – and is widely recognized for its open-hiring program. Monetizing that trust is a welcome but tricky challenge for its top leaders.

• ExxonMobil, on the other hand, suffers from a huge deficit of trust and hauls that liability around as burden in every aspect of its business despite engineering prowess and cash-on-hand beyond compare. Long a target for members of its founder’s heirs, for its unwillingness to disclose information related to climate, the company now faces not only the Rockefellers as disgruntled investors but also a suit filed by Attorneys General from sixteen states.

How leaders and organizations behave clearly influences trust. Take food, beyond brownies, for example. No one would willingly eat food from a person or organization they did not trust. Chefs, thus, enjoy tremendous trust. Many have thus emerged as not just magnificently trained cooks, but as leaders in the efforts to improve the quality, access, and nutritional value of the food we eat – whether in restaurants, schools, corporate cafeterias, or airports. But as Chipotle has had to learn repeatedly, once trust is breached repair can be very costly.

When we trust fully, we put risk aside. But when we trust less than fully, risk re-enters our thinking and takes center-stage. Even if we don’t fully realize it, the questions we pose to ourselves in an instant are a form of risk assessment:

• Does that vendor seem reliable?

• How long has that food been sitting in the display?

• I am buying that line of argument; do I know enough?

In the developed world, we don’t want to think about eating as a risky activity – which it has been for most of the course of human civilization and still is for many with limited financial resources. When consumers call for “local” food, when shoppers search for food labelled “organic”, when survey respondents state a preference for “natural” products, and when millennials read labels to see if a product contains ingredients they cannot even pronounce; all of this is, at root, a search for trust.

If risk is the intersection of probability and consequence, then trust is a traffic circle that needs to be navigated with a clear realization that the views and actions of other players may be more important to our success than how we alone steer. To navigate this space, a few guidelines:

• Find the people who trust you least. Don’t try to change their views. Let them be scouts to help you identify vulnerabilities. Listen actively.

• Transparency is only half the story. Before looking for kudos, take responsibility and fix problems – and make sure the fixes are full rather than partial patches.

• If a problem is hard to fix or will take a long-time, be forthright and explain the situation.

• Be authentic when a partial fix is just that; don’t position a bandage as if its brain surgery.

• Manage trust like any other asset, but remember you don’t own it outright; it is a joint venture with stakeholders.

A Tough Year Is Ahead For Chipotle

Jonathan J. Halperin quoted in Forbes  (January 6, 2016).

A Tough Year is Ahead For Chipotle

Full-text of the article appears below.

The fallout from Chipotle Mexican Grill’s food safety woes continues to grow. On Wednesday the company revealed in an SEC filing that it had been served with a subpoena by a federal grand jury looking into a norovirus outbreak at a restaurant in Simi Valley, Calif. The number of people infected at the location was discovered by county investigators to be larger than initially reported, as Food Safety News reported last month.

The news of the subpoena, which is in connection with an investigation being conducted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigations, comes as Chipotle warned investors that it expects to report a same-store sales decline of 14.6% for the last quarter.

Chipotle shares plunged 5% on Wednesday to close at $426.67. While the consensus opinion on Wall Street is guarded – 18 analysts have a hold on the stock, according to Reuters — five still rate it a buy, including Credit Suisse’s Jason West.

Morningstar MORN +0.00%’s R.J. Hottovy believes the shares are undervalued, but warns, “I certainly would be cautious heading into 2016.”

Communication is one part of Chipotle’s current problem as executives have struggled to get their arms around this issue, working with the Centers for Disease Control and the Food & Drug Administration. According to a December 20 report by the CDC,  53 food poisoning cases in 9 states have been linked to 2 strains of the bacteria E. coli spread at Chipotle restaurants. Compounding the company’s woes were reports of illnesses in the California and Boston areas linked to norovirus (Forbes food safety contributor David Acheson deconstructed the issues back in December).  Management closed and sanitized restaurants in states affected after the outbreaks, followed by the company announcing it was implementing new food safety practices. Founder and co-CEO Steve Ellis apologized to consumers and proclaimed that Chipotle would be “the safest restaurant to eat at.”  The FDA or CDC has yet to pinpoint the source of the E.coli outbreaks.

In mid-December, though, customers still appeared to have faith:

A Reuters/Ipsos poll of 829 adults found that 62% would continue to eat at company restaurants, while 23% said they had visited the chain less often. Yet if more reports pop up, how long they will continue to choose Chipotle is questionable. But industry is turning out to be less forgiving: a recent cover story in Bloomberg News took a tone that typically hasn’t been used when covering the company many credit with creating the new restaurant model for sating the current (and next) generation’s cravings while disrupting the overall fast food landscape.

So what are the company’s best next steps? Says Morningstar’s Hottovy, “Certainly both CEOs could be doing more. The biggest issue they are facing is there still isn’t clarity on what is happening. … I think they could be doing things better, but at this point the options are limited.”

Going forward, Jonathan J. Halperin, President of Designing Sustainability notes that one step Chipotle can take to troubleshoot future problems involves aligning its core operational and safety practices with its current (and innovative) business model.

If you look at its 2014 annual report, the company acknowledges they are doing things differently by stating: ‘We may be at a higher risk for food-borne illness outbreaks than some competitors due to our use of fresh produce and meats rather than frozen and our reliance on employees cooking with traditional methods rather than automation.’ If Chipotle is going to continue to provide an alternative model to processed, industrial food, it needs to also be at the forefront of creating systems to support that new approach, such as offering its employees paid sick days.”

He concludes: “Chipotle and its customers are now paying the price for leadership not having made that connection for 20-years before offering paid sick-leave in 2015.”

- Nancy Gagliardi

Monday Monday

Pondering the categories and labels that we come to accept as fixed and true. My daughter, intellectually inquisitive at 12, was asking, “Who decided Monday was going to be called Monday?” And as we were driving from DC to Maryland, who decided “about state borders anyway?” After groping with various fact-based answers, I paused and realized that this was more than anything a question of metaphysics rather than geographic history.

As Pope Francis completes his US visit in the city of brotherly love, I am traveling through Philadelphia en route to a meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association (EGA) with a copy of the Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality. How is it that for so many years the issues of global climate stability, poverty and inequality were largely disconnected from one another? As we teach at Mundo Verde PCS, “habits of mind” are critical.

Looking over the EGA members, I think of the work I have been doing with Greyston: NYS’s first benefit corporation, supplier of brownies to Ben & Jerry’s and the pioneering social enterprise that has made open-hire a viable business practice while also providing jobs to the structurally unemployable. Is Greyston a business or a nonprofit; what is one to make of the social good movement?

The business structures we assume have been around for a very long time are, in fact, reasonably new creations. Although we have come a long way from 1602 when the Dutch East India Company was formed, and even from the passage in 1811 of the New York State statute governing corporations, clearly the overall pace of change is not slowing. And yet amidst change, inequality persists and even worsens: today the 85 richest individuals manage wealth equal to that of the poorest 3.5 billion people.

The notion of socially responsible business we can date to maybe 1953, sustainability to 1987, the triple-bottom-line to 1994, and benefit corporations to 2006. And in America, philanthropy tracks a not dissimilar course, and one closely connected to business: from Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, to the UN Global Compact in 2000 that seeks to set ground rules for responsible business behavior on the global stage.

We seem on the cusp of rewriting the fundamental rules and definitions around how we define returns on investment, what makes a business a social enterprise, and where responsibility rests in the efforts to address challenges that cut across the operational and mental boundaries we have created to help us understand a dizzyingly fast and complex world.

This Pope clearly is different, but how much of a difference do his words make? The work we need to do to reset the core frameworks and systems can seem as daunting as ever.

And, by the way, how did we select names for the days of the week?

Where’s The Pork?

Chipotle lost about one-third of its pork supply early in 2015 and signs popped-up in roughly 500 restaurants announcing that “carnitas” was unavailable. From the corporate HQ, PR Director Chris Arnold positioned his company’s handling of this supply shortfall as evidence that it stands behind its brand that promises “food with integrity.” Indeed, Chipotle did the right thing by deciding to curtail purchases from a supplier that violated its animal welfare pledges and in refusing to substitute substandard product to make up for that shortfall. (See Jonathan J. Halperin's interview in Forbes, Chipotle's Pulled Pork and What It Means For The Company And The Industry, January 16, 2015.)

But, without questioning the sincerity of either Chris Arnold or CEO and founder Steve Ells, I think there is more to this story than they are sharing. The real risk for Chipotle here is not so much a short-term sales dip or supply-chain headache, but rather that it is drawing down its supply of customer good-will and brand integrity. And Chipotle deserves credit for changing (some might say, creating) the fast casual food sector by selling not only great taste but also an ethos of responsibility from farm to table.

In a wired world that accentuates the truism that information abhors a vacuum, the fact that Chipotle won’t really say what pledges were violated leads to speculation. Was it farrowing crates or slatted floors as some analysts have surmised? Something else entirely? Only Chipotle knows; and they are not telling.

Given its deserved reputation as an industry-leader, Chipotle likely won't take as much heat around this as it otherwise would, but for one-third of its pork supply to dry-up in an instant raises questions about the scale of the problem. If it is, in fact, traced back to hard infrastructure and facilities construction at a major supplier, rather than a temporary failure to abide some specific procedure, this raises further questions. Chipotle asserts that the problem was detected in a “routine audit.” How often are suppliers subject to audits? Who conducts them? One has to wonder why the problem was not identified before it put 30% of the supply at risk.

Chipotle’s rapid expansion and success hold important learnings for other companies. There is a huge amount of information fuzziness around the whole notion of standards: who sets them, what they require, and how much they matter. Customers are right to be skeptical of unsubstantiated claims. Most well-defined are government statutory and regulatory requirements companies must comply with for their business operations. Less tightly defined are specific codes set by individual companies that their suppliers must abide.  Even less stringent are standards that companies require suppliers to meet; these are often more vague, especially as to how suppliers demonstrate compliance. More vague are aspirational, often undefined, principles such as Chipotle’s concept of “responsibly-raised” animals. At the lowest end of the spectrum are unsupported claims and pledges of evolutionary progress toward “better” or “equitable” or “humane” or “natural” treatment of animals.

When Chipotle itself is not fully forthcoming, there is a hollow ring to its request that we respect its choice not to “waste resources reporting, but rather spend them on doing the right thing.” This reluctance to share information has irritated institutional investors and a shareholder resolution was submitted last year calling on Chipotle to publish a sustainability report.  The resolution was supported by about 30% of its shareholders.

Sustainability reporting clearly has limits in terms of its usefulness to drive transparency and change behavior. But there is also a minimal threshold for reporting. For a company that has aggressively positioned itself as different and better, the refusal to share important information that is clearly material to its business operations tarnishes its reputation as a change-leader. There is a temptation to give Chipotle a pass in this situation and shift the focus to the laggards in the food sector (such as Koch Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride and Walmart). However, there is value for the food sector as a whole to focus on important issues when people are paying attention. It may not be fair, but people do pay attention when leaders stumble; it’s the price of leadership. Witness Brian Williams’ disastrous stumble.

Based on last year's shareholder resolution calling for greater transparency, it seems likely that this year even more than one-third of Chipotle’s shareholders will want to know what happened to one-third of its pork. While the supply problem will surely be managed, the disclosure issue may be more important.

Language and Sustainability for the 21st Century Food System

The words we use reflect the extent to which our thinking is clear or muddled. Speaker after speaker at The New York Times conference at Stone Barns on Food for Tomorrow spoke to the issue of words and meaning. Molly Jahn linked technology to its broader linguistic roots in technique and also observed that smart and wise are often not the same. She also urged us to understand that we lack the language we need to delve deeply into critical questions around farm systems, catastrophic risk, and the importance of shared knowledge to monitor global agricultural ecosystems.

Mark Bittman and Michel Pollan both noted the hubris embedded in the commonly posed question, “How do we feed the world?” Pollan wryly reframed this within the context of the uber-American radio show in which the Lone Ranger is surrounded by Comanche, Cherokee and Apache Indians and says that “we are in a heap of trouble.” And Tonto, the trusted sidekick, responds eloquently: “Uhh…What do you mean, 'We,' Kemo Sabe?”

The current enthusiasm around “farm to table” innovations sparked Tom Colicchio to draw everyone’s attention to the “to” as he noted that everything begins on the farm and ends on the table. The real challenge and opportunity is in what happens to food between farm and table.

Similarly, Ricardo Salvador asked us to think carefully about what we really mean by farming, especially when we fall into the habit of using the same word to describe the urban farming of a singular patio tomato plant and industrial agriculture as practiced on hundred-thousand acre farms across the Midwest.

And “industrial ag” or “big ag” are also linguistic phrases that we need to unpack and understand to more accurately describe the components of the food system. What we cannot describe, we are unlikely to be able to fix.

Mario Batali (l), Andrea Reusing (r), and moderator Sam Sifton engage with Tom Colicchio as he dissects
"farm to table," observing that the "to" is critical - what happens to food between farm and table.

Reflections on Sugar

The thoughts below capture some aspects of my personal dilemma with sugar. Professionally, I also work with clients that manufacture products containing large quantities of sugar – while also working with foundations and nonprofits committed to helping Americans reduce sugar consumption. The conundrum is real; while no one wants to become sick or make anyone else sick, we live and work today within a tangled system of business decision-making and advertising, personal choices, and public consequences. Another blog, The Sustainability Trajectory, explores the challenges and opportunities over time as that system evolves – either predictably or in very disruptive ways.

• I really like sugar.

• I know too much sugar is bad for me.

• The more I have the more I want.

• I used to think honey was better than sugar.

• I expect to find sugar in my Hershey Bar.

• I did not know that one cup of condensed Campbell’s Tomato Soup also has 24 grams of sugar.

• I really like both those companies.

• I thought fresh, organic, natural juices were good for me.

• I realize now that sugars removed from the fibers that bind them into fruits are metabolized differently.

• I am sometimes bewildered when I shop.

• Is a smoothie, with fiber, better than juice?

• The body metabolizes high fructose corn syrup differently from other sugars, but I am not sure I understand exactly how.

• One calorie is not the same as every other calorie.

• According to the CDC, diabetes can be prevented through “healthy food choices”; afflicts 28 million Americans; was the 7th most common cause of death in 2007; and cost us more than $174 billion that year in direct and indirect costs.

• $174 billion is more than thirteen times the total GDP of Iceland.

• Americans are heavier than ever before, myself included.

• But people who are thin can also be very sick with metabolic syndrome.

• FedUp, the new movie, is very sobering.

• According to the Harvard School of Public Health, the average American eats 22 teaspoons or 88grams of added sugar every day – not quite 4 Hershey bars.

• The FedUp challenge to not eat sugar is hard.

• Because there is no nutritional value to added sugars, food labels don’t share an RDA – which might help us understand more about what we are eating and drinking, and what it is doing to us.

• 80% of the 600,000 food products in the US contain sugar.

• Coca-advertising budget in 2014 will be more than $4 billion.

• Investors called for PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi to resign after she announced plans to focus advertising on nutritious products.

• Dr. Robert Lustig’s you tube video on the dangers of sugar, The Bitter Truth,has over 4,600,000 views.

• I am helping him build the Institute for Responsible Nutrition.

• I really like sugar.

• I know too much sugar is bad for me.

• Have a nice day.

The Sustainability Trajectory

The Sustainability Trajectory

Transitioning to expanded role as “engine for change” in sustainability, environment, and energy funding, The Cynthia & George Mitchell Foundation invites external thought leaders to blog.

In 2012, a little bakery just north of New York City became the first business licensed in New York State as a Benefit Corporation.

Thus Greyston Bakery joined companies like Patagonia, Etsy, and Ben & Jerry’s in advancing a fundamentally new model for business that focuses as much on a declared social mission as on its business purpose. The advent of benefit corporations signal the beginning of a profound structural shift in the business of doing business—the first of four disruptive shifts discussed in this essay.

Far from being set and fixed for all time, the core structure of business is fluid and evolving.

In 1811, New York State enacted the first law in the United States providing for the formation of limited liability corporations. Since then we have enjoyed incredible benefits from a period of industrial production unsurpassed in human history. And while it may be seem inconceivable that this period could be winding down, it would be equally foolish to bet that it will continue forever. With this unparalleled productivity has come consumption on a scale that cannot be sustained, in part because the wealth produced in this 200-year stretch of human history has also generated inequality on a scale that is mind-boggling. The 85 richest individuals on the planet have amassed wealth equal to that of the 3.5 billion poorest people in the world.

Baking brownies in Yonkers is not going to close that gap. But as a benefit corporation, Greyston is not just, or even primarily, in business to bake brownies. Greyston does not hire people to bake brownies so much as it makes brownies in order to hire people. Greyston’s social mission is open hiring whereby it hires people on a first-come, first-served basis without asking for references or doing any type of background check.

They are in the business of hiring the structurally unemployable (those who have been in jail, on drugs, or homeless). Other benefit corporations have declared other social missions such as conservation for Patagonia or “re-imagining commerce” for Etsy. While there are about one thousand benefit corporations today, there were no limited liability corporations in the United States until 1811 (although business trusts and partnerships existed).

Benefit corporations are of course not the only mechanism through which a business can demonstrate its commitment to socially responsibly behavior. Corporate sustainability reports and corporate foundations often expound on the “good works” being done in the communities in which they operate. But these efforts are often isolated from business operations, relatively inconsequential to the business financially, and not factors in internal business decision-making.

The benefit corporation model pulls responsibility for the social and environmental elements of the triple-bottom line out of philanthropic giving and sets it squarely in the executive suite—embedding those considerations in the core product or service of the business.

Benefit corporations thus fundamentally shift the balance of business priorities. Shareholders become just one powerful group among multiple stakeholders—practically not just rhetorically. The need to run a profitable business remains critical; no money, no mission. But the reasons for running the business are significantly expanded, as is the timeline against which success is measured.

A second disruptive structural change on the sustainability horizon is a shift in the basis for executive compensation. While the data remains somewhat opaque around this issue, what is unmistakably clear is that many more Chief Executive Officers sign eloquent and heartfelt letters to introduce sustainability reports every year. But they rarely actually put their compensation on the line to achieve sustainability goals.

According to a new CERES report, a scant 3% of 613 large publicly traded American companies link executive compensation to anything more than mere regulatory compliance on sustainability related matters.

Sustainability reports have been central to disclosure and transparency; they have given investors and advocates a point of access and leverage; and they have enabled companies to benchmark against best practices. But they have not, generally, worked their way onto the C-suite decision-making dashboard. Sustainability data, painstakingly collected and analyzed, rarely forms the basis for core business decisions. That would change—and fast—if leadership compensation was as closely linked to sustainability metrics (from water and GHG emissions, to community investments and labor practices) as it is to ‘making the numbers.’

As much as we need to redefine leadership, and the compensation that goes with it, so too does the notion of “supply chain” need to be reconceived. And this too will be highly disruptive for leaders and investors who cling to an outdated and narrowly circumscribed definition of the role of business being exclusively about producing products to generate near-term profits for its owners.

Once upon a time not so very long ago, what happened inside distant plants or on fields in far away lands, managed by layers of absentee investors, employing isolated workers with limited voice and even less political clout, seemed safe to ignore. But over a ten-year period, that changed dramatically.

In 1984, chemicals leaking from a Union Carbide plant in India killed thousands, and Bhopal became a household name. Five years later the Exxon Valdez ran aground and poured crude oil into Prince William Sound, tarring Exxon with the stain of corporate irresponsibility that has been impossible to remove. And for years in the 1990s, Nike was dogged by claims, and then acknowledged, that children in impoverished nations were making its shoes.

In a little anticipated shift, global businesses were forced to expand their horizons and exercise responsibility not just inside factory walls but also up and down global supply chains. But those “chains” were, and to a great extent still are, conceived of as circumscribed bands of direct inputs that flow vertically upward into products of ever increasing value.

We are now entering an age in which that band is bulging and the myriad horizontal connections at each point along the chain have also become of concern to global manufacturers. The flow of supplies is a web, an ecosystem—not a chain. The plant that makes cotton t-shirts relies on cotton grown in fields, picked by workers, sustained by nutrients and water and moved to market in myriad ways. And while a textile manufacturer may not perceive itself as being in the water business, that mindset exposes the business and its investors to immense risk if the price for cotton skyrockets due to competing demands among farmers, bottlers, other companies and citizens for access to limited water resources.

Managing the interconnected web of resources for multiple users is going to push buyers and procurement teams and their senior leadership to develop whole new skill sets and layered systems to ensure access to resources. Brute market power and dominance may temporarily forestall the day of reckoning for some corporations that cling to the notion of limited supply chain responsibility. But those that grasp the web-like quality of modern supply will likely prove more resilient and capable in the face of future challenges.

And finally, perhaps it is not really sustainability that holds the key to future prosperity across the triple-bottom line. Despite all the reporting, the deeply dedicated sustainability teams, and the efforts to build systems and software and better metrics, perhaps at the end of the day what we really should focus on is neither financial performance, nor integrated reporting, nor even the growth of the benefit corporation. Perhaps we are heading into an era in which we will begin to package these indicators into something vastly more than the sum of the parts to assess the overall health of a corporation. Whether organizational or personal, it is health that really tells us how we are doing, what we should be doing more of or less of, and how we stack up relative to others of similar type and size.

It is not a simple metric, but corporate health or wellness may be the elephant whose individual parts we have been poking at for some time without being able to fully see it for what it truly is—the underlying measure of a company’s capacity to generate value over time.

Sustainable Living or Survival of the Fittest?

This year’s CERES conference in Boston was provocative and challenging -- as it should be in celebration of 25 years of creative, innovative, and collaborative advocacy to bring greater openness and accountability to corporate behavior. And it is behavior, of course, that needs to change; openness and accountability are only the tools of the trade in modifying corporate practices.

Paul Gilding, perhaps the speaker who made the audience most usefully uncomfortable, painted two competing visions of the future. One, the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, champions collaboration, aggressive sustainable agriculture practices, and a fundamental reorientation toward attempting to do more with less, continuing to grow and expand but with an increasingly limited footprint. Gilding also celebrated the clarity with which ExxonMobil has now articulated a different vision of a global economy driven by aggressive use of fossil fuels, where lack of climate stability is seen as a cost of business as usual, and within which ExxonMobil’s rightly vaunted discipline in execution is seen as its competitive trump card in a go-it-alone world.

While perhaps overstated a bit, I concur with his fundamental view, having served as a consultant to both Unilever and ExxonMobil -- although the engagement with ExxonMobil was abruptly ‘paused’ due to differing visions of what constitutes responsible behavior around climate change. Unless the most esteemed international scientists have it all wrong, the two competing visions of the world are pretty stark. If we push past an overall global increase of temperature beyond 2°C, the natural ecosystems that have evolved into a relatively stable and hospitable climate for our species are going to shift dramatically. And if the work commissioned by the US Department of Defense some years ago from the Global Business Network (run by Peter Schwartz, long-time scenario planning chief at Shell) is right, then we may be looking at abrupt rather than gradual changes in the global climate.

As with much change, wealth provides insulation. Resources can be mobilized to plan, defend, and identify alternatives when threats present themselves. But walled castles, cities, communities, and nations have a way of failing over time. While perhaps splendid in their isolation during their halcyon days, they also are brittle. Sea walls may be the Maginot line of the 21st century.

But there is a point at which the dynamic of “growing concentration of wealth and increased dispersal of political power” sends tremors through both markets and governments. And this was articulated well at CERES by Mary O’Malley from Prudential, an insurance company that knows a thing or two about risk.

While no one at the CERES conference was counseling the need to abandon ship, many stressed that business as usual is no longer tenable. From Roderick Morris at Opower to Rob Olson, Chief Financial Officer at IKEA US, the resounding message was to get ready for rough sailing into a vast sea of change. And those outfitted properly for the voyage stand to reap vast rewards. As Morris rightly noted, it is an invitation to innovate when the market presents a situation where “energy and water are cheap and saving them is boring.”

From Olson at IKEA, we were reminded that preparing for this new era requires flexibility and leadership to change traditional thinking. For decades companies have forsworn adjusting hurdle rate (return on investment targets) to accommodate viable sustainability projects that will bring long term value to stockholders, but by definition take longer to mature. IKEA has wisely adjusted hurdle rates outward from 8-10 years or in some cases to as far out as 25 years for critical sustainability investments.

Twenty-five years is 100 quarterly statements and 100 calls with Wall Street analysts. Few business leaders here today will be on those calls – and we generally lack bandwidth, systems, governance, and management capacity to manage out twenty-five years. But who among our business leaders today is planning for their companies to be out of business in twenty-five years? To survive, business leaders need to stop waiting for analysts to ask questions on those quarterly calls about the painstakingly compiled sustainability reports – and instead start actively presenting sustainability as core to the long-term generation of value for investors.

Leaders hesitant to make the case for sustainability as a core business mission and companies with a culture of complacency about their market position would do well to remember the fate of iconic brands that also “missed the memo” on change: Blockbuster Video, Borders, Polaroid. Who’s next?

Dismayed by one IPCC report after another (each showing with ever increasing certainty that the global climate is become more and more unstable), reading a steady flow of nerve-racking news from Ukraine, wincing at the stories of horrific abuse in Nigeria and Sudan, and still hoping for a more robust economic recovery -- it is useful to reflect on the powerful examples where hope and hard-work have combined to overcame seemingly overwhelming odds. Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland and no longer the youngest member of the The Elders organized by Nelson Mandela, reminded us all of how Archbishop Desmond Tutu response to a question from a journalists about how he remains an optimist in the face of crushing hardship: “I’m not an optimist. I am a prisoner of hope.”

Risks over Time

Since participating recently in the UN Investor Summit on Climate Risk, and in preparing for the Sustainable Land & Water Program Expert Workshop in Amsterdam on Friday, I’ve been thinking more about risk as fundamental conceptual framework for making meaningful comparisons and connections. Risk is ineluctably comparative; some actions and decisions carry more risk than others. There is physical risk for a bobsledder, financial risk for a chief financial officer. What seems risky to me, may seem not at all so to you.

And risk speaks to how we value what we don’t know. If we knew everything – past, present and future we would have certainty, i.e. the absence of risk. While leadership and intelligence each have many definitions, both require the capacity to choose wisely in the face of uncertainty.

Equity and fairness are also embedded in and sometimes obscured by how we present risk. As an agricultural buyer I reduce the risk of supply disruption by contracting with multiple suppliers; and as a farmer I can reduce my risk of a bad harvest by diversifying my crops. But when I farm higher up on a steeper slope to expand my acreage, I may create new and unforeseen risks for the downstream fishing village that may be wiped out by the silt washing off my hillside. Risk is often location specific—my hill, your river—and also very time sensitive.

And when we draw down nature’s capital stocks today, whether of rare-earth metals or carbon absorbing forests, we shift risks out into the future. As discussed at the UN Investor Summit on Climate Risk, stranded assets thus represent an interesting test-case of how we define present versus future risks. “Known reserves” in the oil and gas sector have traditionally been valued as assets and carried on the books of global companies on the presumption that the assets will be productively used at some future moment.

But there is a wrinkle in this thinking – a serious wrinkle – as documented by the work of CERES and its insurance and business partners. The risks of actually combusting all fossil fuel reserves across the planet are so high that upon serious consideration, no one really believes we could survive if we used 100% of these reserves. So, if some number less than 100% is actually usable, then some of those reserves are ‘stranded assets’ with quite limited value if they are never going to be used. How overvalued are the oil majors: one or two or ten percent? And that makes for a very different discussion about social, business, and financial risks in the oil and gas sectors.

Looking ahead to the meetings in Amsterdam, and immersed at the moment as well in a World Bank project on agricultural risk, looking at landscape- rather than farm-level productivity may (like stranded assets) unsettle decades of thinking in agriculture. The unceasing call for yield and productivity improvements may well have taken us down a path to short-term success while pushing extraordinary risks out into the future as we have undermined the productive health of landscape ecosystems around the world.

From a landscape-level perspective, a particular farm is only as healthy and productive over time as the landscape around it that provides for, among other things, soil nutrition. While we can postpone the day of reckoning for decades, a farm in the midst of a destroyed and denuded landscape is hardly a farm at all – even if it still has some productivity left in its tired soils. It too risks becoming stranded, as the assets around it that once breathed life into it become barren and infertile.

Like life itself risks rise and fall in response to both planned events and unintended consequences. That we have the capacity to manage risks wisely and with deep respect to how risks change over time is clear. Whether we have the will to do so is the greater challenge.

Yes… But…

Rich and deep conversations are the hallmark of CERES conferences and this year in San Francisco was no exception, as CERES looks forward to its 25th anniversary in 2014. During the conference the newly released CERES report on fracking and water stress was covered in the New York Times. And General Motors signed the Climate Change declaration.

At the conference, Bill McKibben sounded yet another eloquent call for urgent action, warning the more than 500 participants that getting this done “over time” is no longer an option. On the global freshwater crisis, Peter Gleick from the Pacific Institute similarly observed that we have already passed the point of “peak water” and that unlike peak oil there are no substitutes for water.

Dan Hesse, CEO of Sprint, noted that measured along a very much shorter time-frame he has never been asked a question about sustainability on any of his quarterly earnings calls. At the other end of the spectrum Heidi Cullen, Chief Climatologist for Climate Central, reminded everyone that when the Dutch government vowed in the mid-20th century to protect its people from massive flooding, it opted not to prepare for a one in a hundred-year storm but rather adopted an 800-year time-horizon.

Although the redwood groves in Muir Woods, a mere 16 miles north of the conference site, are heirs to the tree-like ferns that appeared on earth 300 million years ago (the fossilized remains of which are today’s fossil fuels), who among us can think out anywhere close to 800 years?

But, on the other hand, who among us wants to predict when the companies we work for, or buy products from, will cease to exist? While no executive will admit to planning for the closure of his or her businesses, lack of longer-term thinking is essentially exactly that. If we are not implementing sustainability practices now -- managing resources such as water and soil health and biodiversity and atmospheric capacity for carbon absorption -- then we are failing in our fiduciary duties to preserve and generate value for stockholders and stakeholders.

Yes, but as much as we need to deepen the capacity of our species to think long-term we need to ‘scale’ urgently not ‘over-time.’ As David Blood from Generation Investment made very clear, longer-term business thinking about sustainability also yields near-term results: risk mitigation, cost reductions from greater environmental efficiencies, employee retention, and lower cost of capital.

But how do we scale, accelerating business change such that it is in synch with what science tells us are the outer limits of time and temperature before the fragile window closes that has allowed our species to develop over about 200,000 years – which is either a very long time for an earnings analyst or a mere blip in geologic time.

The answer often proposed, taking things to scale, may be right. But scale may not mean bigger. Scale might not mean building acres upon acres of solar panels far away from electricity users. Rather it might mean small solar clips we can attach to our cell phones. In America alone, with an estimated 328 million phones dispersed among a population of 314 million people this might not be such a small achievement. A different kind of scaling.

But could such a device be invented and marketed by a company if in its development it has the same RoI hurdle rates as all other corporate undertakings? Would investors and analysts on those quarterly earnings calls have the stomach for it? Seems like the Dutch did after the Great North Sea Flood of 1953. Was hurricane Sandy enough to galvanize Americans?

Buses and Sustainability

I have buses on my mind – lots and lots of school buses sitting in parking lots all over the world. In the United States about 480,000 yellow school buses take kids to and from school, and on fields trips. And are then parked.

What I have come to like about buses is that they are a form of sharing. Whether in public or private use, buses embody the notion of a shared need – a common route. They are thus aggregators, of commuters or students, or in innovative settings much more. But in aggregating, they also preserve an individuals particular need.

Verizon, for example, now uses buses to deploy technicians in New York City, in addition to individual trucks and vans. The buses are packed with equipment, some mobile and some fixed, and drop technical staff where they are needed to address customer problems and then pick them up when they are done. Saves a lot of time (looking for parking spaces, fuel, vehicle maintenance and so forth). In retrospect, seems like a no-brainer.

In the national capitol region around Washington, DC, another bus has been repurposed as a green market. Run by Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food & Agriculture, it also follows a set route but this repurposed bus collects fresh produce and meats from area farmers and delivers them to underserved neighborhoods. Customers can use government SNAP, WIC, and SFMNP funds to buy healthy, local, fresh food. Another no-brainer, in hindsight.

As I head to the CERES conference “Igniting Innovation, Scaling Sustainability”, I wonder how we can more effectively use such underutilized assets: school buses that spend more than half their useful lives parked, offices that are empty for as many hours as they are occupied, and school kitchens and lunch rooms deserted after students go home.

Enough Defining

Implementation, not definition, is the challenge for sustainability today. Despite much harrumphing and navel-gazing about what exactly sustainability means, the core is clearly understood. As we have explained it to young students at Mundo Verde, sustainability means taking only what you need now and saving the rest to share with others. One can quibble over that simplification, but at core it is correct. And around that core are many facets that both enable and challenge people grappling with how to ‘do’ sustainability.

As movingly captured last evening at the premiere of La Expedición at the Josephine Butler Center in Washington, DC, the Mundo Verde community works on three facets of sustainability, nurturing children to become future leaders. I facilitated the discussion afterwards with invited parents, education thought leaders, faculty, and community leaders. 

The public premiere is Saturday, April 20 at 5:30pm at North Columbia Heights Green in the alley off 11th Street NW between Park Road & Lamont Street 6:30 pm-8:30pm (Facebook event page). This event is free and open to the public. (Special thanks to Meridian Hill Pictures and Washington Parks & People.) Questions? Contact: communications [at] mundoverdepcs.org

Mundo Verde is a bilingual school, ensuring that the leaders of tomorrow have skills to navigate and collaborate in a multicultural world. Second, students learn both in the classroom and even more fundamentally outside through carefully developed learning expeditions. And third, sustainability is both explicitly taught and modeled through the schools work with vendors. The outdoors thus becomes a classroom while the classroom becomes a teaching tool.

While the food provided by James-Beard Foundation award-winning chef Todd Gray and Ellen Kassoff, partners in Equinox, for the premiere of La Expedición provided a lovely backdrop to this event, agriculture and the global food system was the central focus of last week’s Sustainable Food Laboratory summit where I presented the results of research undertaken for Unilever. With Molly Jahn from the University of Wisconsin, I urged leaders from leading companies (PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, General Mills, Cargill and others) and NGOs (Oxfam, Eco-Agriculture Partners, Conservation International, BSR and others) to build on the current farm-level certification systems and embrace landscape-level monitoring.

And on the flip side, hunger too is part of the sustainability equation. How can we have a sustainable world with nearly 2 billion people malnourished – roughly a billion of them from hunger and the other half from obesity? A Place at the Table opened last month in thirty-two markets and the digital mosaic we created of successful Americans who were once on food stamps continues to draw people in to an expanding national conversation and policy debate on ending hunger in America.

Stay tuned for more news from Mundo Verde and A Place at The Table, as I am also en route shortly to the CERES conference in San Francisco – where the focus will surely be more on the doing than on the defining.

“Pandora’s Promise” – Can it Be Kept?

Robert Stone has produced a provocative and important new documentary on nuclear power that was screened this week at the Sundance Film Festival. But as important as it is, Pandora’s Promise is a film that in its current configuration undermines itself.

Stone sets out to document how the dangers of our unstable climate have pushed him and a set of people featured in the film to revisit their long-held opposition to nuclear power and instead embrace fourth generation nuclear, or Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) technology. Fourth generation nuclear may indeed offer safety improvements over current operating nuclear reactors that are fundamental game changers. But the credibility of that notion is called into question by other aspects of this movie that is at once passionate and heartfelt and very unsatisfying.

The cast of characters chronicled throughout the movie are not only never identified in terms of who they are or what they do, but also engender little empathy or interest as they tell their stories. They are clearly sincere in their various professional assertions and descriptions but they lack depth. We learn almost nothing about them as people in the course of the movie; it is almost as if they are actors playing themselves rather than real people telling real stories.

And some of the assertions and scenes strain the limits of credulity. Michael Shellenberger, never identified beyond his description of himself as an environmental activist, voices what he claims is a common view -- that he was stunned to learn that background radiation exists naturally on earth and is not purely a human creation. Really? Perhaps he will say more about this during his scheduled appearance on The Colbert Report on Monday, January 28th.

And a few scenes also look like they might have been staged. Do scientists visiting the exclusion zone around Fukishima really collect radiation data wearing radiation suits with no head covering or breathing apparatus? Are they partially suited to make the point that suits aren’t really needed at all or conversely to show brave scientists doing what it takes to get important health data? Or is it just to add dramatic tension to the film?

But more important than these small items, the movie seems to cherry-pick and even distort data to about nuclear power, past and present, to make the case for its future. I posed a few questions about this. The movie claims, correctly, that Chernobyl claimed only 28 deaths due to Acute Radiation Syndrome and drums home the authenticity of this data point with a ponderous parade of acronyms over the highlighted line from the international report coordinated by WHO ("Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts"). But there is no mention made – other than to skewer Helen Caldicott – of equally well-documented facts such as the following from a WHO overview: Health Effects of The Chernobyl Accident.

• “A large increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer has occurred among people who were young children and adolescents at the time of the accident…. [And] 5,000 cases of thyroid cancer have now been diagnosed to date among children ….”

• “Recent investigations suggest a doubling of the incidence of leukemia among the most highly exposed Chernobyl liquidators.”

• “The Expert Group concluded that there may be up to 4,000 additional cancer deaths among the three highest exposed groups over their lifetime.”

In the same way the film passes over these facts, it presents a compelling but fatuous claim that all the waste generated by all commercial nuclear reactors from 1958 to the present day could be stored on a single football field. I asked about this after the screening and the very vague and dodgy answer only confirmed my suspicion that this benign metaphor obfuscates more than it educates. To begin with, physical size is not the right way to measure nuclear radiation. It is like a doctor talking about big and small pills rather than doses and efficacy.

But so be it, if size is to be our unit of measure. There are 72,000 tons of commercial nuclear waste in the U.S. stored either as fuel rods immersed in water or in dry cask above-ground storage at some seventy-seven sites in thirty-five states. Leaving aside the considerable scientific debate about using short-term techniques for long-term storage, there is no way reactor waste stored in this manner can fit on a football field.

So a sleight of hand is needed to justify this claim. The calculation seems to be based on the quantity of isolated hot nuclear pellets in the abstract. In reality their intense radioactive power is only contained by surrounding them with zirconium shielding and immersing them in tanks with re-circulating water and additional chemical coolants. They exist only within this waste containment system. Thus, the actual combined footprint of the four spent fuel waste pools at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, for example, measured 48m x 31m. Waste from this one plant alone would thus stretch about two-thirds of the way across a football field and from one end- zone to midfield.

Joined on stage Thursday by two characters from the film – Gwyneth Cravens and Richard Rhodes -- Robert Stone seemed, to his credit, to be uncomfortable with they way both totally failed to answer my questions about thyroid cancer and the football metaphor. Gwyneth Cravens clearly did not want to answer the question of how the football calculations were arrived at and stumbled through a basic explanation of techniques for storing nuclear waste. And beyond waxing rhapsodic about the lofty intentions of the first prime minister of Belarus, Vyachaslaw Kyebich, Rhodes spoke not at all to the results of extensive international medical research on the health effects of Chernobyl – admittedly an area outside his considerable expertise on the history of nuclear weapons.

These serious flaws in Pandora’s Promise undercut its credibility. While it is true that fear of radiation and short-term cancer vastly exceeds documented deaths from commercial nuclear accidents, that fear has been fanned not just by environmentalists and the media – which the movie happily indicts – but by a culture of secrecy, dissembling and false assurances propagated for decades by the nuclear power industry.

We have been promised energy “too cheap too meter” since the dawn of the nuclear age. Perhaps fourth generation nuclear power is a key piece of the puzzle to ensuring climate stability for future generations. But before citizens or policymakers agree to let Pandora out, her promise is going to need to be documented with much greater credibility than is offered by the unidentified characters in this movie.

The American Table: James Beard to 7-Eleven

From the Beard Foundation 2013 conference-planning meeting – the focus this year will be ‘appetite’ – to the screening last week at the Ford Foundation of A Place at the Table, the importance of food as central to a sustainable future is becoming ever clearer.

This trend reminds me a bit of my early years running a company in the then Soviet Union where we went in a very short few years from answering quizzical questions about what exactly are you doing (strategic market research in a non-market economy), to being joined by dozens and soon hundreds of the world’s largest companies as they scrambled (and often stumbled) to find a niche in Moscow. The notion of critical mass is a relevant to social change as it is to physics.

That 7-Eleven has shifted its nationwide purchasing to now include (take a seat if you shock easily!) fresh produce sends a signal that change is indeed afoot. Fear not, the Big Gulp won’t be replaced anytime soon by Brussels sprouts. But as political revolutions don’t come about through voting, so too the sustainability revolution is upon us now and there wont be a signal conference or press release to announce its arrival. The work, however, that has been done steadily and with increasing depth and sophistication by folks like those at The Sustainable Food Lab has made a world of difference. At its summits, SFL brings together players all along the global food value chain, from local producers and farmers to global retailers and local purveyors. I will be presenting the results of recent work for Unilever at this year’s conference, grappling with the question of monitoring sustainable agriculture at a landscape- rather than farm-level.

As the push for new ways of growing food gains ground, so too the search for cures to the obesity epidemic continue. Michelle Obama’s work with the White House garden has inspired thousands of local efforts to bring nutritious food into schools. In one small example of this, and with the help of The James Beard Foundation, I have connected celebrated Chef Todd Grey and his partner Ellen Kassoff from Equinox with Mundo Verde– a DC Public Charter School on whose board I sit. And the upcoming Green Schools National Conference this winter has a renewed focus as well on food and well-being.

All of which makes it all the more peculiar to hear the CEO and founder of Whole Foods speak in an eerily detached manner about how the government’s health care reform plan recently upheld by the Supreme Court is actually more like fascism than socialism. Having lived in the Soviet Union for quite some time, and looking ahead to International Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27th, I take a rather dim view of such incendiary comparisons.

I’ve no gripe with strong language, and appreciated the refreshing candor of Representative Marcia Fudge at a recent Tavis Smiley forum at George Washington University (link to CSPAN Video Library).  As part of a rich and provocative panel Smiley convened – Jonathan Kozol, Cornell West, John Graham, Newt Gingrich and others – the new head of the Congressional Black Caucus gave voice to what many of us have thought for some time. Representative Fudge shared that in shepherding legislation to the floor of the House of Representatives these days she has to deal with members who are “evil, nuts and mean.“ Such is the paralyzing result of the radicalization of the Republican Party that now eschews achievement and prioritizes obstruction.

But at The Ford Foundation screening of A Place at The Table, I was uplifted and again inspired by this compelling movie even though I know well its powerful story of how 50,000,000 Americans struggle to find food every day. I chatted again with Barbie Izquierdo and commended her for her grace and candor in responding to a tough, personal question from the audience.

Marianna Chilton, Director of the Center for Hunger Free Communities at Drexel University, is also featured in the film and participated on the Tavis Smiley panel at which she effectively challenged many of Speaker Gingrich’s smoothly spoken untruths. Beyond that, however, she quietly and movingly reminded everyone that there are many people like Barbie Izquierdo in her Witnesses to Hunger organization – people experiencing not only hunger but also poverty every single day. And she emphasized these people have a kind of innovative and entrepreneurial spirit that bespeaks a resilience and determination few of us posses.

Ponder that for a moment. The power of entrepreneurial people – 50,000,000 strong – to change our future. More soon on SNAPalumni.org and the LeagueofHungryVoters.org. Coming soon to a 7-Eleven near you?

Regulating the Playing Field

As Hurricane Sandy shifted the national conversation in the closing days of the U.S. 2012 presidential campaign, so too has the rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School interrupted the partisan machinations over government spending and taxation. As we look forward to 2013 and beyond we thus have a rare moment to reflect and observe that these issues share a common root: the respective roles of government and business to shape our future as people and as a national community.

In violation of the investing maxim that past results are no indication of future returns, many business leaders cling to the shibboleths of the past to secure their future. They argue vehemently against regulations, and against government spending more generally, insisting that industry can best police itself and that regulation stifles growth, innovation, and job-creation. And in the same breath these lobbyists for the past ride in elevators, work in offices, eat food, drive on roads, and use communications bandwidths regulated for the public good by none other than the government.

Businesses large and small also regularly evoke the notion of a level playing field – and insist that the only role for government in the market is to level that field. But level for one party can be decidedly sloped for another. So this is generally nothing more than a cover for seeking or maintaining competitive advantage from government support – from tax breaks in the energy sector to federal support for medical research.

From fabrics to firearms, the question of how to allocate responsibility across the value chain is central to the success both of private enterprise and governments not only in the US but also around the world. See especially “From Triangle to Tazreen: A Century of Lessons,” by Francesca Rheannon in CSRwire on the recent plant fire that killed 112 in Bangladesh, and Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times on the carnage in Connecticut (“Do We Have the Courage to Stop This?”).

Beyond these two issues, here are four more crying out for resolution – and resolution that would benefit business, people, and the national and global community.

Nanotechnology, long out of the barn, is now being chased by various regulatory agencies. Like GMOs before it, nanotechnology holds great promise but is fraught with risk, both known and unknown. Although late to the table, government can help businesses drive down that risk with a smart regulatory framework that directly addresses both short-term needs and potential long-term consequences.

Fracking, hydraulic fracturing of the earth’s deep rock formations, holds out the potential to drive down American energy costs and thus boost production and on-shore manufacturing while creating jobs and billions of dollars of revenue for private companies as well as debt-ridden governments. But the risks associated with the vast quantities of water used to crack the rock, the chemicals used in the fracking, and the global consequences of an energy independent America are poorly understood. While state governments are awakening to this opportunity/challenge, the federal government needs to engage and drive a robust discussion about what level means in the field of fracking.

The search for climate stability, of course, continues to cry out for U.S. and global leadership. As politicians dither, the ice caps melt opening new shipping routes across the Arctic, storms increase in intensity, coral reefs bleach, dustbowl conditions return to the U.S. Midwest, sea-levels inch upwards, scientific panels affirm and re-affirm that the changes are real and man-made, and yet many business leaders continue to act as if this greatest risk to their ongoing operations can be handled by committees and pronouncements. (More soon in another dispatch on the “up the middle, up the middle, up the middle” approach to climate stability.) But there are some companies (see the signatories to the Prince of Wales’ Climate Communiqués) looking forward and as leaders they also are calling on governments to step in and … level yet another playing field.

And last, it is time to again eliminate hunger in America. More than 50,000,000 people in this nation of plenty do not know from where they will get their next meal; fully 49,000,000 receive government assistance through the prodigiously named Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). While this national outrage persists, elected officials in Washington vote against the hungry and even now have begun to seek to balance the budget on the backs of these least fortunate Americans. See the Food Policy Action report card to see who voted how on key food legislation in the 112th Congress.

Hungry Americans, many of whom vote and have real reason to vote, are not even on the traditional playing field and thus have no interest in whether or not it is level. But for some of those who tend the fields on which we play, the pure pursuit of self-interest seems to be all that matters. While enlightened self-interest can be a huge and beneficial incentive, self-interest as the singular guiding principle makes for a dog-eat-dog world. It also makes predicting the future much easier; as Garrett Hardin explained in 1968, it leads with grinding certainty to the destruction of the global commons upon which we all depend.

We have some important choices to make in 2013.

Explaining the U.S. Presidential Election

As I prepare for meetings next week in London, and a presentation to Unilever, I wonder what I will be asked about the U.S. election – how to make sense of it. The explanations and interpretations are many.

• The shifting demographics of Hispanic voters

• "Legitimate rape”

• The ground game

• Citizens United and PAC money

• Koch, Adelson, Israel, Iran

• Social media

• The secret 47% video

• Auto bailout and Anne Romney's Cadillac

• The vagaries of the electoral college

• FEMA and Hurricanes Sandy v. Katrina

• The auto plant in Janesville that closed during the Bush Administration

• Etch-a-Sketch

• Wildly exaggerated fear-mongering about voter fraud

• Tea Party overreach and the extinction of moderate republicanism

• The Romney trip to Canada with the dog on the roof of the family car

All of these were a factor. But there is an explanation at once simpler and deeper. Do you like your bank? If you don’t really love your bank, then you were never really going to like Mitt Romney and Bain Capital. Mitt and Bain remind you not of business innovation and creativity but rather of the schemes played by people with big money that pitched the nation into an economic recession. Mitt Romney and Bain Capital remind people of March 2008, when Bear Sterns was on the edge of collapse and forced into a merger with JP Morgan, loosing 90% of its value. Mitt Romney and Bain Capital bring back memories of September 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed; AIG lost 90% of its value and tottered on the edge of collapse; and the Fed stepped in to protect Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley from failure. They remind people of October 2008, when the stock market crashed and lost 22% of its value and banks across Europe collapsed or are were rescued. They remind us all of November 2008, when the government stepped in to protect Citigroup.

If you see this election as one in which President Obama was running against a financial wheeler-dealer, after a period of unparalleled banking and financial recklessness, then the harder question to answer is why was it even close.

What is the Modern Corporation?

Howard Schultz, founder and CEO of Starbucks, shared his thoughts this morning at Aspen in discussion with Joe Nocera of the New York Times. His was an impassioned, articulate, unwavering championing of the view that long-term business value is created and protected only by having a focus beyond profits. Not excluding profits – but surely not only profit.

It was a tour de force presentation mixing values and passion with hard-nosed investment and business strategy. Responding to a comment from Joe Nocera about Howard’s unique background, both as the company founder and a kid from Brooklyn who grew up in public housing, I reframed the question back to the link between organizational and leadership values – and perceptions of time.