Leaders in Sustainable Business Development (SBD)

Photo By Daniel Suchenski

Written by Pankaj Arora

Very often, SBD efforts in a company start small by one person who is passionate to bring a change in the existing way of doing things. As success comes, this change agent hopefully gets recognized by the senior management and those efforts get scaled up to be applied to through out the company, one step at a time. But unless the top leadership of the company is sold to the sustainability idea, very little gets done. Looking at the leaders of Patagonia, Seventh Generation, Stonyfield Farm or even Coca Cola, one common theme emerges – all are passionate for steering their companies to being a sustainable business. For our purposes, let’s pick Garry Hirshberg, the founder CE-Yo of the organic yogurt company Stonyfield Farm.

In 2006, Stonyfield Farm formed 10 teams in each of the areas of environmental burden – sustainable packaging, facility GHG emissions, transportation, zero waste and water to list a few of them. As part of their Mission Action Program (MAP) process, each team completes an annual ‘Action Plan’, which includes setting long-term and near-term goals and outlines the steps to achieve the goals. The plans must be approved annually by the CEO, COO, and VP of Natural Resources. The team members also have a portion of their compensation linked to achieving an annual MAP objective. The Human Resources department is expected to list the key personnel and team leaders in each of the teams to measure the outcomes – both successes and failures in terms of levels down to the employee behavior change such as use of energy saving software for computer users. This Action plan is then further shared across the company for future engagements and coordination.

The farmers outside the company are important leaders in moving towards SBD. Since more than 42% of the emissions come from farming and cows, an accountable and a leadership team is put in place to work to reduce those methane emissions primarily coming from belching of thousands of cows. Climate Counts scorecard, is another effort, which has evolved into a leadership position over time helping other companies reduce their climate footprint score. ‘Preserve’ is Stonyfield Farm’s partners in recycling. ‘Effect Marketing’ is the company’s green marketing partner leader, apart from the NGO’s the company is engaged in.

In my opinion, the three most important achievements of the sustainability leaders associated with SBD in the company would be:

•  Removal of lids of their yogurt cups by the Packaging team that led to more than a $1.2 million a year savings to the company.
• The transportation team got a 40% reduction of CO2 from their trucks on the road due to eco-driving, led to $3.3 million gallons of fuel savings.
• Zero Waste team achieved the zero waste to landfill thus turning their entire sludge and waste to energy generation.

Stonyfield Farm can be used as a leadership model example, because it is one of those few companies that began as an answer to environmentalism of its CE-Yo in the early 80’s. It is time for the leaders to spare the emotional bursts that spur the environmental movement and use science and facts based approach to track the progress to SBD.

References: Book SBD by D.L Rainey, www.stonyfield.com, Interview of Garry Hirshberg from a podcast at www.greenbiz.com and from Stanford University’s website: http://sic.conversationsnetwork.org

Published with permission from Pankaj Arora - Photo taken by Dan Suchenski