“Following the green path, especially in hard times can lead your company to higher profits and sustainable advantage.” That’s the main premise of Andrew Winston’s new book Green Recovery. The tricky word is “can”, which Winston addresses by outlining four basic strategies for riding out the recession and emerging ahead of the game.
Get lean. To lean your business use less energy and resources to save money. Winston focuses on areas with quick payback: lighting, IT, HVAC, distribution/transportation, travel, and waste reduction. If done right, leaning can result in significant and almost immediate savings.
Get smart. Using environmental data about the product life cycle chain is “the future of strategy”. It saves money and the environment, it yields better decisions, and it looks good.
Get creative. Green innovation enables your businesses to stay ahead of the green curve. It requires asking tough, even heretical, questions about your business model and operations. It asks for going beyond out of the box and questioning everything.
Get people engaged. Sustainability galvanizes people inside organizations: it challenges them and gives them meaning, both on the professional and personal level. Engagement should start with education and continue with involvement, always operating on the levels of action, thinking, and ownership.
Tons of examples and concrete tips back each strategy, ranging from simple ones – turning off computers when idle – to complex solutions challenging core business models. Each path to green recovery works in its own right, but only acting on all will deliver the greatest value. Though not addressed in the book at length, planning for simultaneous implementation of the four strategies seems crucial.
According to Winston, business survival and competitive advantage should motivate green recovery. These seem safely legitimate and necessary goals in a recession, though I’d argue that survival is a negative goal. Without an underpinning in values, the question why any one business should survive the recession goes unanswered.
The book operates with, at best, the dual bottom line of, first and foremost, profit, and only then planet. Environmental benefits appear almost as side effects of the four strategies; measurement tends to be in terms of dollars. Social sustainability seems like an implicit result of getting people engaged, and even employee engagement aims primarily to boost the financial bottom line.
Winston’s breezy style makes for a quick read (plus it’s a tiny book), making business greening seem almost easy. Overcoming the recession with green recovery requires quick action. Packaging sustainability as a sensible and beneficial task helps make the business case for it.
Crucially, “green isn’t an additional, tangential [business] pursuit…it is a core part of operating today.” Market pressures – volatile energy/commodity prices, climate change regulation, transparency, and demands from the supply chain, employees and consumers – require making investments in greening your business now. Get the book to learn how.
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Andrew S. Winston, Green Recovery: Get Lean, Get Smart, and Emerge from the Downturn on Top, Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009.
Disclosure: I received Green Recovery as a review copy from Harvard Business Press.
Publishers: Email me to discuss reviews of your new offerings in marketing or sustainability.
