Kanal Consulting Blog

We recently moderated a panel discussion with sustainability leaders from Adobe, AMD, Cisco, Intel, and Sabre/Travelocity, at Sustainable Silicon Valley’s monthly meeting. What follows are key takeaways from an enlightening and spirited discussion. Contact us if you’d like more information at 415-788-8500.

Major Accomplishments in 2009
Reduction in facility costs from consolidation and increased telecommuting; reduced energy consumption, reduced business travel from use of video conferencing; fewer data centers; greater efficiencies in resource utilization, and aligning sustainability and corporate goals were some of the major accomplishments at these companies in 2009. Adobe has made the most progress on energy efficiency with all buildings LEED certified (even one built in 1904!), and on-site power generation (solar and wind turbine). Cisco invested $75-80 million in conferencing technologies and saves about $100 million per year. Intel invested $20 million in energy saving technologies and has saved $50 million to date.

Sustaining Sustainability
Despite the economic slump, or perhaps because of it, all panel members stated that sustainability efforts accelerated at their companies in 2009 and are on track to accelerate further in 2010. So sustaining sustainability has not been an issue at these companies. However, Cisco stated that the focus has now shifted from operations (cost efficiencies and lowering their own carbon emissions) to products, to tap the growing customer demand for “green” products. Intel is delivering products that consume 90% less energy, and Sabre has made sustainability a key element of its corporate strategy.

Employee Engagement
This continues to be one of the most important challenges, and topic of discussion, among sustainability professionals. Intel’s approach has been to include sustainability as an element in ALL employees bonuses with an increasing emphasis higher up in the organization. AMD emphasized that CEO communications is very important to get employees fully engaged. Intel stated that “sideways” influence on peers is just as important to embed sustainability within an organization.

Changing Business Models
Significantly reduced business travel (25-50%) and using integrated conferencing technologies is the new permanent way of doing business, as are work-at-home programs (25-35% of employees), flex offices, downloaded instead of packaged software (40% at Adobe and rising), on-site power generation, and sustainability as an element in all employees’ goals and incentive compensation. We don’t know of any other company besides Intel where 100% of employees are affected so if you know of any others please let us know.

We’ll have a new post next month on how companies are using LCA in their product development process.

In our work and research with dozens of leading companies, we are sometimes surprised at the reluctance to pursue environmental sustainability initiatives, because of misconceptions about their cost or benefits. The biggest myths we have come across are:

1. It’s a cost and we can’t afford it right now
2. It requires lots of staff
3. There’s no money to be made from sustainability
4. It’s just for big companies
5. It’s mostly for B2C companies
6. If we make claims about sustainability, we’ll be accused of green-washing
7. NGOs are our adversaries
8. We don’t have to worry about the supply chain because we don’t make things

To disprove each of these myths, we have provided real examples from several well-known (and some not so well-known) companies in the following article which was published by greenbiz.com. It can be found at
8 Biggest Myths about Sustainability in Business

Please send us your comments or more examples to dispel these and other myths.

We are consultants so we have lots of opinions. Some of them even prove to be correct. We thought we’d start this blog to share our views on sustainability in business, because it’s a topic that excites us, and gives us a reason to come to work.

We have been fortunate, no, privileged to work with almost 30 leading US and European companies recently, on a study to identify Best Practices in Sustainability Management. This experience has taught us a lot, and many of our companies said, it has taught them a few things too, about how to improve sustainability at their organizations. We want to use this forum to share some of our learnings, so we’re not sending emails that get us in trouble with the spam police. Feel free to comment, criticize, share, or send in a joke, if you’re so inclined.

And if you want the boring stuff about us, here it is:

Vijay always knew he wanted to be a consultant (because he couldn’t decide what else to do), and so went off to get his MBA at Wharton, after a rather uneventful, (and thankfully brief) career in Engineering, making complicated communications devices. He started his consulting career at Deloitte Consulting, advising CXOs on financial and strategy issues. He did have a detour at a corporation, (and rather grand time riding the dot com wave), at Sun Microsystems, working in a variety of senior marketing and strategy roles, before starting his consulting firm in 2003. He accidentally, and fortuitously, got into sustainability consulting about 2 years ago when a long-term client asked for a market assessment of the software design market for sustainable infrastructure. Since then, he has dramatically increased the firm’s focus on sustainability assignments, and the firm’s mission is to help business grow sustainably. For fun, he collects wine (and drinks some of it), and tries to help his wife with organic farming. He also claims to be a decent photographer. Vijay and his wife live in San Francisco, and spend their weekends in beautiful Sonoma County.

Kelly Flores got hooked on sustainability listening to Paul Hawken at GreenBuild in 2007 while on assignment for a client looking to provide software for “green” infrastructure.  Since then she’s stalked Bill McDonough (with an autographed copy of “Cradle-to-Cradle” as proof) and is waiting for an opportunity to cross paths with Al Gore.   In previous lives she worked in technical support for financial institutions The Capital Group and Fidelity Investments, and provided strategic marketing support to Sun Microsystems, PCMall, and solar startup Soliant Energy. When not behind her desk working on a project or writing about sustainability, she can often be found hanging out once a month at Green Drinks – LA or catching documentary films at the Conscientious Projector screenings in Pasadena, CA.  She is an L.A. native and graduate of USC, but ventured east to spend two cold winters earning her MBA from Wharton.

Welcome to our first attempt at blogging. Yes, we’re a bit late to the game but…well, you know the saying.

We want to comment on what we think are the key steps to sustainability at corporations, which we have categorized into 12 steps. This is deliberately intended to be at a high level so that readers can see the forest and not just the trees. The 12 steps  are:

1. Integrate sustainability into the company’s vision, values, or core mission statement.
2. Set goals that are specific, credible, measurable, and normalized for business changes.
3. Treat sustainability projects with the same business case requirements as other projects.
4. Let the CEO and senior executives be the key spokespeople, and demonstrate internal commitment.
5. Establish a strong governance model.
6. Ensure employee engagement.
7. Drive operational efficiencies.
8. Implement technologies and policies to reduce business travel and commuting.
9. Employ product life-cycle analysis to inform new designs.
10. Communicate internally and externally.
11. Partner with the Supply Chain.
12. Engage various stakeholders.

You can find the full article at http://kanalconsulting.com/sustainability.htm

What do you think? Matthew Wheeland, Managing Editor at Greenbiz.com likes the 12 steps, but rightly points out we didn’t address the Where to Begin part, but that’s the topic of another article and another post.