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Our Perspective on Environmental Sustainability
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“Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.”
- Ancient Native American proverb
At Unison Advisory Group, we believe companies have an obligation to respect our planet and to leave it healthier than we found it. In other words, we believe companies have an obligation to become environmentally sustainable. We believe this obligation is measured by how well they:
1) Use wastes as inputs
2) Use nature's sources of energy
3) Use safe substances
4) Respect native habitats
We understand these are very challenging measures. In fact, in some instances we have lost the know-how or we have not yet developed the know-how to attain them. We also understand that they sound very different from the "create shareholder value" many of us learned in business school.
Since environmental sustainability is different, some people see it as expensive and incompatible with financial success. We do not. We see the pursuit of environmental sustainability as the 2010 version of the PC and Internet era - a great and growing opportunity for companies to innovate, grow, improve margins and serve customers, employees, communities and shareholders in new ways. We see striving to fulfill environmental obligations as a catalyst for achieving all of the more traditional business goals.
Our research shows that companies fall into Five Shades of Green. The vast majority of companies are currently in the two lightest shades of green. Only a smaller number of companies are in each successively deeper shade of green. Since we are still paving the cowpaths of environmental sustainability, we expect companies to become more and more sophisticated stewards of the earth. Their increasing sophistication together with a surge of innovative breakthroughs will propel companies toward the deeper shades of green. We envision a day when there are few light green companies and many, many companies that are deeply engaged with the environment, what we call "forest green." |
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