Blu Skye World

4 Fast Steps to Put a Price Tag on Ecosystem Services (Triple Pundit)

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:43:00 -0700

What’s business if not value creation? Take something that doesn’t cost very much, add value, and sell it for more, creating a profit. It’s only natural that many businesses do so using natural resources like land, trees, water, air, and fossil fuels as their inputs. Those components become the ingredients for the products, or they are the receptacle for waste created in the manufacturing process.

Either way, what was once a common good – air, water, natural resources – is used for private gain. The public good suffers at the expense of private benefit. So what to do about it? At Fortune Brainstorm Green Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and UCLA Professor and Pavan Sukhdev, Fellow, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University sat down with Jib Ellison of Blu Skye Consulting to discuss the business case for ecosystem valuation.

Use it or lose it.
Pavan Sukhdev explained the problem pretty bluntly, “We use natural resources because they’re valuable but we lose them because they are free.” Without ecosystem management or valuation, these services will dry up as companies and individuals rush to ‘get theirs’ before the services is gone for good.

Jared Diamond concurred, “You’d think that people that relied on forests for fuel would protect their forests, but there are many examples throughout history of cultures like Easter Island that have chopped down absolutely everything, resulting in societal collapse. That wasn’t a policy decision it was the decisions of individuals...." Read the full article on TriplePundit.com

Fortune Brainstorm: GREEN (April 16-18, Laguna Niguel)

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:55:04 -0700

We're excited to announce Jib Ellison will be discussing one of our favorite topics this month at Fortune Brainstorm: GREEN. He will moderate a panel on What Is Nature Worth? with Jared Diamond and Pavan Sukhdev. Glen Low will be there discussing another favorite topic, Sustainability Indexes: What's the Magic Number? with Dara O'Rourke, Mark Lee and Marc Gunther. Both of these topics were for years squarely in the 'too hard' box, but we now have real world examples of progress on both fronts. If you'll be at the conference, we hope you'll join in the discussion and find time to connect with Glen and Jib.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012, 7:45 AM BREAKFAST ROUNDTABLES

Sustainability Indexes: What's the Magic Number?

There is a wave of confusion and even fear around sustainability indexes and rating systems. It turns out that rating both suppliers and consumer products is a lot tougher than anyone thought. Can it be done and if so, how?

Discussion leaders:

Glen Low, Principal, Blu Skye

Mark Lee, Executive Director, SustainAbility

Dara O'Rourke, Co-founder and Chief Sustainability Officer, GoodGuide

Moderator:

Marc Gunther, Fortune

***

Wednesday April 18, 10:20 AM PLENARY SESSION

What is Nature worth? *

In some cases it might be more valuable not to develop a forest or dig a big mine. Can we put an economic value on the services that nature provides to man?

Discussion leaders:
Jared Diamond, Author, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Professor, Department of Geography, UCLA
Pavan Sukhdev, Dorothy S. McCluskey Fellow, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University

Moderator:
Jib Ellison, Founder and CEO, Blu Skye

*If you can't be there in person, you can catch this session online. Visit the event website to register for the free virtual conference.

Berkeley-Stanford Cleantech Conference (April 12, 2012)

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:04:16 -0700

April 12, 2012, Stanford Camplus, Palo Alto, CA — Blu Skye's Glen Low will be speaking at this year's Berkeley-Stanford Cleantech Conference on a panel about how clean tech is playing a role in improving the efficiency and reducing the impacts of global supply chains.

Panelists:

Glen Low: Principal, Blu Skye Consulting

Ty Jagerson: President, HelioPower

Andreas Klugescheid: Vice President of Corporate Affairs, BMW

Ashok Sinha: CEO, Sunpreme

Moderator:

Joel Makower, GreenBiz

Conference Details:

The BSCC is a joint effort between Berkeley Energy & Resources Collaborative and Stanford Energy Club. This year the keynote theme is: Leaping Forward: Business Opportunities for Cleantech in Emerging Markets. There will be three panels covering the design of innovative new products, the policy and financing barriers facing large-scale market entrants, and the sustainability of the material value chain. Following the panels will be a networking reception for attendees and panelists.

Keynote speeches will be delivered by Vinod Khosla, President of Khosla Ventures and Elizabeth Littlefield, CEO and President of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). Other confirmed participants include Ashok Gadgil (Director, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs), Julian Wong (former DOE advisor), Michael Kobori (VP of Supply Chain Social and Environmental Sustainability at Levi Strauss & Co.) and many other top industry executives!

For more information regarding tickets and agenda please visit: http://bscc8.org

We hope to see you on April 12th!

Contact Details:

Company: UC Berkeley
Name: Jay Dumaswala
Email: jay_dumaswala@mba.berkeley.edu
Phone: 614-329-7771
Website: The Berkeley-Stanford Cleantech Conference 8

Having the Right Answer Isn’t Enough

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 15:55:39 -0700

David Brooks, in his book The Social Animal, points out that human decision-making has some essential truths. As he says, "Reason and emotion are not separate and opposed. Reason is nestled upon emotion and dependent upon it. Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those things. The human mind can be pragmatic because deep down it is romantic."

This accounts for a lot of things I’ve observed lately. For one, it isn’t for lack of knowledge that people fail to do the right things for themselves, the people they love, the companies that they work for, or the world they live in. For another, if it’s hard for me to do the right thing, it’s even harder for me to get others to do their part. How much time is spent inside your business trying to get to aligned and coordinated action? The challenges are exponentially harder when a solution requires coordinated action from people outside our direct control –within our organizations and especially outside our organizations. Lastly, if reason is indeed nestled upon emotion, then this explains why sustainability is a unique and powerful tool to unlock business value in complex systems.

We’re too smart for our own good. We are all awash in information about what to do, but we often don’t do it, even when we have the best intentions. Books, seminars, blogs, consultancies and advisors of all stripes are employed every day to help business people figure out what to do. Very smart people have been working out good solutions to very thorny issues for a long time. Nonetheless, even with good solutions at our finger tips, we often act counter to what we know to be the best thing to do. It seems that our rationality is too often employed in figuring out the good reasons why we can’t do something.

It’s a people problem, not an economic problem. Warren Buffet told the story of a CEO with three trays on his desk: an inbox, outbox and one labeled ‘too hard.’ More often than not, complex sustainability solutions end up in the box labeled ‘too hard.’ Two great examples of well reasoned, solutions to complex sustainability problems that will strike most CEOs as ‘too hard’ come from Amory Lovins’ book, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era and a recent McKinsey report entitled Resource Revolution: Meeting the world’s energy, materials, food and water needs. Both visions lay out in great detail profitable paths to sustainability. Both require unprecedented coordination among multiple organizations. Both face fundamental challenges associated with people and how we make decisions. Just because it makes sense today and for tomorrow, and we can make money doing it, doesn’t mean it will happen.

With meaning comes motivation. If there is a silver lining in the fact that we are more rationalizing than we are rational, it’s that sustainability is inherently meaningful and meaning is one of the most powerful motivating emotional forces. When we can skillfully link the analytic capabilities needed to uncover a profitable business solution together with the capabilities that bring meaning to working together, then big change can happen fast. Solving endemic, societal problems, especially those that pose a threat to our children’s children, provides a very solid emotional platform upon which to build and execute a bold plan.

Unlocking System Value. This is what Blu Skye does when we’re at our best. Our most successful projects have a clear business and sustainability proposition, a courageous business sponsor, an elegant but complex solution, and a roomful of stakeholders who rarely, if ever, take coordinated action together. We unlock business value. We have helped the US dairy industry mobilize to uncover $250 million of business value annually by 2020, the US battery industry to design a national battery recycling program, the global apparel industry to design and launch a sustainability Index, and most recently, a leading aluminum producer in uniting stakeholders to recover the $6 billion in packaging and printed materials sent to landfills each year. Our goal is to make the impossible possible and solve some of the planet’s most intractable sustainability problems. We use sustainability to collaborate with business system partners to help our clients quickly capture business value that they can’t get alone. Big change. Fast.

Alcoa and BluSkye: Pushing green businesses to the next level (GreenBiz.com)

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 10:46:04 -0800

Into my inbox every day come press releases about this company putting solar panels on a roof or that one making its fleet more efficient. These incremental steps are laudable but also (1) boring (2) old hat and, most importantly, (3) unlikely to get us the environmental change we need.

Transformational change, by contrast, usually requires entire industries or groups of industries to work together, often with NGOs, sometimes with government. That's been going on for years -- Unilever and WWF organized fisheries, NGOs and companies to form the Marine Stewardship Council back in 1997 to promote sustainable fishing practices -- but lately, there seem to me more of these cooperative but complicated efforts. That's reason for optimism.

Last fall, for example, I attended a Starbucks "cup summit" at the MIT Media Lab where the company, with the help of business guru Peter Senge, brought together paper companies, NGOs, government officials and rivals like Green Mountain coffee to figure out how to design a system to eliminate waste from coffee cups. [See The Starbucks Cup Dilemma in Fast Company.] Now Alcoa, with the help of sustainability consultant BluSkye, leading a broad and even more ambitious effort to drive up recycling rates across the US.

To learn about the Alcoa initiative, I met last week in San Francisco with Jib Ellison, the founder of BluSkye, and talked by phone with Kevin Anton, Alcoa's chief sustainability officer.

The problem, as they both described it, is simple: Between $1 billion and $2 billion worth of aluminum cans end up in landfills each year...

Read the full article at GreenBiz.com

Speaker's Corner March 7: Making Markets and Conservation Work Together

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:38:18 -0800

Join Jib Ellison and Chris Mann, CEO/Chairman of the Gourd of Guayakí Sustainable Rainforest Products, importer and marketer of yerba mate on March 7 at 6:30 PM in Santa Rosa for what promises to be a stimulating discussion on the future of sustainable business.

For more event details, download the flyer [pdf].

Stop Wasting Waste: Fixing the Travesty of Lost Value in Recycling (from GreenBiz.com)

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:21:51 -0800

It's become an encouragingly common story to see evidence of how recycling can generate more value than landfilling waste. The recent GreenBiz article The Successes Possible from a Jigsaw Puzzle Theory of Recycling outlined one such business model, Donco Recycling Solutions -- a firm constantly seeking innovative uses for scrap or waste from one industry in manufacturing streams of others. In essence, a high value matchmaker who plays a small but meaningful role within the larger puzzle of this untapped system.

It's untapped because only 34 percent of U.S. municipal solid waste found its way to recycling or composting in 2010.Combine the remaining 66 percent with other non-hazardous sources of industrial waste and there exists a veritable gold mine of material flows which, if accessed, could generate the classic triple bottom line -- economic, environmental, and social benefits at all points in the value chain. In some cases such as used beverage containers this amounts to over $2.9 billion in lost value [PDF] annually.

What then is preventing rampant investment in closed loop material recovery by the U.S. business sector? At the outset it appears that a compelling business case doesn't exist. But dig deeper and you start to find that even companies who have realized the economic and environmental benefits of recycling can't seem to create effective systems at scale. Add the potential of efficient systems to the social benefits of recycling from job creation (up to 70,000 jobs from increasbiing recycling rates of beverage containers alone) and we should be prepared for the perfect storm....Read the full article on GreenBiz.com

Collaborating With Product Suppliers

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 10:07:56 -0800

For most retailers, the sustainability journey begins on the operations side of the business – with a focus on what they can directly control - the environmental footprint of stores, distribution centers, and logistics – and covering a range of eco-efficiency issues including energy, waste and water. And this makes perfect sense as the place to start. However, for most retailers the footprint of their operations is a relatively small slice of the overall footprint – 10-20 percent. The lion’s share of the impact of retail is in what goes on the shelf – the products and the impacts along the supply chain of extracting or harvesting raw materials, processing and manufacturing, transport and packaging, and consumer use and end of life. And having an impact on that 80-90% of the retail footprint very quickly demands collaboration with suppliers to understand impacts all along the value chain and to identify and pursue innovation opportunities to reduce that footprint.

In working with a number of retailers in this kind of innovation, we find a set of practices that are the ‘building blocks’ of supplier engagement for product and supply chain sustainability:

Strategy: Understanding overall risks and opportunities in the supply chain and prioritizing areas for action, setting goals and making commitments for improvement and innovation.

Factory Audits: Assessments of environmental and social performance at the facility level in the supply chain to highlight conformance to standards and/or performance relative to peers.

Purchasing/Sourcing Policies: Integrating sustainability criteria into product specifications and sourcing practices to drive sustainable sourcing. Example: Whole Foods’ animal welfare ratings.

Footprinting: A variety of techniques that take a high-level life-cycle approach to products and help identify product sustainability ‘hot spots’ where disproportionate impacts indicate areas ripe for innovation.

Supplier Scorecarding: Establishing standard measures of sustainability performance at the company level for suppliers, often in the same areas where the retailer has focused in its operations (e.g., energy, waste, water). These sustainability metrics are often integrated into existing supplier scorecards on financial, quality, and operational performance. Example: Walmart’s Supplier Sustainability Assessment.

Innovation Projects: Focused initiatives, in collaboration with one or more suppliers, that drive improvement against a particular sustainability outcome. Example: collaborative programs to improve energy efficiency in supplier factories.

Merchant Engagement: Mobilizing buyers and other merchandising professionals through education, metrics, and incentives related to sustainability issues in product design and manufacture, and supporting productive dialogue between merchants and suppliers around innovation opportunities. Example: Nike’s Considered Design program.

Consumer Engagement: Creating demand for more sustainable products through communication, education, and interaction with consumers through a variety of channels, and using consumer feedback to drive innovation with suppliers. Example: Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles.

Industry Collaboration: Joining with supply chain partners and often with competitors to address systemic sustainability challenges that individual companies can’t address on their own. Example: The Better Cotton Initiative, or the Sustainable Apparel Coalition.

Retailers asking what their next step should be in supplier collaboration can usually find answers in these building blocks. With the right strategic perspective, these building blocks can create a roadmap that charts a journey from compliance and risk mitigation to innovation and value creation. And If managed as part of a cohesive approach to supply chain sustainability, they can unlock substantial value for both retailers and their suppliers.

-----

By John Whalen and Glen Low

Reposted from the RILA Report: Sustainability - Volume 4, Issue 5

V1 of the Apparel Index Ready For Testing!

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:04:53 -0800

After almost two years of collaboration V1 of the Apparel Index is ready for testing and publicly available at www.apparelcoalition.org. The Index is an industry-wide tool for measuring the environmental and social performance of apparel products and the supply chains that produce them. The Sustainable Apparel Coalition welcomes comments and feedback on the tool to continue to improve it.

The goal of the Apparel Coalition is to lead the industry toward a shared vision of sustainability. This first version of the Index was developed with involvement of a wide range of stakeholders, and the metrics are fully transparent to encourage broad adoption of the Index globally. To accomplish this, the Coalition has drawn upon decades of work from different efforts to measure and track apparel sustainability including the Outdoor Industry Association “Eco Index” and Nike’s “Environmental Apparel Design” tools.

Each of the Coalition’s participating companies and organizations see an opportunity to advance their own sustainability goals by collaborating to create more uniform, broadly defined tools for measuring sustainability, and for collective actions to drive innovations in products and manufacturing that will benefit the entire apparel industry and consumers.

Congratulations to all the members of the Apparel Coalition who have put so much into making the Index a reality!

John Whalen Interviewed on Big Change Fast

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 13:55:28 -0800

Join Evolutionary Collective Conversation host Patricia Albere and business expert Tom Curren for an interview with John Whalen, a principal at Blu Skye Consulting. Blu Skye is making big ripples in the corporate world by helping companies like Nike and Microsoft as well as entire industries move towards sustainable practices.

Tom and Patricia will talk with John about the work he is involved with, some of the keys to his and Blu Skye’s success and what it takes to shift companies and industries towards a more sustainable and positive future.

Click here to listen to the interview with John Whalen, host of Evolutionary Collective Conversations, Patricia Albere and special guest host, Tom Curren.

Original Air Date: November 8th, 6pm PST/9pm EST

Webinar for Corporate Eco Forum Members

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:11:16 -0700

The Corporate Eco Forum will present a webinar on November 2nd, 12:00pm EDT/9:00am PDT, featuring Blu Skye founder and CEO Jib Ellison. Jib recently co-authored The Big Idea: The Sustainable Economy in the latest Harvard Business Review. Jib was also featured in the recent book Force of Nature by Edward Humes. CEF members can register by emailing Michael Vito (michael@corporateecoforum.com) with your name, title, and organization.

Retail Sustainability Conference Participants

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:32:57 -0700

This webpage is for participants of the 2011 Retail Sustainability Conference. It is intended to offer additional resources for participants of the Friday Oct. 14 interactive session on Collaborating With Product Suppliers, led by Blu Skye's John Whalen, Glen Low and Ellie Moss, and for general participants of the conference.

Sustainability Strategy Self-Assessment Tool

Are you ahead of the pack or just getting started? Do you know? How can you tell? Download our Sustainability Strategy Self-Assessment Tool to see how Blu Skye thinks about sustainability leadership and where you should focus the efforts of your organization. Then give us a call if you want to dig a little deeper.

Additional Resources

The Future of Sustainability Leadership, by Glen Low and Julie Menter, describes what will define sustainability leadership in the future and contrasts it with what has defined it previously. It outlines what companies should do to position themselves to compete successfully in the Sustainability Age and gain unprecedented competitive advantage. This paper is a great pre-read for the Sustainability Self-Assessment Tool.

When does collaboration make sense? When tackling deeply embedded, systemic barriers that individual executives often lack the tools to overcome, a new approach is required. Big Change Fast, a white paper by John Whalen describes how companies are breaking down barriers to the system change that is required to get to cost effective sustainability solutions. The key: pre-competitive collaboration.

Need to follow up on a conversation you started at the conference? Please feel free to email any of us directly:

	John Whalen	johnw@bluskye.com
	Glen Low	glen@bluskye.com
	Ellie Moss	ellie@bluskye.com
	Rebecca Harris	rebecca@bluskye.com

Sign up for our mailing list (which we use judiciously) to receive updates on our latest thinking and events by emailing rebecca@bluskye.com with "add to mailing list" in the subject line.

Sustainability Strategy Self-Assessment

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:03:10 -0700

The Big Idea: The Sustainable Economy

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 20:53:59 -0700

by Yvon Chouinard, Jib Ellison, and Rick Ridgeway

No one these days seriously denies the need for sustainable business practices. Even those concerned about only business and not the fate of the planet recognize that the viability of business itself depends on the resources of healthy ecosystems—fresh water, clean air, robust biodiversity, productive land—and on the stability of just societies. Happily, most of us also care about these things directly.

And yet collectively we have not been making progress on reducing the damage business does to the world. Admirable companies have launched inspiring initiatives, but the negative impacts of business activity continue to grow.

The problem is simple. It’s generally cheaper to buy the product that has a worse impact on its environment than the equivalent product that does less harm. Higher cost to planet does not translate to higher price to customer. Of course, this is due to the fact that businesses are rarely obliged to pay for the full toll their operations take on the world. Because many of these impacts have been hard to gauge with any precision—or to assign to individual businesses with fairness—their costs have remained external to businesses’ accounting.

But what if those externalized costs could be quantified and assigned? What if we could get to the point where the lowest-priced T-shirt was also the one doing the least harm to the planet and society? In that scenario, consumers’ bargain hunting would align perfectly with business practices that sustain a healthy and just world, and powerful market forces would be put in the service of sustainability’s goals. This is not a flash of brilliance on our part—it’s what sustainability theorists have said all along. “True cost accounting” has long been the holy grail of the movement.

Our companies, Patagonia and Blu Skye, have devoted decades to the business of sustainability, and never before have we felt the optimism we feel now. Developments on three fronts, long in the works and now converging, make it not only possible but inevitable that successful business will become synonymous with sustainable business. First, “prices” are now being calculated for many things that had been considered priceless; second, capital is flowing into companies known to manage those costs well; and third, indices are being established that allow disparate contributors in a supply chain to converge on sustainability standards. Each of these developments has yielded meaningful gains on its own, but because all three have now reached a certain maturity, we are entering a new, accelerated phase of progress. The dots are connecting, and a whole different picture of how to prosper in business is emerging.

The concept of sustainability has evolved across three eras. In the beginning, it was seen as an operational concern, consisting of largely defensive efforts to reduce companies’ environmental footprints and cut waste. That evolved into a more strategic stance—let’s call it Sustainability 2.0. The focus shifted from cost reduction to innovation, and initiatives began to consider whole value chains. Now we’re in the midst of another overhaul of the concept, in which considerations of impact pervade all the decision making of firms. And as for Sustainability 4.0? The 3.0 era will render the term redundant. Instead of asking either “how can we turn a profit?” or “how can we minimize our impact?” managers will see those as two sides of the same coin. Sustainability will simply be how business is done.

Putting a Price on the Priceless

The first trend contributing to Sustainability 3.0 is the recent progress on quantifying ecosystem services— that is, measuring, in dollar terms, the value of the myriad beneficial services that natural environments perform. An example is the erosion control provided by mangrove forests: How much would it cost to achieve the same control by other means? Another is the pollination that insects perform: What is it worth to agriculture? The natural world’s services range from the supply of fresh water and clean air to the sequestration of carbon and production of all manner of raw materials. If plant diversity is necessary to support new drug discoveries, what would we pay to have it?

Of course, the bounty of nature is priceless. But the unfortunate effect of our seeing these inputs to well-being as incalculable has been that they are treated as free. That mind-set creates problems when resources turn out not to be limitless or indestructible. A failure to price resources also makes it difficult to think clearly about trade-offs, which many decisions relating to sustainability involve. When inputs and outputs can be stated in like terms (which is to say, dollar terms), optimal solutions can be found.

The importance of quantifying ecosystem services was first acknowledged in the early 1990s, but serious efforts began in 2000. At least two not-for-profit organizations—Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy—and the accounting giant PriceWaterhouseCoopers are currently developing methodologies to value ecosystems. Under the direction of Peter Seligmann, Conservation International has shifted its strategy for protecting wildlands from an emphasis on their intrinsic value to stressing the value they deliver. The organization now has teams working on the arduous task of quantifying the contribution of ecosystems to human life. One product of this effort is a web-based tool called Artificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services (ARIES), developed in partnership with the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics and with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, which allows users to value ecosystems rapidly and on multiple scales, from local to regional to national to global.

To read the rest of the article, go to HBR.org

Want to engage? Check out the webinar with Jib Ellison and Rick Ridgeway, hosted by UPS.

Upcoming Event: Corporations and the Food Movement (10/4/11)

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:29:47 -0700

On October 4th at 6pm, Blu Skye's Jib Ellison will join author Michael Pollan and Jack Sinclair, EVP of Grocery at Walmart for a discussion on the role of corporations in the sustainable food movement. This class is part of the UC Berkeley course Edible Education 101: The Rise and Future of the Food Movement, which in addition to the 400 UC Berkeley students who are enrolled in the course is open to about 300 general public free of charge.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011, 6pm - 7:30 pm

Wheeler Auditorium, UC Berkeley

General public tickets available through TicketWeb starting September 28.

Update: Missed the event? You can watch it here.

Description: As the world's population grows from 7 billion to 9 billion, developing countries start eating higher on the food chain and demand for food production doubles -- all in a changing environment where extreme weather events become the norm and resource scarcity (e.g. demands on water) become increasingly severe, the way we produce food will have to adapt. Companies like Walmart play a key role in feeding the planet, and they are getting quite sophisticated in how they think about these issues. One trend we see is a move to put a value on nature - on ecosystem services - and companies involved in producing food are just beginning to explore how valuing nature and biodiversity will change the way they do business.

Speakers: Jack Sinclair, Executive Vice President of Grocery Merchandise, Wal-Mart, and Jib Ellison, CEO, Blu Skye Strategy Consulting in conversation with author Michael Pollan

JACK SINCLAIR

Jack Sinclair is the Executive Vice President of the food division for Walmart U.S., responsible for the company’s overall strategy for food and grocery. He works to integrate planning, category management, store experience and private brand development into the grocery business unit. Sinclair joined Walmart from McCurrach, a U.K.-based field merchandising business. He has worked in the retail food business since 1982 when he began his career as a trainee at Shoppers’ Paradise in the United Kingdom. He worked for Tesco and Safeway PLC, where he eventually served on the board of directors that led the merger of Safeway PLC and Morrisons.

JIB ELLISON

Jib Ellison is the founder and CEO of Blu Skye Strategy Consulting where he leads a team of strategy experts who work with Fortune 50 companies to transform markets – and to create new ones. His process is premised upon using sustainability to reveal new market opportunities, engage senior management and employees, and leverage his considerable network of experts to do well by doing good. In this way, Ellison and his team expand conventional definitions of value, opportunity and change. His recent clients include Hilton, Microsoft, SC Johnson, Sony Pictures, Staples, Walmart, and Waste Management.

MICHAEL POLLAN

Michael Pollan is the author, most recently, of "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto." His previous book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals", was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. He is also the author of "The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World", "A Place of My Own", and "Second Nature". A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Pollan is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003 and the Reuters-I.U.C.N. 2000 Global Award for Environmental Journalism. Pollan served for many years as executive editor of Harper's Magazine and is now the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley.

Webinar - Sustainability 3.0: When Products' True Costs Are Covered

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 09:51:00 -0700

Harvard Business Review Complimentary Audio Webinar

Sustainability thought leaders Rick Ridgeway (Patagonia) and Jib Ellison (Blu Skye) share their vision for Sustainability 3.0

Monday, September 26, 2011 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM GMT

Missed the webinar? You can access the recorded presentation here.

Webinar Overview

Sustainability in business has gone mainstream, as businesses of all sizes in all sectors have launched sustainability initiatives.

Yet sustainability isn't working. All major global environmental indices--for climate, water, land use, and more--are moving in the wrong direction. A precise definition of sustainability and a roadmap for how to achieve it eludes us. Companies make up their own definitions of success and impose their own standards on vendors. And, the true cost of using the planet's resources is not factored into the prices of products and services.

On September 26, Patagonia's Rick Ridgeway and Blu Skye Consulting's Jib Ellison will describe their vision for Sustainability 3.0, which they have written about in the Harvard Business Review.

They see multiple trends converging and envision pricing that fully and accurately reflects the cost to the environment and society of the resources used. A result will be that products with a more benign social and environmental footprint will be priced lower and products that use more resources will be costlier. Market forces will ensure that the promise of sustainability is fulfilled. Business will exit the Industrial Age and enter the Sustainability Age.

This solution is based on three powerful trends: 1) ecosystem valuation; 2) socially responsible investing; and 3) value chain indexing. Connecting the dots among them will multiply their power.

Intrigued? Join these sustainability thought leaders for a complimentary, interactive Harvard Business Review webinar on September 26.

They will explain their vision of Sustainability 3.0, describe how Sustainability 3.0 will lower costs to the planet and for consumers, and discuss why it is in companies' self-interest to embrace price transparency. You will leave with the information you need to position your firm as an early adopter of Sustainability 3.0.

Speaker Bios:

Rick Ridgeway, Vice President, Environmental Initiatives and Special Media Projects

Patagonia

Rick Ridgeway, is currently Patagonia's Vice President of Environmental Initiatives and Special Media Projects. Rick and his team develop, implement and promote the second two of the company's three-part mission statement to make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis. In this capacity, his department oversees the company's environmental grant-making, internal and external environmental education, and special multi-year environmental projects including Freedom to Roam, a coalition founded by Patagonia to seek protection for wildlife corridors. Rick also manages Patagonia Productions, the company's division that publishes book and produces films.

Before joining Patagonia, Rick was owner/president of Adventure Photo & Film, building it into the world's most recognized outdoor stock photo and film agency before successfully selling it to focus on writing and filmmaking. At the same time he was active in the outdoor equipment industry, working as consultant for the Kelty Pack Co. for over 20 years.

In addition to his business history, Rick is recognized as one of the world's foremost mountaineers and adventurers, and is known to many through his writing, photography and Emmy award-winning filmmaking. Along with three companions, Ridgeway became the first American to summit K2, considered the hardest mountain in the world to climb, and he has done many other significant climbs and explorations on all continents. He has produced and directed over 30 adventure shows for television. His 40 articles have appeared in Outside, National Geographic and many other magazines. He is the author of six books, including the highly acclaimed Seven Summits, The Shadow of Kilimanjaro and Below Another Sky. Rolling Stone magazine called Ridgeway "the real Indiana Jones", and recently National Geographic honored him with its "Lifetime Achievement in Adventure" award.

Jib Ellison, Founder and Owner

Blu Skye Consulting

Jib leads Blu Skye Consulting, a small team of strategy experts who work with Fortune 50 companies to transform markets -- and to create new ones. His process is premised upon using sustainability to reveal new market opportunities, engage senior management and employees, and leverage his considerable network of experts to do well by doing good. In this way, Jib and his team expand conventional definitions of value, opportunity and change.

Jib serves on the Advisory Board of the Corporate Eco Forum, an invitation-only membership organization for large companies that demonstrate a serious commitment to environment as a business strategy issue.

For more information and to register for the free webinar, follow this link.

Monday, September 26, 2011

4:00 PM -	5:00 PM	GMT
12:00 PM -	1:00 PM	US Eastern
11:00 AM -	12:00 PM	US Central
10:00 AM -	11:00 AM	US Mountain
9:00 AM -	10:00 AM	US Pacific

More time zones

Webinar Overview

Sustainability in business has gone mainstream, as businesses of all sizes in all sectors have launched sustainability initiatives.

On September 26, Patagonia's Rick Ridgeway and Blu Skye Consulting's Jib Ellison will describe their vision for Sustainability 3.0, which they have written about in the Harvard Business Review.

This solution is based on three powerful trends: 1) ecosystem valuation; 2) socially responsible investing; and 3) value chain indexing. Connecting the dots among them will multiply their power.

Intrigued? Join these sustainability thought leaders for a complimentary, interactive Harvard Business Review webinar on September 26.

Speaker Bios:

Rick Ridgeway
Vice President, Environmental Initiatives and Special Media Projects
Patagonia

Rick Ridgeway, is currently Patagonia's Vice President of Environmental Initiatives and Special Media Projects. Rick and his team develop, implement and promote the second two of the company's three-part mission statement to make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis. In this capacity, his department oversees the company's environmental grant-making, internal and external environmental education, and special multi-year environmental projects including Freedom to Roam, a coalition founded by Patagonia to seek protection for wildlife corridors. Rick also manages Patagonia Productions, the company's division that publishes book and produces films.

Before joining Patagonia, Rick was owner/president of Adventure Photo & Film, building it into the world's most recognized outdoor stock photo and film agency before successfully selling it to focus on writing and filmmaking. At the same time he was active in the outdoor equipment industry, working as consultant for the Kelty Pack Co. for over 20 years.

In addition to his business history, Rick is recognized as one of the world's foremost mountaineers and adventurers, and is known to many through his writing, photography and Emmy award-winning filmmaking. Along with three companions, Ridgeway became the first American to summit K2, considered the hardest mountain in the world to climb, and he has done many other significant climbs and explorations on all continents. He has produced and directed over 30 adventure shows for television. His 40 articles have appeared in Outside, National Geographic and many other magazines. He is the author of six books, including the highly acclaimed Seven Summits, The Shadow of Kilimanjaro and Below Another Sky. Rolling Stone magazine called Ridgeway "the real Indiana Jones", and recently National Geographic honored him with its "Lifetime Achievement in Adventure" award.

Jib Ellison
Founder and Owner
Blu Skye Consulting

RILA Sustainability Conference

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 21:15:32 -0700

Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) Retail Sustainability Conference
October 12-14. Orlando, FL (The Peabody Orlando)

Join Blu Skye's John Whalen as he leads a session on Collaborating With Product Suppliers. Session description:
The product supply chain is the largest contributor to any retailer’s sustainability footprint and effectively addressing those impacts requires collaboration with suppliers and peers. Using the Sustainable Apparel Coalition as a case example, this session will engage the attendees together in an inquiry about how we might best move forward on collaborating with product suppliers in a way that creates value for our businesses, reduces questionnaire fatigue and accelerates sustainability results. Through interactive discussion, participants will explore:

What does it take to successfully engage suppliers in innovation through measurement standards?
How might we collectively align on a consistent set of questions for our supply chains?
What can we learn from emerging measurement standards such as the Sustainable Apparel Coalition?

We will close the session sharing the results of our thinking and identifying actions we can all take to make progress towards these shared goals.

Visit the RILA Sustainability Conference website for more information and to register for the conference. Email rebecca@bluskye.com if you are a retailer who has never attended the conference and would like to receive a discount on your registration.

Upcoming Event: Ecosystem Services at Climate One (9/12/11)

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:32:22 -0700

Climate One at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco Sept. 12 at 6pm. Event description: The many services that nature provides to humans are undervalued in commercial markets because it is difficult to put a price tag on them. Now with increasing awareness about sustainability and resource limitations, companies are paying more attention to such ecosystem services. That means better understanding of activities such as crop pollination, pest control, and waste decomposition, and calculating economic impacts including the benefits of those services and the costs to companies and society if they are diminished. Join us for a conversation with a consultant advising some of the world's largest companies on how to think about ecosystem services and a visionary environmentalist working to preserve and value biodiversity around the world.

Panelists:

Jib Ellison, CEO, Blu Skye

Peter Seligmann, Co-Founder & CEO, Conservation International

Location: The Commonwealth Club, SF Club Office

Check out the Climate One blog for a full summary of the discussion.

If you missed the event, you can tune in to KRCB 91FM or stream online at http://krcb.org/live-stream Thursday, October 13^th at 7 p.m. for the radio broadcast.

Jib Ellison discusses The Sustainable Economy, an upcoming article in the Harvard Business Review

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 09:31:06 -0700

All Business is Green Business - Jib Ellison discusses the three major trends that are driving business toward a sustainable economy. Look for the article, featured in the Big Idea section of the upcoming October issue of the Harvard Business Review.

Listen to the Podcast at HBR.org

Upcoming Event: Haas Executive Education Course - CSR 3.0: Leveraging Sustainability for Strategic Advantage (9/20-21)

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 12:11:20 -0700

Leveraging Corporate Responsibility Leadership to Enhance Strategy, Brand, and Employee Engagement
Companies leave value, money and opportunity on the table every day with ineffective CSR. CSR 3.0 helps participants learn to conceptualize, develop, and deliver a business strategy, communications approach, and employee engagement plan that leverages the business value and unrecognized opportunities of corporate responsibility.

Mainstream corporations understand that being socially and environmentally responsible serves as a source of competitive advantage and is integral to long-term success. Corporate responsibility helps companies build customer loyalty, recruit and retain employees, and stand out in a crowded marketplace. However, despite the growing number of Corporate Responsibility success stories, companies continue to struggle with the fundamental challenge of embedding Corporate Responsibility into their day-to-day business strategy.

Corporate responsibility is most effective when it is intimately connected to the corporate brand and strategy, reinforcing a company's unique identity and playing an integral part in the telling of the organization's story. With today's global economic challenges, corporate responsibility is about business innovation and creating competitive advantage — a critical strategy for leading companies.

This program will also include a Sustainability Lab – S Lab – a time during which participants can work to enhance and strengthen their company's own CSR strategy, and get guidance and feedback from course faculty.

Program Overview:

This two-day leadership program is designed to strengthen senior executives' efforts to integrate corporate responsibility into their business strategy and branding efforts. Join business leaders and Haas School of Business faculty in hands-on, highly interactive sessions that include corporate responsibility in a shifting world, measuring impact – for the business and beyond, communicating on corporate responsibility, and forecasting the future of Corporate Responsibility.

Program Topics Include:

Moving from CSR 1.0 to CSR 3.0 – Where We're Going: Leading Examples and Trends in Corporate Responsibility
Strategies and Frameworks for CSR 3.
Engaging Employees Through CSR
Are We There Yet? Sustainability Measures of Success
What to do Monday Morning: Putting Ideas into Action

Industry Speakers:

Glen Low
Principle, Blue Skye
www.blueskye.com

Chris Coulter
Executive Vice-President, Globescan
www.globescan.com

Mary Flowers
Vice-President, Wal-Mart

Liam Casey,
CEO, PCH International

Tony Kingsbury
Director, Sustainable Products and Solutions, Dow Chemical Company
responsiblebusiness.haas.berkeley.edu

For more information and to enroll in this course, visit the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Center for Executive Education website.