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The Sustainable City Circa 2040

June 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The first in a series.

Jonathan F.P. Rose, founder of the green real estate and development Jonathan Rose Companies, delivered an inspirational capstone address at the Executive Council Sustainable Cities leadership forum earlier this week. I served as editorial director for the event.

Rose asked participants to close their eyes and imagine the city they’d like to live in in 2040. A few minutes later, people reported back what they’d “seen”: green space, children playing unsupervised, transportation that was accessible but not intrusive, successful locally owned businesses, a short distance between work and home (“No one ever visualizes a long commute,” Rose quipped when hearing that last contribution.).

What was interesting was that though the participants came from different industries and geographies, their sustainable urban ideals were remarkably similar. They were human scale and community oriented. [Read more...]

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Getting Ready for Sustainable Cities

May 26, 2010 By 1 Comment

New York is Going Green

I’m serving as editorial director and moderator of the upcoming Executive Council Sustainability Leadership Forum –  Sustainable Cities: Smarter, Greener, and More Competitive. It has been an interesting event to put together as I’ve interviewed and recruited speakers from companies like Autodesk, Coca-Cola, IBM, Cisco, ARUP, and many others. I’ve learned a lot and look forward to a day of rich, robust discussion.

Amanda Crater, founder of CraterCom, recently interviewed me for apodcast preview of the event: Eric McNulty-Sustainable Cities.

Executives from these large companies all have highly polished stories to tell. Their firms are doing good work and the impact that can be had at the scale at which they operate is significant. My editorial challenge, of course, is to puncture the polish. Not to play “gotcha” but to be sure that the audience gets the insights it needs.

I’m working on my queries: What will the long-term implications of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill be for business in general — not just the extractive industries? Must the cities of the developed world go “brown” before they go “green”? What sustainability opportunities with short payback windows are businesses overlooking?

What are the questions you’d most like me to ask of these executives?

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The Complexities of Happiness

May 18, 2010 By 1 Comment

Happiness has been a hot topic for the past couple of years. Dan Gilbert’s book and Tal Ben-Shahar’s course at Harvard made plenty of headlines. One of the more interesting projects I’ve been involved with in this area was a half-day brainstorming session in which I brought together a number of experts on happiness, laughter, and positive psychology at the behest of a major consumer package goods company. We explored the major lines of thought and research. Given the peculiarities of academia, many of these people had never met each other and really enjoyed the experience.

You can check out a summary report of the session here: Happiness Report

I find sustainability and leadership to be deeply connected to happiness. Certainly understanding that wealth beyond a certain point does not boost happiness should be instrumental to slowing the growth, or reversing, our resource-intensive culture’s mad never-ending pursuit of the next geegaw — a climb that has us on the Hillary Step of Maslow’s hierarchy climbing without supplemental oxygen, reaching the point where the brain begins to degrade until all judgment is lost. Fortunately, there seems to be a growing realization that our deep interpersonal connections, experiences, and contributions are far more important to our sense of well being than the number of adjectives attached to our favorite latte. [Read more...]

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Great Reviews for Value-Based Sustainability

March 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I generally have a good feeling about how a conference I’ve helped put together has gone by the end of the sessions. You can tell by the buzz in the room and the number of people taking notes. It always helps, however, to have the opinions of others.

CleanTechies was a sponsor of the event and as part of that effort they raffled off some tickets to the event and those people agreed to blog in return. The free pass may make them somewhat biased but I’m gratified by their overall response:

Thomas Rosenberg said, “This event had excellent speakers throughout.  Some of the speakers highlighted what their specific companies were doing and what were the drivers for those priorities.  This component provided excellent examples of early wins and highlighted the importance of proper metrics. ”

Kristen Parinello also gave the conference a positive review. Tamara Becher said, “At last week’s Executive Council summit on Value-Based Sustainability: the Business Case for Clean, Green, and Lean, several best-of-breed companies shared their thoughts on sustainability and the role of consumers.”

You can also check out the highlight reel.

The next summit will be organized around the theme of “The Sustainable City” and will be held in New York on June 8. Your ideas for topics and speakers are welcome.

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Value-Based Sustainability

February 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The recent Executive Council Value-based Sustainability summit in San Jose was a great experience. I enjoyed moderating the conversation with Libby Reder of eBay and Bob Stoffel of UPS. They had very different yet complementary sustainability stories: eBay’s driven from the bottom up while UPS’s came from their intense engineering focus. Both are leaders in greening their businesses.

I also enjoyed the interview I led with Bryan Jacob of Coca-Cola. Coke will be carbon net-neutral at the Vancouver Olympics and has forged a productive relationship with former antagonist Greenpeace.

“The 2% is a big idea, first because its really 4%… you only need 25 of those solutions to solve the whole thing.”
~ Sumir Karayi, CEO, 1E

The key take-aways: there are steps that companies can take that deliver immediate ROI (greening IT and automating energy management are two); the companies that are seeing the greatest success are involved in conversations beyond their own four walls (such as Coke’s with Greenpeace) — they are engaged in the broader dialogue; and measurement is still a struggle as organizations strive to understand which metrics matter most. Analytics are growing in importance. Read my full trip recap on Executive Nomad and see the video highlights on Exec TV.

I enjoyed making new acquaintances: Amanda Crater of CraterCom, Emilie Cowan of Opportunity Green, and Michael Cabot of Autodesk to mention just three.

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