Archive for Thought Leadership
Getting Ready for Sustainable Cities
Posted by: | CommentsI’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?
Blue Sky Paradox
Posted by: | CommentsA few years back I wrote a case study for Harvard Business Review, “They Bought In. Now They Want to Bail Out,” in which I introduced a concept I called the “Blue Sky Paradox.” It is an idea I came up after having experienced several large-scale technology implementations. In essence, the paradox comes from the process: during the discovery phase of the project, the architects get everyone to dream big in order to unearth their true needs, desires, and pain points and then come back with a much narrower solution when they are ready to put something in place.
It is a paradox because the discovery phase is perfectly legitimate — the techies have to both gain an understanding of the underlying issues, build excitement among different constituencies, and get people to put some skin in the game — as is the delivery phase — but the latter has been defined by budgets, time lines, legacy system compatibility issues, and vendor system limitations. It takes skill to manage expectations throughout the process particularly because many of the stakeholders involved in the brainstorming disengage from the process until procurement and design decisions have been made. They don’t get to see how the decisions and trade offs get made.
In brainstorming, your baseline is like a flat line across a page with 180° of possibilities between the two ends. Budgets, deadlines, and other aspects of the subsequent reality pull that line up from each end to form a “V.” All of the suggestions and ideas that fall outside of the “V” represent someones unrealized hopes and unfulfilled desires.
I’ve lived through a couple of such implementations after the case was published and, unfortunately, the lessons are still to be learned. I’m pleased that a couple of of people in the field found it valuable as well: See, Observe, and Learn and Darryl Praill at ADEXA.
UPS Longitudes
Posted by: | CommentsAmong the programs I developed and ran at Harvard Business Publishing is the Longitudes series created in collaboration with UPS. These events presented thought leadership on global trade and supply chain management to an audience of top UPS customers. We held these events in Chicago, Frankfurt, New York, Paris, Shanghai, and Toronto. I had the privilege to work with presenters such as the CEOs of Procter & Gamble, Williams Sonoma, Premier Farnell, and others as well as executives from Disney, IBM, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and a wide range of other companies. Academic leaders from around the world added their insights and I can’t forget Presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, F.W. DeKlerk, Vincente Fox, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclev Havel, and Lech Walesa.
UPS was a great client with which to work: their top management team was deeply invested in the program, they were truly engaged in the ideas and the concept that educating their customers would pay dividends (and at one point revealed that the Longitudes program had a 500% ROI), and were just all around nice people. The program won the Silver Anvil from the PR Society of America in 2006 and, subsequently, two other top industry awards: Gold award for Best Multi-Venue Event(B-to-B) as given by Event Marketer magazine’s EX Awards and the silver award for the Best Business to Business campaign as given by the Marketing Agencies Association Globe Awards.
I’ve attached the summary report from the last of the events: Longitudes ’08 held in Barcelona. If you’d like information on any of the others or about how to use thought leadership events to engage more deeply with a key constituency, please be in touch.

