Sustainable Cities: Taking a Broader View
By · CommentsSecond in a series on the Executive Council’s Sustainable Cities leadership forum.
One of the more intriguing themes that coursed through the dialogue at the Sustainable Cities forum was the importance of a holistic view of corporate impact. IBM, the event’s co-host promotes such a perspective through its Smarter Planet and Sustainable Cities work. Rich Lechner, IBM’s Vice President of Energy & Environment, spoke with Fortune’s Brian Dumaine about the infrastructure challenges ahead for electric vehicles. The cars themselves are simply the beginning and any solution must incorporate myriad considerations for recharging, battery exchange and disposal, and other issues that will involve auto manufacturers, utilities, city planners, and many others. IBM is embracing the complexity as the first step to simplifying the solution.
He also spoke about the famous example of UPS eliminating as many left hand turns as possible for its drivers. Yes, the move saves fuel and time — but it also improves public safety as left-hand turns result in more accidents than do right- hand turns. Public safety is a critical component of a sustainable city and not one that should be relegated solely to law enforcement or public health officials.
Scott Vitters (Coca-Cola) and Harry West (Continuum) also addressed the broad view during the Sustainable by Design panel. Vitters noted that Coca-Cola believes that its accountability goes from the acquiring the raw materials for its products through the fate of its containers after use. Vitters’ charge is packaging and he explained that the company is engaged in everything from developing bio-plastics to the recovery of used cans and bottles.
West, CEO of the design firm Continuum, offered the example of the Preserve toothbrush, a product his firm helped design. The toothbrush is made from recycled yogurt containers and other #5 plastics which saves significant amounts of water and energy when compared to virgin polypropylene. Its package is also a postage-paid return envelope that lets the brusher easily return the used toothbrush for recycling.
“Preserve doesn’t just help consumers think differently about toothbrushes,” West said. “It helps them see new possibilities in all products and product life cycles.”
In the afternoon, Relina Bulchandani of Cisco spoke about an “ERP (enterprise resource planning system) for a city,” which expressed the idea of enabling transparency and usability for the vast reservoirs of data being generated in cities. Cisco’s work with client companies involves improving decision-making by improving data flow and unlocking discreet pockets of data that might exist in a single department so that a broader number of users can benefit from them. A city is like this only with more players and more fixed boundaries between entities as some data exists with public sector agencies and some with utilities and other private sector organizations. Bulchandani, participating on the Data-driven City panel, discussed the importance of bringing all of this data together to optimize system performance, minimize environmental impact, and maximize benefits to citizens.
Each of these perspectives was distinct yet, refreshingly, acknowledged that for cities to be sustainable, organizations and individuals must think and act across a broader purview that takes externalities and full life-cycle impact into consideration.
The Sustainable City Circa 2040
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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→
Road Band or Session Players: A Leadership Challenge
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Alison Brown
I recently had the chance to interview Alison Brown and Garry West, the husband-and-wife team who run Compass Records in Nashville. I’ve known Alison since I recruited her to speak at a Harvard Business Publishing Burning Questions conference in 2003 — who could resist the story of an investment banker-turned Grammy Award-winning banjo player-turned record label founder? It was a tale of a passion for music that would not be denied and that turned not into a lark but into an ultimately more rewarding career.
I also interviewed her for Worthwhile magazine (Worthwhile A Brown interview).
I was in touch again recently because I am working on a book on leadership and wanted to get Alison and Garry’s insights into what it is like to lead people over whom you have little authority — musicians certainly fit the bill. While I have to save most of the leadership insights for the book, I did want to share part of the conversation that I found fascinating: the decision on whether to use an artist’s road band or session players when recording an album. Read More→
Water, Water Everywhere…but is it Safe to Drink?
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Why bring sustainability and urbanization together on June 8th at the Executive Council’s Sustainable Cities conference in New York? From The Economist: “The problem is not strictly a matter of water scarcity. Indeed, expanding the availability of water may actually increase disease…So hygiene and protected storage are essential. Yet there is a shortage of safe water for drinking and sanitation in many places, not least in the cities to which so many people are now flocking.”Getting Ready for Sustainable Cities
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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?
