How does a business start developing sustainable business practices, and go green?
I attended the first annual UT Sustainable Business Summit last month, and I learned two surprising things. One is that when you start to turn your company towards sustainable practices, the hardest thing to do is to talk about it.
Why? Because unless a company starts green, no company can just “go green” overnight. So it’s very easy to become a target when you announce some of the things you’re doing as a first effort along the way. I made some comments about this here: Sustainability Gets Weak Publicity
The other thing I took away from the Summit is that developing and instituting sustainable practices can be a very complicated process.
So going green is stabbed with a two-pronged fork: the complicated and slow effort required, and the low odds of getting any positive encouragement along the way.
All of this speaks to me about the need for better green communication. It’s clear that the old stereotype of good guys being all green and bad guys being all toxic is just not useful – it never was completely accurate, and it certainly doesn’t reflect the situation today.
Many corporations are quietly trying to “green up” the way they do things. And they’ve learned the hard way not to brag about it. What I want to do is help them brag about it.
We all want to have a sustainable way of life, on a sustainable planet, in sustainable markets, making sustainable profits. All of these factors have to work together. And the messages about how to achieve this need to be communicated.
Look for more here on the business of green business as Hunter and Associates starts to develop better ways to talk about sustainability.
