America Needs Jobs

Not those jobs. Steve Jobs. You get the point. He is gone. But what a legacy! Who are our next Steve Jobses?

Who has a dream worth pursuing, at great cost and against all ridicule? Who has the entrepenurial spirit to take great risk in the face of sometimes unthoughtful governmental regulation, to achieve great goals? Who will stop decrying uncertainty and start celebrating the opportunity that accompanies it? Who has the courage to lead without apology? Why not you and me?

This world changer was adopted, raised in modest means, and dropped out of college. Maybe there’s something to that “indomitable spirit” thing.

Revisit his 2005 commencement address to Stanford with me. What three or four nuggets will you take from it. Perhaps “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life,” or “Stay hungry. Say foolish.” or his humor in the line, “If you live every day as if it will be your last, eventually you will be right….”

What sticks with you? What will you share?

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Author Lee DeRemer is the Professor of Ethics and Strategic Leadership at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He retired from the Air Force after 26 years of flying, command, and staff assignments and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in values-driven leadership at Benedictine University. This post was republished with permission from www.DangerousU.com. 

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Reporting Roundup: What the CommitForum Experts Had to Say about the State of Reporting, the Value of Assurance, When to Disclose What, and Why Leading Indicators are a Better Measure of the Future

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This post provides highlights from a session of The CR CommitForum, held last week in New York City. Find a mistake in the text? Write us here to share the correction.
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Last week's CR CommitForum featured multiple sessions that touched on the topic of reporting of sustainability and corporate responsibility initiatives. The general conclusion - repeated by multiple speakers in various ways - was that transparency fosters sustainability. 



Read highlights in the areas of:

• General Reporting
• Third Party Assurance
• Disclosure
• Leading Indicators

How Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Helped Bring Food Security to their Coffee Growers

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This post provides highlights from a session of The CR CommitForum, held last week in New York City. Find a mistake in the text? Write us here to share the correction.
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Forum Speakers:
Pat Palmiotto, Director of the Allwin Initiative for Corporate Citizenship, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth

Rick Peyser, Director of Social Advocacy and Coffee Community Outreach, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters

Session Title:
Fighting Hunger in Coffee Supply Chain Communities

Los Meses Flacos, the thin months, is a phrase heard to often in countries like Nicaragua, which are also prime coffee-growing regions. This was a phrase that researchers and staff from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters heard repeated as they interviewed the farmers that provided the company's coffee beans.

When asked, 67% of the nearly 200 farming families interviewed reported extreme hunger for 2 to 8 months of the year.

Leaving a Positive Beer Print Behind

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This post provides highlights from a session of The CR CommitForum, held earlier this week in New York City. Find a mistake in the text? Write us here to share the correction.
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Forum Speaker:
Bart Alexander, Corporate Responsibility VP, MolsonCoors

If you knocked back a few cold ones this past weekend, you left a series of "beer prints." Beer prints are more than the ring of moisture left on the bar napkin: they're representative of the product's impact (positive and negative) in the community.

In what was one of the more engaging presentations at CommitForum last week, MolsonCoors corporate responsibility VP Bart Alexander shared an overview of the company's "beer print" campaign to help employees and stakeholders connect the beer industry to sustainability and corporate responsibility.

"We can make CSR as simple or as complicated as we want to make it," Alexander told the audience of corporate responsibility champions. "We can tie CSR to our business ambitions like avoiding risk and reducing cost, but employees' eyes gaze over at all this. Our employees get beer."

Writing the Unfinished Symphony at the Base of the Pyramid

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Stuart L Hart is a leading authority on the implications of environment and poverty for business strategy. He is the founder of Enterprise for a Sustainable World, www.e4sw.org. This blog is shared with permission from Voice of the Planet. 
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When Franz Schubert wrote the first two movements of Symphony No. 8 in B Minor in 1822 (what would come to be known as the "Unfinished Symphony"), little did he know that he was modeling the behavior and skills needed to successfully create the markets of the future at the base of the world income pyramid in the 21st century.

In fact, a full decade after C.K. Prahalad and I first wrote the Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP), few large corporations have yet to realize the vast business potential of the world's four billion poor and underserved: Most have either sought simply to sell stripped-down versions of their current products to the emerging middle classes in the developing world, or have abandoned the profit motive entirely and moved their BoP initiatives to the corporate social responsibility department or corporate foundation.

Green from the Ground Up: One World Trade Center Builds with Green Concrete (Highlights from The CR CommitForum)

The new buildings at One World Trade 

Center are being built with green concrete. 

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This post provides highlights from a session of The CR CommitForum, held earlier this week in New York City. Find a mistake in the text? Write us here to share the correction. 

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Forum Speakers:

Michael Gentoso, VP, Atlantic Region, US Concrete

David Green, Eco-Efficiency Analyst, BASF Corporation

Forum Title:

Durability From the Ground Up

On September 11, 2011, many of us turned to our televisions to watch the memorial ceremonies at the World Trade Center complex. While our eyes were drawn to the waterfall and the stunning new building, we may not have noticed the miles of new concrete that fill the area. When complete, Towers 1, 2, and 3, the transportation hub, and the museum and memorial will have close to a total of 1 million yards of concrete. 

Sustainability experts, however, paid attention. One World Trade Center is being built from the ground up with Green Concrete, a new material for reducing landfill waste and improving a building's carbon footprint. 

Leading the Sustainability Driven Company - Part 2

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Keith Cox, Ph.D., is the Systemic Sustainability Lead for idGroup Consulting & Creative, where he focuses on positive business and social change. He is also an advisor to the Center for Values-Driven Leadership. For the first entry in this series, click here. 

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This time we look at what makes a sustainability-driven leader tick. While there is no one ideal leadership profile that guarantees success in driving a strategic sustainability agenda, research has discovered some core characteristics that seem to enable individuals to embrace sustainability principles and drive them through the organizational culture.

Perhaps the most significant characteristic of these sustainability-driven leaders is that they are “called” to lead social change. In responding to the call, they express a desire to help others to promote humanity, to protect the planet, and they continually “live into” their highest vision of themselves. These desires influence the intentions, choices, conversations, and interactions of these leaders on a daily basis and are ultimately transformed into organizational priorities. Almost everyone I interviewed had a life story where some combination of the influence of parents, schooling, peers, the zeitgeist of the times, or a specific life experience informed a personal sense of purpose that connected them to principles of social/economic justice, environmental stewardship, and/or corporate responsibility.