• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Jim Harris

  • About & Books ▼
    • Blindsided
    • The Learning Paradox
    • The 100 Best Companies to Work for in Canada
  • Speaking & Consulting ▼
    • Disruptive Innovation Speaker
    • Digital Transformation Speaker
    • Jim Harris – Virtual Keynote Speaker
    • Blockchain Speaker
    • Vuca Speaker
    • Business Speaker
    • Leadership Speaking
    • Disruptive Innovation Info
  • Videos & Media ▼
    • Articles
    • Technology
    • News
    • Testimonials
  • Contact Jim

climate change

How Much Can Business Influence the Environment?

December 17, 2012 By Jim Harris

Our first blog, How Sustainability Can Save Business, reframes the common purpose of traditional Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practitioners — that of “saving the environment.” Our premise: Given the social and economic frameworks and institutions of our society, more can be accomplished (and faster) by viewing sustainability as an economic opportunity relevant to business, compared to viewing it as an environmental initiative in isolation of business. Therefore the goal of “saving the environment” may be more appropriately framed as “saving business.”

Our perspective is pragmatic; that the worthy purpose of “saving the environment” is destined to be ineffectual, and at best immaterial, if environmental initiatives are pursued in isolation of the economic engines and structures of our society — that is, capitalism, business, government and the active participation of other organizations and individuals within this framework. It is within this framework that companies are applying a central guiding principle to their business sustainability strategies — “derive economic benefits from improved environmental and social outcomes.” Why? Because it delivers results.

We do not argue the desired outcome of healthy people and a healthy planet, and an economic framework that includes a broader social purpose. Indeed, we align on these values. After all, Jim was leader of the Green Party of Canada and Tyler used to earn his living as a conservation biologist in the forests of British Columbia, Alaska and the Northwest Territories.

It’s just that we don’t really think we have time to wait for traditional approaches to environmentalism to be successful. Similarly, we do not argue the value of traditional environmentalism and the vital role it continues to play within our society; rather, we simply note that traditional approaches to environmental objectives have failed to deliver results at the scale that’s required and in the time frame that’s required. In short, traditional environmental methods have not been successful enough, fast enough.

During the interim, some businesses have demonstrated that they can implement and scale the environmental benefits far better traditional approaches to “saving the environment” while also delivering shareholder value. For example, Canadian Tire estimates that they have accumulated an annual benefit stream of approximately $25 million in cost avoidance since launching its Business Sustainability Strategy in 2008 and reduced its transportation and real estate greenhouse gas footprint by 9 per cent while actually growing — increasing their tonne-km of product shipped by 22.5 per cent and the amount of real estate area by 9 per cent!

This applied eco-capitalism favours free market principles to achieve environmental objectives. Which is convenient, since business will find itself in an economic context in which sustainability issues will increasingly influence financial performance and global trade.

As such, our observation is this — for profit seeking companies, sustainability is most successfully employed as a strategic framework for innovation, value creation, employee engagement and organizational improvement — while generating environmental benefits. What’s excites us most about this approach, is that it would appear that Canadian business also shares this view.

Companies are informed and engaged; some even track, manage and mitigate their GHG emissions with internal rates of return (IRRs) at multiples of the cost of capital. And some incorporate internal carbon pricing into management discussions and decision-making. Many have discovered that business sustainability issues are production issues, supply chain issues, marketing, sales and customer issues, and post-consumer use issues. In short, they are economic issues in addition to being environmental issues, and we say, engage them as such.

As we noted previously, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) has urged Canada for a “national approach to climate policy and carbon pricing” in a policy paper — Clean Growth 2.0: How Canada can be a Leader in Energy and Environmental Innovation — highlighting how Canada can build a more competitive economy and a more sustainable society while ensuring adequate public finances to fund Canadian’s way of life.

Most recently, Perrin Beatty, the president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, has echoed this opportunity in a policy paper on strategic partnerships among Canada and Mexico, noting that carbon pricing is an area that may be ripe for bilateral Canada-Mexico collaboration. It is interesting to note that Beatty served as a Member of Parliament for the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada for 20 years (1972-1993) and served as a Cabinet Minister.

Change is afoot. The environmental community knows it; the business community knows it. All we need is for Canada’s government to know it — to recognize the opportunity and collaborate with business and the rest of society to build the policy framework that will enable us to participate in the greatest entrepreneurial imperative of our time, the creation of economic benefits from social and environmental leadership.

Which brings us to the original question: Will business influence Canada’s approach to environmental issues? We think they already are. And perhaps the question should be: How successful will business be in influencing Canada’s approach to environmental issues?

We are going to take some time over the holidays. So all the best for the holidays and Happy New Year to all our readers. Thank you so much for your support, feedback, and getting the word out about this blog! So this will be our last blog for 2012. When we return in 2013, we’ll continue to highlight how Canadian business is innovating from the inside out to begin to address many social and environmental issues.

Original Article

Filed Under: Magazine Articles Tagged With: Business Strategy, Canada News, Canadian Council Of Chief Executives, Canadian Tire, Carbon Pricing, cleantech, climate change, Climate Policy, Corporate Social Responsibility, Eco-Capitalists, energy efficiency, greenhouse gas emissions, innovation, Internal Rate Of Return, Mexico, Supply Chain, sustainability, Sustainable Business

24 Hours of Reality: The Dirty Weather Report

November 8, 2012 By Jim Harris

Join me on November 14 for 24 Hours of Reality: The Dirty Weather Report. Broadcast live online, it’s an event that anyone can attend. And it’s your chance to join millions around the world to demand real solutions.

Taking place over 24 hours, this event will put a spotlight on every region of the globe — featuring news, voices, and multimedia content across all 24 time zones. Every hour will be different. You’ll hear from experts, musicians, comedians, and everyday people about the impacts of climate change on their lives and homes.

Leading the event will be our Chairman, former Vice President Al Gore, who will conclude with a presentation on November 15 at 7 p.m. Eastern Time.

Most of all, we want to hear from you. During these 24 hours, we’ll ask you to sign a pledge and join a global movement to demand action. You can join the social media conversation, make connections, and send us your ideas. Find out how we can, and we must solve the climate crisis — and how you can help.

Looking for ways to improve your business? Jim Harris is a professional business innovation speaker, contact him today!

Filed Under: News Tagged With: 24 hurs of reality, Al Gore, climate change, dirty weather, event, impact, international, multimedia, november, online

Why Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast

November 1, 2012 By Jim Harris

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast, every day.” This was Tyler’s response to a question during a panel session at a recent conference. The panel was discussing the challenges faced by professional managers in their efforts to implement sustainability into business.

The other challenge under discussion was about finding the appropriate balance between sharing insights and strategy with others, versus holding some things back for the competitive reasons.

Tyler’s comment was relevant to both. His point: having a strategy is one thing, but being able to implement it is entirely another. After all, the value of a strategy is not what is written on the whiteboard or the back of napkin, it is the value unleashed by engaging the minds and hearts of motivated employees and suppliers.

The key to unlocking this value is to understand and harness the corporate culture, work within its bounds and value system, while making room for new ideas. Enterprise Risk Management colleagues refer to the ability to implement a strategy (or not) as “execution risk.”

Tyler has been fortunate to have had the experience of developing and implementing business sustainability strategies over the past decade in three different, very large corporations: a $14 billion company, a $400 billion company and Canadian Tire, a $12 billion company. In every instance he had to tailor his approach to the culture’s unique value system and the process by which ideas are accepted into the community.

Making Room for New Ideas

New ideas may not easily find room to coexist with pre-existing ones: There is a natural institutional and cultural inertia that opposes new concepts that compete for acceptance within an established corporate culture. It’s like a new group of people joining a cocktail party that is already well underway. They are either accepted, adding to and changing the pre-existing dynamic — tolerated as a fringe element, talking amongst themselves in the corner of the room — or totally rejected and asked to leave.

In short, one must tailor how the building blocks of the strategy are applied so that they are accepted. This is a very difficult to achieve, particularly for new employees, or “outsiders” tasked with this agenda. And believe us, we’ve both made a few mistakes; but, we’ve also learned that it is important to push the boundaries as well. The trick is knowing when and how to do it.

During the launch of the sustainability strategy for Tyler’s previous employer (a global retailer headquartered in a “dry county” of a US state in the buckle of the Bible belt) business sustainability “milestone meetings” were held every four months for employees and key suppliers to listen and learn from external sustainability leaders, and to share employee progress and success stories.

At one meeting, Ray Anderson, the Founder of Interface carpet, was the guest speaker. [As an aside: Interface’s 15 year sustainability effort has driven $450 million to the bottom line in savings — equal to 28 per cent of the cumulative operating profit over that period.] When Ray was part way through his talk people began to walk out — right in front of the CEO, Board members, senior executives and several hundred employees and guests. Tyler was astonished and had no idea why, or how people could be so rude or have such disregard for a guest speaker.

Later, as he found out via a few blunt e-mails from some of those who had left, he learned that Ray’s use of the geological time scale and comparing it to a 24-hour clock to demonstrate how relatively little time humans had been on the planet — a few seconds on Ray’s clock — and yet had how much we had changed it, was offensive to their fundamental religious beliefs

Being Canadian and new to the US south, being an atheist and someone who had studied geology, Tyler had no idea that such ideas could be a source of friction — that there were still people who believed that the world was only several thousand years old. Who knew?

Debriefing with the CEO after the meeting, Tyler apologized for the cultural oversight. The CEO waved off Tyler’s apology and expressed his disappointment at those who had left the meeting because, as he saw it, part of the value of the business sustainability strategy was opening up one’s perspective to those of others, to listen and learn about what matters to other people and their value systems. To this very day, one of the core competencies Tyler stress’s and includes in job requirements is the ability and wiliness to:

• Raise potentially controversial issues in a manner that encourages dialogue;

• Listen to others while maintaining a wide perspective on issues; and

• Incorporate diverse views and constructive criticism, leading to improved outcomes and understanding.

You Gotta have Faith

Reflecting upon his first few months in his new context, Tyler began to see a pattern of behaviour and expression of acceptance of sustainability into the culture by employees as almost evangelical in nature. People expressed acceptance of business sustainability as they would a faith-based belief system.

It hit Tyler smack in the face when, during one of the regular Saturday morning meetings, a senior vice president stood up and declared that he was now “a believer” in sustainability and its value to business because, if it was not for the business sustainability initiative, he would not have been able to sign the deal with “The Eagles” for the retailer to be the sole distributor of their retrospective CD box set. As it turned out, it was the underlying value system of sustainability that helped the west-coast musicians relate to the executive from rural middle-America. That deal alone probably paid for the entire sustainability team’s payroll and consulting budget for the next decade.

A beer-drinking Canadian atheist in the Republican dominated dry-county in the US Bible belt, Tyler had his work cut out for him for the next business sustainability Milestone Meeting. The featured guest speaker was non-other than the former Vice President Al Gore, who was going to give his now famous An Inconvenient Truth talk and promote his movie. If some people didn’t believe the world was more than a few thousand years old, how the hell would they ever “believe in climate change” — from a democrat politician?

Remember, culture trumps strategy every time: As it turned out, the answer was to open up with a preacher as the Vice President’s warm-up act. Jim Ball, the Executive Director of the Evangelical Environmental Network, kicked off the meeting’s discussion on climate change playing to the home-town audience — talking about how climate change has repercussions for “the health of our children” and “global and domestic poverty” because it is the world’s poor that will be most affected by it.

Jim’s message was that climate change was not a political issue; rather, it is an issue of moral duty. “How we care for God’s creation is one of the greatest moral challenges of our time. And as Christians, we also know it is a challenge that cuts to the heart of how we promote and cherish life.”

After this meeting, “belief” in climate change was never an issue, and Al Gore received a standing ovation.

In closing we offer you this observation: Implementing a business sustainability strategy into any business is equal parts strategy and change management. They are intertwined and dependent. To be successful, one should use the momentum of the force that oppose change — the cultural values, practices and inertia of the business — as the conduit into the business and its operations. It’s like using a sort of cultural Judo to embed sustainability values into the business operations and its culture.

 

Original Article

Filed Under: Magazine Articles Tagged With: Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, Business Strategy, Canada Business News, Canadian Tire, Change, Change Management, climate change, Corporate Culture, Corporate Sustainability, Culture, Interface, Ray Anderson, Strategy, sustainability

How Skeptics v Realists view Global Warming

February 2, 2012 By Jim Harris

Here is a great graphic from Think Progress Green from an article by Brad Johnson “AMS Certified Meteorologist Mark Johnson Claims ‘Earth Hasn’t Warmed In 15 Years’ “. It shows how the skeptics make deliberate misinterpretations of temperature data. The graphic can be seen originally at Skeptical Science: Going Down the Up Escalator, Part 1skepticsvrealists_500.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: climate change, global warming, Green

Inaction risks trillions in world assets

December 4, 2009 By Jim Harris

I was one of six live bloggers at the Munk Debate on climate change on Tuesday. The topic, “Climate change is humankind’s defining crisis and demands a commensurate response,” pitted Elizabeth May and George Monbiot on the pro side v. Bjørn Lomborg and Lord Nigel Lawson on the con side.

Read more:  http://bit.ly/6xX5NY

Filed Under: Magazine Articles Tagged With: bjorn lombert, climate change, elizabeth may, george monbiot, insurance, munich re, munk debate, nigel lawson, reinsurance, swiss re

Inaction will cost $7 trillion

June 2, 2009 By Jim Harris

By: Jordana Levine

If the issues of climate change are not addressed, it could cost every person on earth $1000 a year, or $7 trillion worldwide, says Nicholas Stern, former World Bank chief economist.  In the report, Climate Change and Green Jobs: Labour’s Challenges and Opportunities, the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) stresses that taking action will cost a lot less than doing nothing.

If the federal government invested $30 billion over ten years to transition to an economy that is consciously aware of climate change, 330,000 jobs would be created and Canada’s GDP would increase by $140 billion.  There would be $95 billion added to personal income and $28 billion in energy savings.

Just under half of Canada’s CO2 emissions come from heavy industry, mainly using coal, gas and oil.  The report gives the example of the tarsands, which the CLC says are the single most destructive project anywhere in the world, consuming one gallon of oil for every two gallons it produces.  The tarsands have already made a hole the size of Vancouver Island, and it is predicted to grow by 400-500% in the next ten years if no changes are made, which would make the area the size of Florida.  The CLC urges Canada to stop racing to provide the US with oil and focus on slowing down the use of non-renewable energy in its own country.

The CLC believes that good jobs and a strong economy will only happen if we take into account every area that contributes to a high-quality life, including the economy, jobs, equality an the environment.  Both the global economy and the environment will be in major trouble if temperatures rise more than two degrees Celsius, leading to destruction of ecosystems, hugely diminished biodiversity, dangerously high sea levels and extreme weather.

The CLC especially supports four major areas:
•    Promoting energy efficiency
•    Investing in rail and mass transit infrastructure
•    Creating proper fuel efficiency standards
•    Developing renewable energy sources

The report stresses the importance of ensuring that policies, such as carbon taxes, do not increase inequality between classes.  The biggest polluters should be paying the most and household carbon taxes should only be imposed if 100% of the revenue goes towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A Just Transition Fund is a vital aspect that would compensate communities and individuals for wage cuts, displacement and job losses; it would fund the retraining of these workers and encourage them to work in a greener economy without diminishing the quality of life or contributing to inequality.  

 

Filed Under: News Tagged With: CLC, climate change, coal, Green Collar Jobs, Greenhouse Gases, investment, Oil, renewable energy

CLC: “There will be no good jobs on a dead planet”

June 1, 2009 By Jim Harris

By: Jordana Levine

To prevent global warming, Canadian experts call for a 25% reduction below 1990 levels of CO2 emissions by 2020 and 80% below by 2050.  

The CLC Statement on Climate Change was written for the House of Commons regarding Bill C-30: Canada’s Clean Air and Climate Change Act as a recommendation.  It insists, “There will be no good jobs on a dead planet.”

The statement highlights key opportunities to create new jobs that do not generate emissions.  A serious program to retrofit older houses in Canada over 25 years would create 50,000 jobs a year on its own; construction jobs can substitute industrial, polluting jobs.  There could also be opportunities for jobs developing efficient and renewable fuels.  The CLC gives a number of ways that new industries could create more jobs that are kinder to the earth.

The CLC insists on creating strategies to regulate practices, encourage public investment and get the government directly involved through taxes and spending measures.  The government will need to be active, insuring that it makes useful investments that will help us transition to an environmentally sustainable, low-carbon economy.

The CLC calls for eliminating tax subsidies for the oil and gas industry.  Instead, the government should provide companies with tax incentives to invest in equipment that reduces emissions and that there should be a cap-and-trade system to limit emissions. Emissions caps should be lowered as green strategies and tax measures improve and the cost of reducing emissions falls.  The Pembina Institute and other experts calculate that a carbon charge of $30 per tonne would force actual change in an orderly manner.

The report points out that energy-efficient and low-carbon economies are more labour intensive, creating new opportunities for workers, but notes that some sectors will see job loss.  The CLC suggests that a Just Transition fund should be set up, which will compensate workers for loss of money and contribute to retraining them in new, greener fields.

The Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) calls for new, effective climate change policies to keep emissions down and provide new jobs centred around environmentally sustainable practices in the workplace.

The CLC brings Canada’s national and international unions, as well as provincial and territorial labour federations and district labour councils.  The members work in nearly every sector, occupation, and area of the country.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: CLC, climate change, Green Collar Jobs, Greenhouse Gases, investment

Footer

Jim Harris
Focusing on disruptive innovation, digital transformation, strategic planning with executive teams and boards & leadership.


#1 International Bestselling Author, Management Consultant, Keynote Speaker and Strategic Planning Facilitator.
Boost the bottom line of your business with expert advice from CURRENT Organization, a professional innovation consultant based business in Toronto, Ontario.
  • LinkedIn Icon
  • Twitter
  • You-Tube Icon
  • Facebook Icon

Copyright © 2022 · News Pro On Genesis Framework · Privacy Policy WordPress · Log in