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Sustainable business leadership - update

Gil Friend has emailed to ask me to direct altfunction readers to the updated Declaration of Sustainable Business Leadership:

'Sustainable Business - A Declaration of Leadership' now has its own web site.

PDF downloads are free; hard copy posters (11x17, Reincarnation 105# book paper (100% recycled, 50% post-consumer) suitable for framing, hanging in your office, or giving to your boss, are now available for purchase.

Coming soon: discussion space to explore how people are putting the Declaration into practice.

You can find the story behind the poster -- and the challenge it carries -- in my latest Sustainability Sundays posting at WorldChanging.com.

Like the look of the discussion space. Might also be worth noting here that the organisation I work for, Forum for the Future, is also doing some work around what leadership in business looks like. It should be public in a few months, so any useful pointers to innovative examples of business leadership I might not have heard of will be welcome.

Nike reports... at last

Neville Hobson alerts me to Nike's first CR report since the Kasky case brought public reporting from Nike to a rather abrupt halt. There's bound to be tonnes to think about in there but for starters some interesting words from Phil Knight (outgoing CEO and Mr Nike). Not least the candid honesty about making a mistake.

The second chapter began with critics bringing working conditions in underdeveloped countries to the attention of the world. After a bumpy original response, an error for which yours truly was responsible, we focused on making working conditions better and showing that to the world.

Our goal in writing this report has been to be as accurate, complete and honest as we can be about how Nike performs. Just producing this report proved to us that the value of reporting goes far beyond transparency. It becomes a tool for improving both our management of business and in giving us clues about what we need to do next.

(My emphasis). It is a time of year when I get bombarded by CR reports - BP's blockbuster also came out this week among others - and it is easy to lose sense of why reporting is important, but Knight nails it: it's about performance. Transparency is essential but useless without corresponding change.

More than that, as Knight says, it is about 'giving us clues about what we need to do next'. Reporting is historically about the past. It's about to become more and more about the future. And though identifying future risks will be driving CR into looking forward, the companies that do it (to coin a phrase) will be those who seek business opportunities, or 'what we need to do next'.

There are few reports I read cover to cover yet when Knight writes: 'but I urge you to read it from cover to cover. And then some: because probably the most significant piece of disclosure linked to this report is actually on our Web site.' I probably will.

Sustainable business leadership

Natural Logic's Gil Friend has just posted his Declaration of Sustainable Business Leadership - a cogent statement, well presented. It strikes me as a practical tool for engagement with businesses seeking a way of making such a declaration.

The fact that it is not 'owned' by a business - i.e. it's not BP's declaration or Xerox's etc - could be particularly useful.

In talking to businesses about how they create and present statements of intent on corporate responsibility or sustainable business practice, I generally use existing examples from leading businesses. However, this sometimes elicits a response along the lines of 'but we're not a [insert sector of choice] company, what can we learn from them?' This declaration might get round that issue.

The presentation matters too. There is a lot of information there - often a major headache for communications professionals addressing CR and sustainability ('can't we summarise it and put the rest in an appendix?' etc) which, by their nature, are complex and wideranging. Friend gets round this through effective use of colour and five bold, positive introductory statements that lead the reader through the argument for sustainable business and present a solution too:

Because:
We envision our company, suppliers and customers, and our community doing business in ways that:
To do this we will:
We will measure our progress by the trends our:
We will persue these steps with a commitment to:

Definitely worth a look.

Link: Gil Friend.