Economic, Social, and Environmental Sustainability Designing Organizations for the Triple Bottom Line

Transcription

1 Economic, Social, and Environmental Sustainability Designing Organizations for the Triple Bottom Line A Working Conference October 2 3, 2008 Goal Create a collaborative network to share knowledge and help define a research agenda on designing and changing organizations for economic, social, and environmental sustainability. We anticipate conference participants will form the nucleus of an ongoing community of interest and may participate in subsequent research collaborations. Messy Global Issues Despite the recent increase in company attention to sustainability, little is known about designing organizations to address the triple bottom line of economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Tackling these messy global issues requires new organizing approaches, among them the building of constellations of organizations coming together in coordinated effort. We believe the future of organizational effectiveness is in designing sustainable organizations capable of accomplishing the triple bottom line. Clearly, the change required to accomplish this will be enormous and require great leadership. To learn how best to do this, USC Marshall s Center for Effective Organizations is convening an invitation only meeting. Participants will share experiences and learnings about working together to simultaneously increase economic, social, and environmental sustainability. investigate organizational challenges and models for dealing effectively with these issues. identify areas where greater knowledge will help companies and constellations of organizations navigate this new terrain. Conference Structure Issues to be discussed in the conference will be surfaced through 4 to 5 plenary cases. All participants will share their case example and participate in discussions where experiences and learnings are shared. We will collectively draw conclusions about the issues that demand attention and require additional research. Cases under Consideration The "Greening" of Paper: Emergence of Corporate Social Responsibility Policies throughout a Supply Chain. In recent years, we have witnessed the "greening" of the paper industry, spurred by the emergence of purchasing policies by book and catalogue printers and pulp and paper manufacturers. This case highlights this evolution and includes a focus on the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that played a key role in encouraging these industry players to source responsibly. The case also highlights how fragmentation and complexity in supply chains across a globalized landscape pose challenges to sustainability and explores some of the innovative responses to these challenges. Participants will include representatives of ForestEthics (NGO), NewPage Paper, Clean Agency, and others. Forest City: The Challenge of Building Sustainability as a Core Focus in a For Profit Business. Forest City, a $7.8 billion NYSE real estate development company with projects all over the country, has adopted the principles of sustainability into the projects it develops and the properties it manages. The case study will describe Forest City s journey, its accomplishments, and the challenges of building sustainability as a core focus in a for profit business. The Cuyahoga River Valley Organization (CRVO): The Challenge of Sustaining a Geographic Region. This case describes the challenges of creating a multi organizational collaborative to restore an historical, economic, and environmental region. The project involves corporations, NGOs, and governmental agencies working in concert. The case will describe the organizational infrastructure they are establishing. Participants will include representatives of Cuyahoga County 1 P age

2 government, the Foundation community, Currere, Inc. (the organization design consultant), the park district, and the business community. Sustainable Enterprise Executive Roundtable (SEER): The Challenge of Synergistic Sustainability. A series of sustainability projects have evolved in collaboration among Mattel, Waste Management, the Port of Los Angeles and Port Terminal Operators, YTI, and others. The case explores the processes used to create this synergy. Participants will include representatives of Waste Management, Port of Los Angeles and Yusen Terminals (NYK shippers). Religious Communities as Hubs of Sustainability Activities. Los Angeles is home to the world s most diverse religious activity, where representatives of the world s major (and minor) religions are seen in daily life. This panel discussion will include examples from local church and temple leaders who have engaged their congregants in greening themselves and their worlds. Much of this work has come about through collaboration across faith boundaries, touching the lives of thousands of stakeholders. Participants include the USC Dean of Religious Life, rabbis from Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills and Hebrew Union College, and ministers from All Saints Community Church. UPS: Leveraging Knowledge and Resources within the Company and Beyond. UPS has an 80 year history of engaging in community sustainability and alternative fuel and fuel conservation activities focuses that have been integrally related to their focus on the social sustainability and robustness of their own organization. This session will focus on the many external alliances, partnerships and relationships that they have built that have resulted in the leverage of their knowledge and resources throughout the world, including impact on the transportation and logistical industry, efficient global disaster response capabilities, and the improvement of the functioning and contribution of non profit organizations throughout the world. It will talk about the internal learning and innovation system that is set up to continually discover new ways to impact ecological, social, financial and community sustainability. Sustainable Health Care Delivery: Sustainability of health care is a global issue, and one that knows no organizational boundaries. The efforts of Cleveland Clinic and the Skaraborg Hospital System focus on organizational multi stakeholder approaches to building sustainable, high quality health care delivery, including new ways of relating to patients, organizing for efficient and effective health care delivery, and the ecological and community impacts of the health care system. Governance mechanisms (structures and processes) for engaging key stakeholders will be a major focus in the session. Sustaining Human Rights: The Gap s comprehensive corporate social responsibility program is the context for understanding the relationship between The Gap and Social Accountability International (SAI). The Gap s initial problemsolving efforts to address human rights and labor standards in its supply chain, such as developing codes of conduct and plant visits to monitor compliance, were inadequate and ineffective. In response, The Gap set about developing an internal capability and working with SAI to influence industry standards. In addition to encouraging its 2000 factories to achieve ISO certification in quality and environmental processes, Gap factories are also encouraged to achieve SA8000 certification, the gold standard in human rights certification. This case provides an opportunity to see how businesses and activist organizations can work together. Public Private Partnerships for Sustainability: A model for leveraging sustainable construction and practices is through the partnering of corporations with institutional systems. The public private partnership between Siemens and the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority is part of a larger nation wide partnership. Similarly, public private partnership between the multi campus Los Angeles Community College System and leaders from regional private businesses has also yielded significant mutual advantage. These cases allow the exploration of how such partnerships are created and evolve and the challenges that are faced in achieving their objectives. PricewaterhouseCoopers: A challenge facing business organizations is how to account for non financial outcomes. How does one really account for a triple bottom line? PricewaterhouseCoopers is spearheading work on this globally, working collaboratively with client organizations and regulatory boards. The issues and approaches being used will be discussed. PepsiCo Alegent Northrop Grumman 2 P age

3 Attendees By Invitation Only In order to engage in active dialogue, the conference will be limited to 50. Attendees will be invited based on relevant experience and learnings on sustainability initiatives. Attendees must be actively engaged in sustainability initiatives. Teams will be encouraged. Benefits Participants will learn about new practices, policies, and organizing approaches to apply in their own work. Summaries of the plenary cases and of the approaches being used will be available as resources to foster dialogue and debate over how best to organize for sustainability. We will build upon these cases and others to create a field handbook. We will generate a research agenda identifying the key questions organizations (business, governments, and NGOs) are asking. Building a Community of Interest An important outcome of the conference is the building of a community interested in designing organizations for sustainability. The community will work to advance practice in the area of multi stakeholder collaboration to address fundamental problems that threaten the sustainability of our corporations, communities, and ecologies. One approach will be the identification of a set of action research projects to jointly benefit participating organizations and the larger community. If you are interested in attending the conference and being part of this community, contact one of the researchers below to schedule a conversation. Center for Effective Organizations Sue Mohrman, Chris Worley, Susan Resnick West University of Southern California 3415 S. Figueroa Street Davidson 200 Los Angeles, CA Tel: Fax: smohrman@marshall.usc.edu Center for Sustainable Cities Hilary Bradbury Huang University of Southern California Kaprielian Hall 416 Los Angeles, CA Cell: Fax: Hilary.bradbury@usc.edu For further information about the issues and the conference, please read the attached document. 3 P age

4 Proposal for a working conference to collaboratively exchange knowledge about organization designs for sustainable success Economic, Social, and Environmental Sustainability Designing Organizations for the Triple Bottom Line The tide is turning. For more than 100 years, the dominant definition of organizational effectiveness has focused on traditional financial outcomes. Corporations looked at increasing revenues and the bottom line; governments looked at growing tax bases and budgets; and non governmental organizations (NGOs) looked for funding sources. During the next century, a new definition of effectiveness will turn toward a profound understanding of the interdependence among organization performance, societal responsibility, and ecological sustainability. This concept of a triple bottom line focuses organizations on these outcomes simultaneously. Sustainable success requires finding ways to deal with the complex interdependencies and trade offs inherent in the global economy, managing the tensions among various interests, and finding approaches to mitigate the undesirable ecological outcomes of current competitive models. These issues are messy and global. They cannot be tackled by single players inside fragmented systems. In a sign of the times, in October 2005, the CEO of Wal Mart, one of the largest corporations on the planet, announced its commitment to rigorous sustainability goals, such as reducing waste and using renewable energy supplies. Companies in its supply chain were quickly required to join the journey to sustainability. Many are feeling the pressure to reduce their carbon footprint, a first step in a journey to embed sustainability considerations in the way they operate. The work has just begun. Most attempts to address threats to sustainability global warming, water pollution, energy, resource related political conflict, homelessness, poverty, or disease struggle to work within the fragmented systems we have inherited from the industrial era. Within corporations, sustainability can be an economic opportunity, leading to competition over who is the greenest or local efforts to encourage recycling and carpooling. Governments look for ways to shift risk and develop tax strategies to encourage conservation. NGO s create watchdog websites to catch and comment on multinational behavior that is harmful or unjust. Instead of addressing these issues independently, impact and progress will depend on these organizations in the future coming together to find ways to create value through collaboration rather than pursuing their purposes independently. As suggested by the examples above, by considering economic, social, and environmental bottom lines, constellations of organizations can make progress toward sustainable functioning. They can strive to meet their present needs without reducing the capacity of future generations to meet their needs. But the paradigm shift is fundamental, and we must learn quite a bit more about how to do this. The University of Southern California s Center for Effective Organizations (CEO) and Center for Sustainable Cities (CSC) are joining forces to learn more about what makes these constellations effective and ultimately to provide guidance to such networks as they change and design themselves for sustainable success. CEO has a long tradition of studying organizational effectiveness issues both within the context of a single organization and in multi interest collaborative networks. CEO is increasingly bringing this knowledge to bear in helping companies and other organizations deal with issues of sustainable effectiveness. The Center for Sustainable Cities, a consortium of faculty from several departments at USC, engages in multidisciplinary research on making cities more sustainable. As part of their mission CSC has convened a Sustainable Enterprise Executive Roundtable (SEER) which enables collaborative learning among Southern California business leaders so that more sustainable practices may result, benefiting the environment, the community, and the bottom line. How will we learn more? Despite the recent increase in company attention to issues of sustainability, too little is known about how to successfully organize to address these issues, and about the models and frameworks organizations can use to position themselves for sustainable effectiveness. To learn more, CEO and CSC are convening a special interest group meeting to: 4 P age

5 share the experiences and learning of organizations and consortia that have been working to increase sustainability, investigate organizational issues and models to deal effectively with sustainability issues, and identify the pressing issues where greater knowledge is required to help companies and constellations of organizations navigate this new terrain. Cases of Designing for Sustainable Success The centerpiece of the conference will be the discussion of current, ongoing cases of organizations coming together to tackle the messy problem of integrating economic, social, and environmental bottom lines. In the course of a two day conference we will hear from the leaders and participants in these cutting edge organizations and networks of organizations, dialogue about how they have succeeded and struggled in addressing complex problems and opportunities, hear from participants about how their experiences are similar to or different from our plenary presenters, and draw conclusions about the issues that require additional research and demand attention. Among the cases under consideration are: The "Greening" of Paper: Emergence of Corporate Social Responsibility Policies throughout a Supply Chain. In recent years, we have witnessed the "greening" of the paper industry, spurred by the emergence of purchasing policies by book and catalogue printers and pulp and paper manufacturers. This case highlights this evolution and includes a focus on the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that played a key role in encouraging these industry players to source responsibly. The case also highlights how fragmentation and complexity in supply chains across a globalized landscape pose challenges to sustainability and explores some of the innovative responses to these challenges. Participants will include representatives of ForestEthics (NGO), NewPage Paper, Clean Agency, and others. Forest City: The Challenge of Building Sustainability as a Core Focus in a For Profit Business. Forest City, a $7.8 billion NYSE real estate development company with projects all over the country, has adopted the principles of sustainability into the projects it develops and the properties it manages. The case study will describe Forest City s journey, its accomplishments, and the challenges of building sustainability as a core focus in a for profit business. The Cuyahoga River Valley Organization (CRVO): The Challenge of Sustaining a Geographic Region. This case describes the challenges of creating a multi organizational collaborative to restore an historical, economic, and environmental region. The project involves corporations, NGOs, and governmental agencies working in concert. The case will describe the organizational infrastructure they are establishing. Participants will include representatives of Cuyahoga County government, the Foundation community, Currere, Inc. (the organization design consultant), the park district, and the business community. Sustainable Enterprise Executive Roundtable (SEER): The Challenge of Synergistic Sustainability. A series of sustainability projects have evolved in collaboration among Mattel, Waste Management, the Port of Los Angeles and Port Terminal Operators, YTI, and others. The case explores the processes used to create this synergy. Participants will include representatives of Waste Management, Port of Los Angeles and Yusen Terminals (NYK shippers). Religious Communities as Hubs of Sustainability Activities. Los Angeles is home to the world s most diverse religious activity, where representatives of the world s major (and minor) religions are seen in daily life. This panel discussion will include examples from local church and temple leaders who have engaged their congregants in greening themselves and their worlds. Much of this work has come about through collaboration across faith boundaries, touching the lives of thousands of stakeholders. Participants include the USC Dean of Religious Life, rabbis from Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills and Hebrew Union College, and ministers from All Saints Community Church. UPS: Leveraging Knowledge and Resources within the Company and Beyond. UPS has an 80 year history of engaging in community sustainability and alternative fuel and fuel conservation activities focuses that have been integrally related to their focus on the social sustainability and robustness of their own organization. This session will focus on the many external alliances, partnerships and relationships that they have built that have resulted in the leverage of their knowledge and resources throughout the world, including impact on the transportation and logistical industry, efficient global disaster response capabilities, and the improvement of the functioning and contribution of non profit organizations throughout the world. It will talk about the internal learning and innovation system that is set up to continually discover new ways to impact ecological, social, financial and community sustainability. Sustainable Health Care Delivery: Sustainability of health care is a global issue, and one that knows no organizational boundaries. The efforts of Cleveland Clinic and the Skaraborg Hospital System focus on organizational multi stakeholder approaches to building sustainable, high quality health care delivery, including new ways of relating to patients, organizing 5 P age

6 for efficient and effective health care delivery, and the ecological and community impacts of the health care system. Governance mechanisms (structures and processes) for engaging key stakeholders will be a major focus in the session. Sustaining Human Rights: The Gap s comprehensive corporate social responsibility program is the context for understanding the relationship between The Gap and Social Accountability International (SAI). The Gap s initial problemsolving efforts to address human rights and labor standards in its supply chain, such as developing codes of conduct and plant visits to monitor compliance, were inadequate and ineffective. In response, The Gap set about developing an internal capability and working with SAI to influence industry standards. In addition to encouraging its 2000 factories to achieve ISO certification in quality and environmental processes, Gap factories are also encouraged to achieve SA8000 certification, the gold standard in human rights certification. This case provides an opportunity to see how businesses and activist organizations can work together. Public Private Partnerships for Sustainability: A model for leveraging sustainable construction and practices is through the partnering of corporations with institutional systems. The public private partnership between Siemens and the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority is part of a larger nation wide partnership. Similarly, public private partnership between the multi campus Los Angeles Community College System and leaders from regional private businesses has also yielded significant mutual advantage. These cases allow the exploration of how such partnerships are created and evolve and the challenges that are faced in achieving their objectives. PricewaterhouseCoopers: A challenge facing business organizations is how to account for non financial outcomes. How does one really account for a triple bottom line? PricewaterhouseCoopers is spearheading work on this globally, working collaboratively with client organizations and regulatory boards. The issues and approaches being used will be discussed. PepsiCo Alegent Northrop Grumman What are the Benefits from Attendance? We expect that participants will benefit from the conference in ways directly related to their interests. First, we expect participants will learn about new practices, policies, and designs that they may be able to use in their own organizations. Second, we expect to have available summaries of the cases that participants can use in their own organizations to foster debate and dialogue over how best to organize for sustainability. Our intent is to build upon these cases and others to create a field handbook that will be available to all attendees. Third, we expect to generate a research agenda identifying the key questions organizations (business, governments, and NGOs) are asking. One desired outcome is to build a community of interest to jointly work to advance practice in the area of multi stakeholder collaboration to address fundamental problems that threaten the sustainability of our corporations, communities and ecologies, in part through the identification of a set of action research projects to jointly benefit participating organizations and the larger community. Attendance The conference intends to bring together representatives from the system itself. This would include representatives from the cases to be presented as well as business leaders interested in building their organization s capacity and capability for organizing for sustainability. We also seek government officials who want to improve their ability to work in public private partnerships, NGO leaders who recognize that social change involves partnerships, and academics interested in the generating a meaningful stream of research to advance organizations ability to create a triple bottom line. Who are we: Center for Effective Organizations. Since its founding in 1979, the Center for Effective Organizations (CEO) has conducted cutting edge research on a broad range of organizational effectiveness issues. The common value underpinning CEO research has been a simultaneous focus on multiple indicators of success: economic and social (employee and customer) outcomes; and, more recently, on broader indicators of sustainability. The leading university based action research center, CEO has conducted research that influences how organizations are managed while also making important contributions to academic research and theory from its inception. The Center for Effective Organization's pioneering research in the areas of organizational design and effectiveness has earned it an international reputation for research that bridges the gap between academic theory and management practice. 6 P age

7 Results from Center research projects are reported and published in many leading business publications and academic journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Business Week, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, Industry Week, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Members of the Center also have published over 30 books that are based on their research. The Center for Sustainable Cities, founded in 1998, engages in multidisciplinary research on making cities more sustainable. The Center was established by USC faculty from engineering, the natural and social sciences, urban planning, and environmental health sciences. This multidisciplinary group produces innovative, actionable and policy oriented research. The Center conducts research in three major areas: 1) Public Health and Metropolitan Growth, 2) Urban Habitat Conservation, Watershed Health, and Open Space Planning, and 3) Business and Industrial Ecology. In addition the Center offers a graduate certificate program as well as training and policy for sustainable practice inside government and business systems. 7 P age