A few highlights:

Walt led off saying that business must have a “broader purpose in life” – employees and other stakeholders become much more excited if there is more to it than making money.  This is a natural human desire, for meaning – and it’s surprising in a way that somehow the “common sense” of business tells us to ignore something so fundamental. According to Walt, making money is great and essential, but – has to be a by-product of something bigger. Purpose really has to come first.

Lisa made the point that leadership includes understanding the full impacts of one’s decisions and actions, evaluating and driving reductions in negative impacts, and constantly engaging and communicating.  Ellen and Kim supported this with some very concrete examples of how they do planning, budgeting, and impact measurement in their respective companies.

I posed the question to the panel “In order to be sustainable, is a fundamentally different leadership style required?”

The consensus was that the style was not different, but additional.  Instead of thinking one quarter ahead, it’s having a longer term vision of the business in the world. It’s respecting the need to get buy in throughout the organization, to advocate for sustainability throughout the supply chain, and to act consistently from a set of sustainable values.

These are not in any way something antithetical to good business practice.  This deeper appreciation of time and complexity translates into concrete business results, including financial savings, brand protection, the ability to shape or avoid regulation, protecting resources needed in the supply chain, anticipating and meeting customer requirements.

Another question:  “Doesn’t this all make executive decision making much more complex, and thus more difficult?” The answers surprised me. Everyone said that it wasn’t actually more difficult, and in fact had very positive results. Walt felt that this approach increased employee involvement and satisfaction. Kim said it was hard to quantify but undoubtedly profitable. Lisa said it resulted in more integrated, deeper solutions.

Ellen described it as taking the process of due diligence deeper into the organization, including thinking longer term about potential impacts and risks.  She used the term “greater mindfulness” to describe this way of seeing.

In the end, culture is huge, the major driver of sustainable corporate behavior.  It means basing hiring decisions, rewards and incentives on consistent values – which in New Belgium’s case, includes a commitment to FUN.  (A simple concept they never taught me in business school!).  And Walt spoke of the most important skills for new employees being not technical – he says we can teach that stuff – but more fundamental attributes of passion, integrity and character.

Sustainable leadership is perhaps best seen not as huge and disruptive paradigm shift, but rather a more gentle and ongoing deepening of perspective.

David Secunda runs a kids’ summer camp operation called Avid 4 Adventure www.avid4.com. He talked about setting out to reduce VMT in their vans carrying kids around for summer camps.    They optimized the business, not to get as many kids in as possible, but to ensure that their fleet of vans was utilized as close to capacity as possible, no more, no less. They made the commitment and decided to live with the consequences. As a result, they actually turned away children when they reached that capacity. The surprising result – better profitability in a flat revenue year.  Focusing on optimizing VMT had a direct, and very favorable, impact on costs.

And even more surprising was the experience of David Rubin, of A Spice of Life Catering www.aspiceoflife.com .  A Spice of Life has been in business for 18 years, and was Colorado’s first “sustainable” caterer. They cater all over Colorado, and formerly had employees drive their own vehicles (not reimbursing mileage) to places like Steamboat Springs (a nearly 200 mile trip).  By conventional business logic, this allowed them to send employees home (each in their own car) to drive 200 miles home when they weren’t needed.  Saved a few hours’ wages.  And mileage. David bit the bullet and provided vans for employees to drive together, covering the cost of transportation – which actually increased his costs.  The surprise here was the huge impact on team culture.  It seems that having folks together in the car proved to be a boon in this already very creative, flamboyant team culture – resulting in better performance, happier employees and delighted customers.

The negative consequences of “to each his own car” are pretty evident – we spend our days in a state of isolation from each other, an isolation that is historically unprecedented. In all the conversation about sustainability, we often focus on the technical facts and forget that the way we occupy the landscape and move around on it is directly related to our culture – how we experience ourselves and each other.

I’ve been fond of saying culture change is a driver for sustainability – but these stories show it goes both ways!

1. Figuring out what’s going on and what’s possible to do. Do we agree on what the situation is?  Do we see a common problem or opportunity? Do we both care to do something about it?
2. Coming to an agreement. Healthy agreements and promises are based on each party clearly understanding what the other person is offering or asking for, and what that will look like when it’s done.  In business planning language, this is expressed as SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Accountable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
3. Following through, and dealing with breakdowns. This is where things get challenging. If our agreement is clear, whether because it’s very thorough, or because we “understand” each other through past experience,  follow through may be easy and straightforward. If not, we need to get comfortable with addressing the situation early on – a skill I call constructive complaining. The clearer the agreement in the first place, the easier it is to deal with breakdowns.
4. Declaring completion, letting go, and learning. This could be as simple as saying Thank You for a job well done, or a lot tougher if things haven’t turned out the way we wanted or expected. Letting go does not mean forgetting about it, it’s understanding how to get better results next time, and becoming more skillful with our requests and offers to others.

Too often though, we fall into the trap of seeing businesses, or any purposeful organization, as a “machine” – a financial machine, an information machine, etc, as if we simply plan it, program it, and “get” the parts to co-operate.  A more powerful approach is to see the plan as an agreement among all the people that need to make it happen. To be successful in today’s transparent environment, any organization, whether a business, a government agency, or a social enterprise, needs to maintain the confidence of all its stakeholders.  This requires an ongoing conversation about what each stakeholder values and how well we are fulfilling that.  And that’s the foundation for measuring business performance.