“From my point of view,” designer Stefan Sagmeister has said, “living a full life includes doing no harm, and being aware of the world that you live in on various levels.”
The occasion for the reflection was the launch of Worldchanging: a user’s guide to the 21st century, that he had designed.
A bestselling book of 2006, Worldchanging includes a foreword by such heavy hitters as Al Gore and Bruce Sterling, while its editor, Alex Steffen, runs the influential non-profit web magazine of the same name. If Sagmeister comes across as idealistic, Steffen is very much aware of the bottom line.
“Money spent making greener profits is not a cost, it’s an investment,” says Steffen.
If you want facts and figures, ask Fuji Xerox. Since initiating its Sydney recycling facility, the company has recovered 99% of end-of-life equipment and parts, saving $13 million in new part costs, generated export revenue of $5 million, and created over 100 new jobs. For its efforts, Fuji Xerox is a finalist in the large business category of the 2010 Premier’s Sustainability Awards.
While awards might be confirmation of their corporate social responsibility, surely it’s the million-dollar profits that matter most. Doesn’t a business succeed by focusing on one thing: the bottom line?
Increasingly, businesses – like those on the Dow Jones sustainability index or the FTSE 4 Good, to which the Xerox parent company has been nominated – are realising that profit is only part of the equation. For them, contributing something back to society and being environmentally sustainable is also part of the economic business model – the triple bottom line.
Indeed, the very fact that big companies have chief financial officers or even chief sustainability officers scrutinising the triple bottom line is a transformation in corporate governance.
As the very existence of those stock market indices suggest, corporate social responsibility is not only increasingly prevalent, it’s the basis for a burgeoning shareholders revolution.
Taming the fickle and demanding shareholder is a major enterprise. It’s about having them recognise ‘patient capital’ – acknowledging that greening a company and corporate social responsibility takes time – and that stakeholders, not just shareholders, are affected by businesses. Exponential growth is appealing, but difficult to sustain.
But the sustainability revolution doesn’t need to happen only at the big end of town. As the directors of Etiko and Sustainable Living Fabrics, Nick Savaidis and Bill Jones, testify smaller companies can make a positive contribution as well.
While research by the Mobium group, Living LOHAS, suggests people are prepared to pay price premiums of around 5–10% for sustainable products, Savaidis and Jones believe it’s simply about a fair price for a fair-trade product.
Both directors agree that good products can be profitable with everyone along the supply chain paid fairly, the environment left undamaged, the wider community aided by company charities and the loop completed by educating the next generation.
Under the triple bottom line model, profit is not just the economic value created by the organisation after deducting the cost of all inputs. Value is measured by how society also profits.
As humble stakeholders, we can still create change. As Joel Makower, author of Strategies for the Green Economy, declares: “Every time you open your wallet, you cast a vote – for or against the environment!”
Or, as Stefan Sagmeister is wont to say, “Everything I do always comes back to me”.