Visionaries
Missionaries and Patrons
Educators and Organizers
Practitioners
Agents Provocateurs and Performers A Leadership Checklist for the Noughties

Imagine it’s, say, the year 2100. The ‘next industrial revolution’ has long since happened: the wheels of commerce now turn without spoiling the environment or driving wedges between people. A historian sets out to document the extraordinary transformation. She begins where the story starts off in earnest, with the last decade of the 20^th Century.

Her first point might well be that these were very early times in the transformation process. She would probably use words like ‘germination’ and ‘gestation.’ From her perspective, the 1990-2001 period would seem almost prehistoric in terms of the transition to sustainability.

Which is not to deny its importance. Every movement, every transformation, has to start somewhere; and the world community started groping for sustainability in the decade of the 1990s.

Such transformation requires a special set of qualities from its leaders—and the 1990s were no exception. It was a time when the great majority of people in business didn’t see the need for significant change. Breaking through the conventional corporate mindset and communicating a new vision was the first challenge.

This was the role of the decade’s visionary leaders. People like Paul Hawken, William McDonough and Amory Lovins had the unique capacity to identify what was wrong with the mainstream view and propose ingenious ways to redesign it. In his seminal book, The Ecology of Commerce, published in 1993, Hawken documented the deterioration of the planet’s ecosystems and called upon industry to devote itself to what he called a ‘restorative economy.’

Hawken’s theme was adopted by business strategists Stuart Hart and CK Prahalad, who argued that multinational corporations should focus on the 4-5bn poor people at the bottom of the income pyramid. Likewise by sustainable business consultant Paul Gilding, who advocated a business trajectory shift from a negative to a positive footprint—which translated, basically, into serving the restorative economy.

A new mindset was also at the heart of architect William McDonough’s vision. In a multitude of forums during the ‘90s, he argued that the way out of our environmental crisis was by applying our genius for design. “Take the filters out of the pipes and put them inside your head,” was one of his pet phrases. Over that first decade he embedded his ecological design principles in buildings throughout the US and elsewhere.

Amory Lovins, resident innovator at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colorado, shared with Hawken and McDonough an impatience with conventional thinking. He too believed that right design could reduce our environmental burdens enormously. He applied his unconventional but effective strategies to areas ranging from energy efficiency to automobiles and was widely acknowledged as being the brains behind the gas-electric hybrids that came to market in the early years of the 21^st century.

"Many early sustainable business achievements were really just cherrypicking: companies showed great success at shooting the slow rabbits, but weren't such hot shots thereafter."

Being a visionary doesn’t accomplish much if people aren’t ready to listen. And that’s where the next round of leaders, the missionaries, came in. Eco-evangelist Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface Flooring Systems, characterized the conversion experience he had reading Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce as a “spear in the chest.” Sir John Browne, CEO of BP (the company formerly known as British Petroleum, then Beyond Petroleum), didn’t give eco-sermons the way Anderson did. His speeches were more measured and less passionate, but in his groundbreaking 1997 remarks at Stanford University, he publicly broke ranks with Big Oil and acknowledged the need to take a stance on climate change, strongly supporting the need for corporations to respond to public concern. Browne’s style was a far cry from Anderson’s faith-driven ‘I believe!’ but his impact on company, peers and industry sector was, if anything, more powerful.

Most of all, it takes power and position to be an effective missionary. It is the alphas at the top of the hierarchy—males, mostly—whose words carry weight. It’s no coincidence that Anderson and Browne were CEOs, just like Mark Moody-Stuart of Royal Dutch/Shell and Maurice Strong of Ontario Hydro. They were later joined by Bill Ford, who became the 21^st century’s first poster child for high-level corporate faith in sustainable development.

Close kin to the missionaries are the patrons. One, in particular, stood out during the 1990s: Swiss billionaire Stephan Schmidheiny. He underwrote the founding of the influential World Business Council on Sustainable Development and his 1992 book, Changing Course, was an early declaration of the need for business to align itself with the requirements of sustainability. Without Schmidheiny’s patronage, the entire movement might never have got off the ground.

Once the visioning, preaching and facilitation are in place, someone has to roll up their shirtsleeves and actually do the work—and that someone was usually a committed environmental specialist inside the corporation. Their role was absolutely critical: No change agent, no change.

One could list literally hundreds of people who took on this unglamorous, sometimes thankless assignment, but four names in particular stood out. Dave Buzzelli of Dow Chemical was the world’s leading EHS sustainability advocate during the early and mid-90’s, a position recognized when he was appointed co-chair of the US President’s Council on Sustainable Development in 1993. Claude Fussler also came from Dow—Dow Europe. Fussler made a name for himself by introducing some then-radical measures based on the concept of eco-efficiency, by authoring a book, Driving Eco Innovation and through progressive gestures such as backing the Who Needs It? report from the prominent UK consultancy SustainAbility—at a time when tackling consumption was considered an outright business no-no.

Two other names that tracked high on this radar screen were Lise Kingo of Novo Nordisk and DuPont’s Paul Tebo—like Fussler, winners of Tomorrow’s Environmental Leadership Award, in 1998 and 2000 respectively. Kingo was hailed for the openness and transparency of her approach, while Tebo was commended for “translating the concept of sustainable development into a set of tangible business goals DuPont can implement and Wall Street can understand.”

Yet another group of leaders is the educator-organizers; people who create conceptual structures that help practitioners apply the principles of sustainability to their business. Two stood out from the crowd for their contributions to sustainable business in the 1990s. One was John Elkington, prolific author and chairman of the ubiquitous SustainAbility. It was Elkington who coined the catchphrase ‘triple bottom line’—corporate accountability for environmental and social, as well as economic, performance. The idea quickly became common currency among leading companies, a sure sign of success.

Another prominent educator-organizer was Karl-Henrik Robért. He developed The Natural Step, a framework for understanding the sustainability of business decisions, which enjoyed enormous success in Sweden, where it was launched, before spreading to seven other countries around the world.

Any list of leaders from the nineties would be incomplete without mentioning two other categories, the performers—people who by sheer dint of personality advanced the sustainability cause—and the agents provocateurs—people who, like banderilleros, goaded the bull of business into paying attention and, eventually, taking action. 

"Take the filters out of the pipes and put them inside your head."

Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, built momentum for the sustainable business movement by dint of her position as CEO of a prominent company, but primarily by sheer force of personality. A whirlwind of energy, she was a highly visible spokesperson for sustainability throughout the ‘90s.

The agents provocateurs, meanwhile, must include Joan Bavaria, the driving force behind CERES, the US NGO that made a big splash early on with its launch of the Valdez, later CERES, Principles which called for companies to commit to a set of ten environmental principles and which was the driving force behind the Global Reporting Initiative, a worldwide corporate reporting standard for sustainability. Also Tessa Tennant, head of the Global Care team at UK insurer Henderson Investors, who was a persistent and invaluable thorn in the City’s side throughout the ‘90s.

There were a great many other leaders as well, both inside and outside business. But, pressed for space, our historian would feel obliged to single out what she might call the ‘leaders’ leaders’ or icons of the movement.

Now forward-wind again to 2100. Phase One in the sustainable business saga, our historian may conclude, was a period characterized by early believers and early adopters, working mostly against the current. Phase two, from 2001 to around 2011, called for a somewhat different set of leadership skills, founded more on implementation and innovation.

Vision, she might conclude, continued to be important, although this was now less about critiquing conventional thinking than about refining our emerging understanding of the new industrial revolution. The basic principles of the sustainable economy were by now increasingly clear and involved such things as closed loops, biomimicry and reducing materials intensity while increasing human employment. Actually implementing this vision was the chief business challenge of the decade.

Higher level, breakthrough strategizing also came of age. Sustainability efforts during the 1990s had been piecemeal and chaotic; projects were often duplicated and energies wasted. Phase Two focused on creating synergies and promoting systemic approaches.

But it was at the level of visionary practice that the new business skill-set really came into its own. For instance, the late-90s notion that companies should develop products for the bottom two-thirds of the income pyramid was attracting increasing attention, but there was continuing uncertainty about how to get it done. What intellectual capital did one draw on to design these products? What innovative financing strategies might be developed? These—and other sustainable business areas—were begging for strategic innovation.

Many early sustainable business achievements were really just cherrypicking: companies showed great success at shooting the slow rabbits, but weren’t such hot shots thereafter. Proof of concept was required—across the whole range of sustainability challenges.

There was also an ongoing need for technological innovation. Disruptive technologies were the wildcard in humanity’s race against time. Society needed dramatic solutions to environmental challenges and, while new technologies almost always bring a fresh set of problems in their train, it was clear humanity needed some startling technological breakthroughs to ward off dramatic decline in ecosystem health and cater for burgeoning populations.

One such wildcard appeared to be alternative energy, a development that promised to drive its costs below that of even subsidized oil. Another was nanotechnology, the manufacture of atom-sized machines for environmental remediation and other tasks. While it was impossible to predict what the decisive breakthrough would be—as late as the 1970s, few people had forecast the advent of the personal computer—it seemed a safe bet that something dramatically new and disruptive would come society’s way.

"Once the visioning, preaching and facilitation are in place, someone has to roll up their shirtsleeves and actually do the work."

Last but not least, there was communication—as intimidating a challenge as any. A great many in the business and financial communities still didn’t grasp the need to embrace sustainable development: sustainability continued to be a largely uphill sell. Powerful communication strategies were required, including formulating a language the wider business community could relate to and building a genuinely persuasive business case.

And it wasn’t only business that needed to be persuaded. Government frameworks and consumers had been the missing link throughout the 1990’s. ‘Green consumers’ had failed to vote with their wallets. Governments, for the main part, had failed to lead with their policies. Stirring these groups into action became one of the core leadership challenges of the noughties.

Finally, too, there was Bush senior’s famous ‘vision thing.’ As humanity turned the page on the old millennium, the question of empowerment, of enabling ordinary people to envision where humanity is headed and choose to act in favor of the future they desire, had barely begun to dawn on society. Encouraging followers to lead—that was the next big question.

Vision

• Critiquing and improving the emerging vision of the sustainable economy.

Strategizing

• Doing higher-level strategizing for the sustainable-business movement as a whole. 
• Devising effective Bottom of Pyramid strategies. 

Innovation

• Developing breakthrough technologies that will leapfrog us toward sustainability.

Implementation

• Providing proof of concept. 

Communication

• Formulating an effective language for communicating to business.
• Building the business case and persuading business to take the lead.
• Figuring out how to engage consumers-especially in the US.
• Bridging the vision gap-nurturing vision in those who don’t naturally have it.

Paul Hawken Achievements: His works, The Ecology of Commerce and the co-authored Natural Capitalism, are laying out the contours of a sustainable economy. Soundbite: “We’re in the process of reinventing our entire system of making things, its relationship to living systems, our whole concept of waste and, in turn, turning neoclassical economics on its head, reversing a 100-year process of emphasizing human productivity.” Amory Lovins Achievements:Inventor of the hypercar and many other eco-engineering innovations. Soundbite: “Listening to Amory is like trying to drink water out of a fire hose.” William McDonough Achievements:A masterful public speaker with a portfolio of high-profile green design projects. Soundbite: “Take the filters out of the pipes and put them inside your head.”

Ray Anderson Achievements: An early CEO evangelist for sustainability. Soundbite: “I am a plunderer of the Earth. Someday people like me may be put in jail.” John Browne Achievements: Herded BP out of the Big Oil corral. Soundbite: “At the moment there’s still a caricature view of who we are and what we do. In that caricature, the industry is dirty, old-fashioned, arrogant and unprincipled. For many people we’re no more than a necessary evil.” William Ford Achievements: An eco-believer born inside business ranks. Soundbite: “We can lead the next industrial revolution.” Mark Moody-Stuart Achievements: Led Shell’s turnaround from sustainability villain to green leader. Soundbite: “The real key to change is communicating and listening.” Maurice Strong Achievements: Ex-secretary-general of the Earth Summit. Ex-CEO of Ontario Hydro. A man who moves in high places. Soundbite: “If we don't change, our species will not survive... Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.” Stephan Schmidheiny Achievements: A well-heeled patron of sustainability causes. An early backer of the WBCSD. Soundbite: “From the beginning, I have seen this not as a philanthropic effort, but rather as an investment in my own education and in the future of my children’s business.”

David Buzzelli Achievements: An early EHS activist at Dow Chemical. Co-chair of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. Soundbite: “Air, water and land are not the free goods our society once believed. They must be redefined as assets, so that they can be efficiently and appropriately allocated.” Claude Fussler Achievements: Consistently on the cutting-edge from his time at Dow Europe to his current position with the WBCSD. Soundbite: “The seas ahead will be rough … The best skippers win when the wind gets difficult.” Lise Kingo Achievements: Her dedication to stakeholder dialogue created a standard of openness in environmental reporting. Soundbite: “If you want credibility in this business, you have to deal with the issues that the public want to hear about-whether you like it or not.” Paul Tebo Achievements: The low-key architect of Dupont’s shift toward sustainability. Soundbite: “Just get out and do it.”

John Elkington Achievements: For years, Europe’s leading gadfly on the subject of integrating sustainability into business operations. Soundbite: “We’re all on a learning curve, environmentalists just as much as business people and regulators.” Karl-Henrik Robért Achievements: The man behind The Natural Step. Soundbite: “Look at the roots, not the leaves on the trees.”

Anita Roddick Achievements: Founder and co-chair of The Body Shop. Put environmental and social issues firmly on the company’s agenda. Soundbite: “I am essentially an activist and an agitator.” Joan Bavaria Achievements: Founder of CERES, promoter of inter-sectoral dialogue. Soundbite: “We aim for constructive tension, not just consensus, by working with companies to keep principled behavior on the agenda.” Tessa Tennant Achievements: Co-founded the first environmental investment fund in the UK. Soundbite: “It’s where altruism actually coincides with investment logic.”