One of the lessons I'm learning about driving sustainability strategy is that everything takes longer than I hoped, or expected, or wanted - establishing baselines and targets, developing and (especially) getting buy-in to new principles and policies, harmonizing practices across multiple divisions. But one of the things I've promised myself (and my readers) is that I'd take the time to recognize and acknowledge signs that sustainability is, in fact, infiltrating into the way we work at EMC.
Last month, I visited our Center of Excellence in Cork, Ireland, and saw an amazing example of just what we trying to do.
The folks over there are about as hospitable as you can possibly imagine. I'd sent Bill my arrival time and departure time, and he took full ownership for arranging a tremendously productive 3.5 days in the middle.
And the very first thing on my schedule was a series of short presentations on the dozen or so local projects with the largest potential environmental impact. As in any normal meeting where you don't know everyone, we started with a round of introductions. And here are the people who presented the projects:
- Ken, Logistics Analyst
- Mick, Facilities Manager
- Jackie in for Ger, Global Logistics Manager
- Eamonn, Manufacturing Operations Project Manager
- Fergal, Manager Module Test Engineering
- Martin & Kevin, Test Equipment Engineering
- Brendan in for John, Systems Test Engineering
- Billy, RMA processes
- Bill, Sustainability Lead for Ireland COE
Did you count the number of times "sustainability" was in their titles? Yeah - one.
Now, it should be noted that the EMC Ireland COE has embraced sustainability very deliberately as a core value of the organization. It factors in every discussion of organizational goals, and is led by Bob from the top with substantial support in every group. Bob put his budget where his heart is by hiring Bill to provide that coordination function across the COE, and Bill is doing an awesome job of shining light on the projects arising in many functions. And Bill is the one who pulled this meeting together to present to me.
But the people actually running the projects are doing them in the contexts of their jobs. They're leveraging their domain expertise in teams within their organizations, cross-functionally, and across the pond. And they are implementing projects that they themselves proposed - from fresh air cooling to environmental chamber utilization and cooling optimizations, packaging material reduction, reverse logistics optimization, virtualized test systems, testing cycle time reductions, and an office energy mapping system. Some of these were originally inspired by the desire to save money, some to save time, some to reduce environmental impact. But all of them knew what the impact was expected to be in each of those dimensions, and all had "lessons learned" that they were sharing with me and with one another. And they were all to a person pumped up about what they were accomplishing.
Not as pumped as I was, though!
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