Interconnected World

Pride in My Job

As my long-suffering (and tremendously patient) readers know, this blog is about my personal journey as a Chief Sustainability Officer. 

In the past, I've tended to focus my ramblings on my ideas about how to instill sustainability as a core principle into everything in business, along with my feelings about the challenges and wins along the way.

But a hugely important, and tremendously fulfilling, part of this role isn't really about sustainability as such. It's about being a good employee, a citizen of the EMC community, a thoughtful manager and available mentor, and a representative of EMC and its management and workforce.

So it was with great honor that I accepted the invitation to serve with my indefatigable colleague Chad Sakac (President of Global SE and a generally unstoppable force) as co-sponsors of the EMC LGBT Allies employee circle.

Yesterday

I'm partway through a blog called "Friedman Redux", hypothesizing that if Milton Friedman were alive today, he'd reconsider his oft-cited statement that "There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits*"

My assertion is that since he said that in 1970, the world has changed so drastically - from population, to GHG concentrations, to proportion of wealth in the hands of private industry, to the ability of corporations to act across geo-political boundaries, to the crossing of planetary boundaries -  that as the smart guy he was, he'd be likely to consider that our responsibilities have changed.

But… that blog is taking research to come up with all the graphs and proof points I need to make the case. And I just have not found the time.

So rather than a deep, thought-provoking piece,  I'm going to fall back on the easy blog - a day in the life of a CSO six years into her job. To cut to the chase, everything has changed but these two:

1. We spend a ton of time on reporting, and
2. This remains a great job for the over-caffeinated.

The Gift of Letting Go

 

I don't know about you, but I wake up with my mind teeming with questions that are my responsibility to answer. What should I  blog about?  How will I sell the idea of an internal carbon price? How much is left in my discretionary budget? Which NGO can best help us accelerate and scale our efforts?

And I fall asleep overwhelmed with the big questions. Can we summon the political will to act for the well-being of future generations?  Are economic growth and sustainability able to coexist?  Will the public start to care about climate change again?

But in each of the past three months, I have had an amazing opportunity to experience the power of forsaking the "?" for the "!". Of being in situations where the one and only expectation of me was that I relinquish the desire to "do", open my senses, and just take it in. Each experience deserves its own blog (if not book), but let me share a highlight (and photo) or two from each:

 

The Sounds of Inequality

We live in the woods. Its sounds greet us when we wake up: the chirping of birds, the rustling of chipmunks in the leaves, the funny gobble of toms looking for hens.

Last year, we bought a small downtown pied-à-terre. We wanted to experience city living to see if availing ourselves of city services was a viable retirement strategy.

The sounds that wake us there are made by humans. 

Twice each week, on recycling day, it's the sounds of the homeless sifting through the refuse in our bins.

The citizen in me is the first to wake: "Society has failed these people and I'm snug in bed."

Then the environmentalist: "How wasteful are we that the bins are so full of useable stuff?"

Then the citizen gets riled: "Are you begrudging these people even your castoffs"?

The professional sustainist in me speaks up and now I'm fully awake. "It's not just a social issue, or an environmental one. It's also an economic problem. Creating waste takes work, which takes money. Except for the occasional 5¢ bottle refund, the money is flowing up while the garbage is flowing down. It's a systems problem".

The system is broken.

And now it's keeping me up at night, too.

Sustainability Report Unblog

Today, EMC published our seventh annual sustainability report. I should blog about it.

Notes of Encouragement

I have just completed a two-day "Energy Excursion" sponsored by the Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce. And I have never encountered more auspicious signs for a carbon-reduced energy future.

The Winning Entry in the student-built Electric Car Endurance Race at Milford HS

Over the two days, we rode a bus and donned hardhats to visit and learn from: a developer of a large- scale solar project, a coal-fired power plant, two geothermal plants from different decades, a century-old hydroelectric plant,  an energy and gas storage facility just being launched, a large wind farm, and a renewable energy fair at a local high school complete with a very cool inter-school endurance race of student-built electric cars.

It's impossible for me to itemize everything I learned, let alone catalog the onslaught of impressions and emotions from this trip through the spectacularly beautiful natural formations of southern Utah. But I do want to share some of my major take-aways: 

Fundamental Attribution Error Correction

I've found myself lately reading a number of books about how humans think - Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, Switch by Chip and Dan Heath, A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink,The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, and more. 

I didn't set out with any particular goal in mind, though I guess I'm searching for some clue, some hint, some idea of how I can do a better job of influencing (or, as my husband would say, "manipulating") others into acting as better stewards of our future.

One of the commonly described fallacies in human reasoning (and I have learned to use the term "reasoning" very loosely!) is called the Fundamental Attribution Error (or, to save typing, "FAE") and I seem to see it everywhere I look.

The Flip Side

Tomorrow, I'm guest lecturing at an MBA class. Meeting with smart, inspiring, challenging students is one of the many things I love about my job, most of which I've written about (probably more than once). Others include (but are most definitely not limited to):

• The mission. Someone is paying me to try to make the world a better place!
• Collaborating, instead of competing with, my counterparts in peer companies. (People who have known me for years will find it hard to believe, but as fierce as I can be in pinochle, I really do not like to compete).
• The justification for sticking my nose into all sorts of corners of the business.
• Working on teams with people all over the company and the world.
• Exposure to other industries and ideas.
• The constant learning.
• Those amazing moments of satisfaction when something changes in the way an executive talks about the core business, an employee shows pride over a process re-design, or the penny drops and the lights go on in a middle manager's eyes.
• The inspiration from the young people who join EMC and want to make a difference.

So this morning, I was standing in the shower noodling about what tack I should take with the students tomorrow, and I thought maybe, for a change, I would share some of the things I don't love quite so much about my job.

The Pain and Pleasure of Sustainability Reporting

Whew!  Another EMC sustainability report out the door, much to our relief.

EMC 2012 Sustainability Report

If you haven't produced a sustainability report, you should know that it's hard. Harder than you can imagine. And totally worth it.

You'd think it would get easier year after year. But I think I speak for everyone on my (extended) team when I say, "Not so". Yes, much of the content is about long term strategy and not only doesn't need to change year-over-year, but probably shouldn't be changing. (See, for example, Energy & Climate Change Strategy). And no, we don't feel we need to completely re-design the layout every year either. So why doesn't it get easier?

Plus Ça Change

Three years ago, I posted a description of a representative day in my professional life. I admit that I'd saved that topic for a time when I was feeling uninspired, thinking it wouldn't interest anyone much since it wasn't thinking any "big thoughts". Yet it turned out to be one of my most-visited posts ever, so I was of course glad I'd done it.

And now I'm glad I did it for another reason. It gave me something to look back and ponder whether and how my job has changed (or not) in three-and-a-half years.