It's a good step towards making it legal, by changing the focus on shareholder primacy, for a public corporation to even consider doing what you or I would see as mandatory in our dealings with other people and with our communities.
In a previous post, I wrote about shareholder primacy (the law governing corporations actually requires the CEO to pursue shareholder profit even at the expense of other corporate goals or values) and how that makes it very difficult for a corporation to pursue goals that are not directly tied to increasing bottom line profits.
According to this Green Biz blog, California is getting ready to pass a law (2011 SB201) which makes it legal for corporations established in California "...to include a social and environmental mission that is given equal weight, perhaps even greater weight, than profits..." It protects CEOs and boards of directors in pursuit of such goals and it provides shareholder mechanisms to enforce the pursuit of the same.
"The ability to provide for the needs of the world's current population without damaging the ability of future generations to provide for themselves. When a process is sustainable, it can be carried out over and over without negative environmental effects or impossibly high costs to anyone involved."
This definition is nice but how to make it actionable?
A checklist would be nice, but that is probably too simplistic. Rather, there seems to be a few key ideas that lead from this definition that give a framework for answering the question: "Is this sustainable?" in whatever context it might arise. The first question is: sustainable for whom? Which leads to...
""People" (human capital) pertains to fair and beneficial business practices toward labour and the community and region in which a corporation conducts its business. A TBL company conceives a reciprocal social structure in which the well-being of corporate, labour and other stakeholder interests are interdependent."
""Planet" (natural capital) refers to sustainable environmental practices. A TBL company endeavors to benefit the natural order as much as possible or at the least do no harm and curtail environmental impact. "
""Profit" is the economic value created by the organisation after deducting the cost of all inputs, including the cost of the capital tied up."
To understand if something has unacceptable costs to anyone involved, you must first identify all of the stakeholders. The simplest embodiment of this idea is in the triple bottom line: Expanding accountability to the stakeholders rather than just the shareholders. Who are the stakeholders?
Your people
Your planet
Your profit (i.e. the economy in which you live and on which you depend).
Once you begin trying to account for all the stakeholders' costs and benefits you are led naturally to...
Accounting for costs according to lifecycle of the product
FCA requires explicit acknowledgement of costs that are typically ignored in traditional cost / benefit analyses. It requires systems thinking to understand the scope and source of these costs. The points of FCA that seem, to me, to be particularly relevant to sustainability are:
What does it really cost to obtain, use and replace a resource? Natural resource usage is a good example: prices reflect extraction costs rather than replacement costs (it's not sustainable if I run out with no replacement). So using resource price as the cost of resources is insufficient to account for the impact of using that resource. Oil is cheap to extract but difficult to replace.
Externalities are acknowledged as costs of business rather than someone else's problem. Passing the cost to someone else does not make the cost go away - it's just theft from that person. A good example is the effect of overworking employees. What is the cost of a crumbling family or of the loss of a parent from workplace induced illness or stress related disease? In traditional accounting, such concerns are not the business' concern so efforts to improve employee well-being are are difficult to justify.
Future outlays to deal with preventing externalities are also planned for. This encourages reuse and encourages building recycling and collection into the product design and business model. It is good business to have people buy a new cell phone every year, until you have to pay for the safe disposal of every one of those phones or the impact on health and environment loss from improperly disposed phones. Wouldn't it be more economically effective to plan on collecting and reusing the materials?
If you include in the costing the environment as the source of all resources and that a better environment results in more plentiful, higher quality, more productive resources (material and labor), then you reach...
"Cradle to Cradle design perceives the safe and productive processes of nature’s ‘biological metabolism’ as a model for developing a ‘technical metabolism’ flow of industrial materials. Product components can be designed for continuous recovery and reutilization as biological and technical nutrients within these metabolisms."
This is about making the world better with each unit produced rather than just making things "less bad."
While Cradle to Cradle emphasizes product design, to me the idea logically extends to sustainable business processes as well: How do I design a business process that makes my people and customers more fulfilled rather than just "less abused" in pursuit of the company's goals?
Trust marketing: respect your customers and their interests to build more business.
Foster and direct intrinsic motivation (Drive... see TED video below) to get the most from employees.
If market based capitalism is to "succeed" in-so-far as it makes the world a more livable place for ourselves and other species (i.e. it is sustainable), then something like full cost accounting seems to be necessary. Capitalism is powerful at driving the "right" behavior given the right accounting / incentives.
There seem to be two ways of coming to this conclusion:
1) Pure pragmatism
As outlined in this Wired article "Betting on Climate Change" forward looking companies will make plans for dealing with climate change and the results of other externalized costs because, eventually, those things come back to become real costs (outlays). It doesn't matter why climate change occurred, responsible contingency planning requires dealing with it. If that means incurring costs now to avoid much larger costs later, so be it. That's good ROI.
2) Inspiration & appeal to our "better" nature
As put forward by Robert Kennedy at a speech in 1968 about Gross National Product:
"Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."
It certainly makes me feel a bit prouder to be a member of the society that came up with the later reason for doing the "right" thing than it does to only be able to claim the former.
