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    Green Recovery: Get Lean, Get Smart, and Emerge from the Downturn on Top
    Green Recovery: Get Lean, Get Smart, and Emerge from the Downturn on Top
    Green Recovery: Get Lean, Get Smart, and Emerge from the Downturn on Top
    Ebook146 pages1 hour

    Green Recovery: Get Lean, Get Smart, and Emerge from the Downturn on Top

    By Andrew S. Winston

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    When the economy turns rough, many companies sideline their green business initiatives. That's a big mistake. In Green Recovery, Andrew Winston shows that no company can afford to wait for the downturn to ease before going green.

    Green initiatives ratchet up your company's resource efficiency, creativity, and employee motivation. They save energy, waste, and money, preserving precious capital-and give precise focus to your innovation efforts and strategic priorities.

    Part manifesto and part how-to guide, this concise and engaging book provides a road map for using green initiatives to deliver short-term gains and position your company for long-term strategic growth. You'll discover how to:

    -Get lean: Amp up your energy and resource efficiency to survive tough times

    -Get smart: Use environmental data about products and supply chains for competitive advantage

    -Get creative: Rejuvenate your innovation efforts by asking heretical questions such as "How might we operate with no fossil fuels?"

    -Get going: Engage and excite employees to solve the company's, the customer's, and the world's environmental challenges


    Green Recovery is your guide to establishing your competitive positioning in difficult times and emerging even stronger into a vastly changed economy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarvard Business Review Press
    Release dateAug 17, 2009
    ISBN9781422135402
    Author

    Andrew S. Winston

    Andrew S. Winston is the founder of Winston Eco-Strategies and helps leading companies use environmental thinking to innovate and grow. He was formerly the Director of the Corporate Environmental Strategy Project at Yale, a strategy consultant with the Boston Consulting Group, and an executive in marketing and business development at Time Warner and Viacom.

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      Book preview

      Green Recovery - Andrew S. Winston

      2009

      Introduction:

      Green Recovery

      Five days before he took over as CEO of the world’s largest retailer in early 2009, Wal-Mart executive Mike Duke stood in front of his employees and described how different the world is today. He said it’s a troubling time, with new leaders, new ideas, and a global economic crisis. Nobody, Duke said, is insulated from this situation. For the most part, his talk was what you’d expect to hear from a CEO during a recession. But then Duke went a different direction and asked the hundreds of employees in the room, and the many thousands watching online, Sustainability is even more critical now, isn’t it?

      Duke described the many environmental projects Wal-Mart remained committed to, such as reducing transportation costs and energy use across the company. To make his point as obvious as possible, he summed up, My message to you today I hope will be real clear: we want to accelerate our efforts in sustainability, we want to broaden our efforts. This does not sound like a company slowing down its green efforts because of a recession.

      So why is the CEO of a $400 billion company thinking green at a time like this? Because the smartest companies are recommitting to sustainability, and using environmental thinking not only to stay profitable, but also to drive innovation and help customers through dark times. The best organizations are preparing to emerge from the downturn better off than their competitors. To be sure, in tough times, it’s hard to prioritize anything but staying alive. But survival and sustainability are truly not at odds. In fact, sustainability is at the very core of survival. No company, or society, can last unless it cares for all of its resources and capital—human, financial, and environmental.

      Green thinking can help spur an economic recovery, both for companies and for countries. I’m not talking about the kind of recovery that moves you into the intensive care unit for twenty-four-hour support. I’m thinking more about the type of comeback that U.S. sprinter Gail Devers made in the early 1990s. While training for the 1988 Olympics, Devers fell ill and was later diagnosed with a thyroid condition called Graves’ disease. After radiation therapy, she went on to win three gold medals in the 1992 and 1996 games. In a Devers kind of recovery, you come back stronger than ever.

      The hard times propel some people, and some organizations, to greatness. As Fortune magazine writer Geoff Colvin put it in a January 2009 article about managing in tough times,

      It’s hard to be upbeat in a recession, but it truly is an opportunity. Marathoners and Tour de France racers will tell you that a race’s hardest parts, the uphill stages, are where the lead changes hands… When this recession ends, when the road levels off and the world seems full of promise once more, your position in the competitive pack will depend on how skillfully you manage right now.

      Green Recovery makes the case that greening your business is more important now than ever. At its core, green is about doing more with less, which can save you money quickly. It also frees up capital to invest in building a stronger, more resilient company—one ready to take the lead from slower-moving competitors. Following the green path, especially in hard times, can lead your company to higher profits and sustainable

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