You’ve probably heard how Sputnik, that low orbiting satellite lobbed into space by the Russians on the 4th of October 1957, effectively triggered the space race. But there’s one detail many don’t know –that it gave birth to one of the earliest crowd-sourced events, fueled by the Moonwatch program.

Derrick Mains, kicked off the SustainAZility movement, with the launch of a wiki last evening by drawing this analogy. “Fifty three years ago, they crowd-sourced the most critical, scientific aspects of date collection!.”

“Tonight with better technology -and as you can see that same passion–we’re gonna follow that same model, by actually launching our own crowd-sourced, data collection and economic development plan called SustainAZility.”

Brown Russell, President of GreenNurture, and Park Howell, CEO and founder of Park&Co also spoke at the event. Attendees then proceeded to log into the wiki and update content.

• Listen to the whole speech here

• View pictures from the event here

• Access the SustainAZility Wiki here

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There are plenty of studies and calls to action on Employee Engagement. But when it comes to Employee Engagement and Sustainability there’s a lot more work to be done.

Studies that attempt to correlate these two factors have found that most employees (86 percent, in one survey) have not been engaged by their employers. Yet, a very large number of corporate CEOs (93 percent!) recognize that “sustainability will be critical to the future success of their companies.”

The Brighter Planet study, released in February this year recognized that the shift toward sustainability is “a cultural shift, and it’s one that must happen at all levels within an organization to be truly effective.” It also noted that “organizations need to work on communicating sustainability issues and initiatives to staff.”

So we wanted to find out ourselves (see link to survey) because even “the definition of sustainability is still in question,” observed Derrick Mains.

“The media tells you it is environmental sustainability; Wall Street will tell you it is all about risk management and profitability; other organizations will tell you it is about social responsibility –how your company interacts with employees the world… it could even be about procurement and process efficiency.”

Listen to a short clip here of Derrick Mains explain the goals of the survey, and the connection between sustainability and employee engagement.

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SustainAZility.

Get used to the word. It’s a lot more than making Phoenix or Arizona a more sustainable place.  It is about making Arizona a hospitable place for businesses that are profiting from the global shift toward Sustainability.

On this week’s radio show, Your Triple Bottom Line, Derrick Mains officially announced the launch of a Sustainazility grass-roots movement, and the launch of the wiki -at www.Sustainazility.com.

Here’s a segment of that show (just under 10 minutes) where Derrick outlines his plan and a call to action.

Download the podcast at this link. Or listen to it using the player below.

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Two days after from being named a Green Pioneer by the Phoenix Business Journal, Derrick Mains called on entrepreneurs and thought-leaders in Arizona to raise the bar if they want to turn the state into a Silicon Valley for Sustainability!

On his radio show, Your Triple Bottom Line, Derrick spent some time outlining the opportunity, and his call to action.

Sustainability will be a 2.7 trillion industry, with 50 percent of that in energy and process efficiency.

The keyword is efficiency.

Arizona is a land of pioneers and risk-takers, he noted. This pioneering spirit needs to be challenged, as we are sitting on a trillion dollar opportunity for ‘holistic sustainability.’

Listen to the podcast using the player below. Connect with Derrick via email.

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Most people don’t have ‘e-waste’ on their radar. In fact most people can’t visualize what it is.

It sounds a bit like some industrial effluent problem that we keep hearing about, or something that happens ‘over there’ -in developing countries.  But e-waste is something we contribute to whether we know about it or not. It’s time local governments and business leaders addressed this knowledge gap.

For instance, the volume of e-waste climbed by 8.6% between 2005 and 2006 (as opposed 1.2 percent. for the volume of regular municipal waste).

But what does that look like? Where do the thousands of  keyboards, computer monitors, obsolete phones and laptop batteries end up? You may not see an used PlayStation controller floating down a river when you’re out Trout fishing…

Jeff Rassas had a great idea one day. He decided to incentivize people to solve the problem locally. His company, YouChange.com, is not just another do-good company. It’s a robust business model. Audio systems, old gaming consoles, PDAs, optical drives and hundreds of other home electronics and business equipment can be turned into cash.

The web site lets you do it in three simple steps: Find out how much your gadget is worth – instant evaluation online by entering a model number. Send it to youchange.com (they take care of shipping & handling), and collect cash and reward points.

Here’s a short segment where Derrick Mains and Jeff Rassas talk about how businesses could be part of the solution. A longer version of this podcast could be found here at Your Triple Bottom Line.

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We had our lens trained on health care, when we spoke about Green Teams on the radio show last week.

Hospitals and healthcare systems are just that -systems. Applying triple bottom line thinking to a large system takes an enormous degree of organization. But it also takes something that’s hard to bolt-on -passion.

Our conversation revolved around the invisible thread of human motivation that runs through those three overlapping entities: employees, patients and the community.

How do they communicate with each other? Dr. Joan Plisko, Technical Director of Maryland Hospitals for a Healthy Environment (MD H2E) and Colleen Cusick of Johns Hopkins talked about the decentralized, yet coordinated team activity they lead. What came out, however, was the huge communication part of the equation.

Communication?

In the age of so many easy-to-implement tools from enterprise email to ad-hoc Facebook Groups?  Sometimes different parts of a company don’t know what each other is doing, and rather than see this as a problem, this is an opportunity for a Green Team, said Dr. Plisko. She used the example of eWaste in healthcare systems.

Here’s a snippet of our conversation about communications for Green Teams.

Download Interview. Or use the player below.

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On last week’s show, we had a great conversation around Green Teams, with our guest Dani Glaser.

Derrick talked of the shift in how teams operate. It was very much corporate driven, then, he said. But today the power-shift — the passion for change –is coming from within and across the organization.

Listen to a short clip.

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Are leaders who push people to do their bidding demonstrating leadership?

Earlier this week, on my radio show Your Triple Bottom Line, I spoke to Michael Stallard, author of a fascinating book, Fired Up Or Burned Out, and we had this discussion around how leaders create a culture of empowerment in the organization.

I have been using the word ‘culture’ flippantly sometimes, implying that it is always a good thing, talking of highly engaged companies as having a robust culture. But they could have a robust negative culture as well. So I asked Michael how does a company such as Facebook, with such a strong, identifiable culture sustain something that was created when it was a 3-person company? Michael had a great response. You could either listen to the whole show here.

Or you could listen to a short a clip of that exchange, using the player below.

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On last week’s radio show Derrick and I  took up what some may think is a terribly dry topic, and poked sharp objects at it with some social media questions.

There seems to be a insatiable appetite for measurement and tools that add more  transparency to how companies perform. Everyone wails about the lack of transparency, and the erosion of trust. There has been talk for ages about how CEO’s need to become “see-through CEO’s.” But what about see-through financial reporting? The topic that’s been around for awhile, including more recent moves by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has embraced social media. (It’s called Regulation FD.)

Our guest was Michael Muyot, who created a sustainability index for NASDAQ, and he naturally had a lot to say about how much more transparent financial reporting could be. But as we talked about the rush toward transparency –or the lack thereof — the conversation quickly turned to trust. And why not?

Trust and transparency are two sides of the same coin. He noted that (and I paraphrase what he said for brevity)

“From a political, business and investment level, the need of the hour is trust. The regular American worker has completely lost trust in everything….”

He spoke of KPI’s – Key Performance Indicators — and how social media can point to KPIs with laser-like focus. Listen to a short clip from that conversation, below.

Derrick asked him what might make innovation come back, and create the environment for, say, the next Google? Does Cap and Trade have anything to do with the reluctance of investors? Michael’s responses were enlightening! Use the player below to listen to the conversation.

And if you like to catch our next show, you could steam it live from your computer or phone here. Wednesday at 7PM (Pacific).

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