It's Time To Stop Hitting the Snooze Button and Wake Up
In class this week, we have been talking about the necessary push for large corporations to integrate sustainability into the core of their businesses. We watched an interesting TedTalk that talked about this pressing need to change the way we do things.
The big pivot, as compared to in Andrew Winston’s TedTalk titled “The big pivot”, is the moment when a person with a serious health risk realizes that a substantial lifestyle change needs to happen or something as drastic as death could result if no change is immediately taken. It’s the moment when the talk of change stops and the action takes over. For us as a human race as a whole, and in this case specifically large corporations, we need to have that moment where we stop talking about how bad things are going to get if we don’t do something about it and actually start making actions towards improving the state of our planet.
There are three mega challenges that Winston ties with this crucial need for corporations to create this pivot to happen. The first concept is that of how changing weather patterns are creating climates in places where these places aren’t used to that extreme weather and it’s costing the economy billions of dollars. If we don’t make changes to slow these already drastic weather patterns, our economy will get worse and worse and life as we know it will not exist anymore. The second challenge Winston touches on is the challenge of rising prices. In his TedTalk, Winston stated “we wiped out 100 years of productivity gains in just 10 years”. There is an ever increasing demand for the commodities that we have grown so accustomed to having whenever we need yet are becoming more and more scarce every year. Not only are the prices rising but the population is growing. This means there is a growing demand for a shrinking supply. You don’t need to be an expert in economics to know that that is not going to end up with very many people being better off than worse unless we do something to change it. The third mega challenge that corporations are encountering is the way technology is giving consumers a window into the ways companies produce their products forcing transparency. Large corporations can no longer hide in the shadows as easily without being exposed through different platforms of technology that are so readily available to the fingertips of millions of consumers. This is causing companies to be held accountable for their business practices therefore stressing more of a concern on sustainable practices.
A good goal contains a measurable goal that matches the amount of action that is to scale with the scientific data showing how much of a change is needed to make the “big pivot”. There are two different types of goals, there are goals with a goal date in which the goal will be reached by and there are goals with no specific end date. An example of a set of good goals would be the goals set by Unilever. These goals include reducing the company’s carbon emissions by 50% as well as cutting the waste created from disposal of their products in half by 2020 (pivotgoals.com). There are three pages of measurable goals that Unilever has set and for the most part have a specified year in which each respective goal is to be completed by. Another company that had an exemplary set of goals was Hershey’s whose goals included zero landfill waste from all factories as well as saving 25 million pounds of packaging by 2025 (pivotgoals.com). These are the kind of goals that all corporations and businesses need to commit to if the necessary change is going to happen.
An example of a bad goal would be a vague and overly broad statement such as “becoming more eco-friendly” which could mean so many different things and there is no universal way to measure if a company is becoming more “eco-friendly”.
The Pivot Goals website includes a list of both the companies that have goals that you can check the status of as well as a list of companies that have no available goals towards lessening their environmental impact. A company that I was surprised to see on the list of companies that don’t have any goals at all was Amazon. Amazon is such a colossal company that so many people use and they have a huge platform to promote sustainability but it seems they are not nearly as concerned as they need to be. This is troubling because Amazon uses so many different resources in reaching such a large consumer population. Through using such a wide range of resources used for production and distribution comes the opportunity to be on the front lines of promoting sustainability throughout their business but they don’t have any sort of goals.
Large corporations are starting to wake up more and more and look towards integrating these Pivot Goals into the core structure of their businesses because regardless of who sets these goals, anyone can set goals all day long but if actual actions aren’t immediately implemented then the corporations with goals will suffer just as much as the corporations that have no goals. Hopefully there will be a snowball effect to where if more and more companies are making sustainable business decisions and actions and profiting more than non-sustainable companies, it will encourage the push for universal corporate sustainable thinking. The problem is, time is running out time to lead by example and immediate action needs to be taken.
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