When in the mid-1990s I started researching high-tech companies’ beyond-compliance environmental accomplishments, I found a few dozen executives who cared about reducing their companies’ environmental impact and who saw competitive advantage from doing so. By the beginning of this decade, when my book Lean and Green was published, more executives had chosen a leadership path toward environmental stewardship and were already starting to reduce costs, improve brand, and meet employees at their values.

Moving forward in time to the 2008-09 global economic crisis–and specifically to last week’s Green Manufacturing Conference– I now find tech companies embracing environmental-impact reduction as a key corporate strategy to surviving and thriving in the face of slower growing or negative-growth revenues. In my keynote presentation at last week’s Southern California conference, I described corporations’ current triple headache of cost cutting, environmental compliance, and standing out positively in the market, and how creating an aggressive and inspiring beyond-compliance corporate initiative weaves together a strategic solution to all three issues.

Conference speaker Leslie Collins of HP described how an HP product is helping UPS to reduce environmental impact and save $16.9 million in labor costs, $11.8 million in projected capital costs, and $1.9 million in consumables costs by 2013. The HP Handheld sp400 All-in-One scans and prints on packages (using 2D imaging) without needing paper labels, thus avoiding the use of 1,338 tons of paper.

According to speaker David Conrad, head of environment for Nokia North America, in the past 9 years Nokia aggressively reduced the no-load consumption of its chargers by 90% (down to 0.03 watts when in a no-load status), with correlating reductions in environmental impact and customers’ electricity bills as well.

These millions of dollars savings for high-tech companies and their customers are contributing significantly to corporations’ abilities to be economically sustainable. The conference illustrated that the business benefit from lean and green strategies is both systematic (there’s nothing fuzzy about it) and systemic (yielding cost and environmental savings throughout the corporation).

In these days of necessary carbon-emissions reductions, I did not press out-of-region clients and colleagues to travel to Southern California for the Green Manufacturing Conference (even though many of them in cold climates wanted badly to attend). Conference Manager Melanie Cruz of Canon Communications and I (as conference chair) saw to it that nearly all of the speakers were from the local region or were traveling to California for other reasons. Nokia’s Conrad, based in Texas, participated in the keynote panel by teleconference to minimize his company’s carbon footprint. We design travel-reduction plans for our clients as well, leveraging more and more great alternatives to travel to achieve both lean and green benefits.

So, if you are reading this blog from Europe, come to the 25-26 March Green Mfg. Conference in Birmingham, UK. And if you sit in North America, I can advise you of closer-to-you Green Mfg. Conferences and other opportunities to connect with TFI.

What examples do you see of corporate-environmental progress from do-good, to leadership strategy, to economic imperative?

Posted by Pamela J. Gordon, February 18th, 2009

Filed to Environment, Lean Practices

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