A culture of sustainability exists when green practices become a habit.
(By Tommy Linstroth, as published in EDC Magazine, June 2012)
Government regulation and oversight is often looked at as cumbersome, bureaucratic and unnecessary. But it’s amazing when such oversight becomes soingrained into business practices that it simply becomes part of the corporate culture — so much so that it’s just how businesses operate, no questions asked.
I’ve been fortunate to be spending a fair amount of time lately working with a Fortune 500-type company to embed sustainability into its core culture. Greening a building is relatively straightforward, but an entire organization? That’s another story. There are plenty of great examples out there from Interface to Patagonia, but those initiatives were driven by passionate environmental visionaries rather than from the bottom or middle up. This process has been eye-opening to say the least, but in no way more so than my new perspective that for the sustainability movement to be truly successful, it needs to be 100 percent ingrained into the core corporate culture. Read more