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Green initiatives – why you cannot afford not to go green

When the economy turns tough, many companies sideline their green business initiatives. That is a big mistake. In Green Recovery, Andrew S. Winston shows why 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. Green initiatives also save energy and waste, preserving precious capital, and give precise focus to your innovation efforts and strategic priorities.

by Michele Butler

ABOUT ANDREW S. WINSTON

Andrew S. Winston is an expert and speaker on green business, and advises leading companies on profiting from environmental thinking. Co-author of the bestseller, Green to Gold, Winston was previously a corporate strategist with Boston Consulting Group and held management positions at Time Warner and MTV.  For further information visit http://www.thegreenrecovery.com/  and  www.andrewwinston.com/speaking.

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 will 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 can we operate without 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 in a vastly changed economy.

Michele Butler talked to Andrew S. Winston about his book and asked him to share some suggestions and guidelines companies can follow to go green.

Michele:  What are the hurdles that businesses face in going green?

Andrew:  One of the major hurdles that we face is that the ordinary business person (and this is a global issue) thinks that green equals expense. My work is to try to break down this notion, showing people that green actually lowers costs in the short and long run, and often much more than people realise. 

The core principle of going green is “doing more with less”. It is called different things, such as eco-efficiency, six sigma, lean, etc., but all these terms mean using less stuff, less energy.

Resources will remain tight in the foreseeable future and energy will get more expensive over time. It therefore makes sound business sense to focus on trying to reduce energy costs. This is one of the biggest elements of going green.

Green also means satisfying your customers’ needs by reducing their impact. This drives innovation and presents a new way of looking at your business, your products, your services. It creates an amazing amount of creativity in an organisation, because there are leapfrogs in a lot of different industries, products and sectors. Leapfrogs in the reduction of energy, in toxicity, in water usage, etc.

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