The transport business owners stand to benefit hugely with GPS tracking units. They can keep track of their whole fleet of trucks from the comfort of their offices. The position and movement of all vehicles can be seen on the screen of the computer or mobile phone. Business owners benefit by being able to reduce cost of monitoring and increase profits. Due to GPS applications, fleet tracking becomes a piece of cake from anywhere in the world and at any time of the day. The system also enables you to track the route of the vehicles.

There are several other features in GPS vehicle tracking systems that will keep you in complete control of your fleet. For example, you can keep track of the speed at which your vehicles are traveling, places where the drivers stopped and took a break, duration of idleness and mileage of the vehicles. Some systems even go further from these basic functions and provide alert facilities. You will get alerts when your vehicles exceed speed limits set by you, when the vehicles cross state boundaries and when the vehicles are used during unauthorized hours. Since you are constantly aware of the position of your systems, you can alert the police and the authorities during thefts and accidents.

GPS systems can be customized according to the needs of the owner. Many GPS systems are web based and do not need any sort of software installations. The reports generated through the GPS systems can be used to file interstate mileage reports to IFTA. The best part of using a GPS system for tracking your fleet of vehicles is that your drivers will begin to be wary and will behave themselves since they are aware of being constantly tracked. You will find lesser irregularities in the transport and your vehicles will begin to deliver goods on time. The efficiency of your business will improve and so will your profits. So, basically, you can hold the reins of your fleet in your hands all the time and from anywhere in the world.

In late 2008, Sony reduced Blu-ray Disc Player packaging volume about 55% on select models. This resulted 43% reduction of CO2 emissions as a result of more efficient shipping the environment and creating better environment for us.

Currently, Green Wave such as Sony are facing two fundamental forces which is:

• Worldwide Pollution
• Natural resources  wasting
• A world that full of  people that insist that the business companies to take responsibility of natural environment

These drivers are transforming of market dynamics. The business organization are do it the old fashio ways by obsolete and imposing challenges that every company. This indirectly creates opportunities for Eco-Advantage.

The Natural Forces of Environment

Under the Wave lies an assortment of local, regional, national, and worldwide environmental problems that limit business choices in the marketplace require management attention. In addition, some of the issues from water shortages to climate change, threaten to restructure markets as well as the planet. Not only that other companies that directly or indirectly  related will also facing smaller impacts. But all of them provide opportunities for those who will react in  most creatively and efficiently.

Some environment issues such as ozone layer depletion are being managed pretty well already. Others verge on crisis. The most pressing issues, like climate change, promise to affect every business, large and small, in every industry. Others are strategically important for business only in certain contexts. And there are a dozen more issues with industry which can bring specific impacts that could also be significant to the global worlds.

People being asking what that makes these pressures a matter to their business strategy ?? The answer actually lies under terms of our economy rests on the asset base of the natural world. This is because all the natural resources are threatened ripples will move through society and across the all the corporate world.

These issues are very complicated. The fact that the underlying science are often complex and even contradictory at times, makes the situation even more volatile and environmental policy making highly contested. Some public policy choices could drive whole industries into obsolescence. Can the coal business survive in a carbon-constrained world? According to the research, those affected will not go quietly. In fact, coal companies are working hard to shape the direction of climate change legislation or action.

On the other side of the ledger are companies and industries that will be crippled if we don’t take action to stem environmental losses. The skiing industry will be just one small symbolic that show economic loss if global warming and energy constraints continue on their current path such as airlines, transportation, and all energy-intensive businesses are hang in balance. Everyone’s insurance costs will rise if reinsurance jack up rates to handle the growing claims from climate change-related natural disasters.

The diversity of environmental issues, variety of interests, and range of scientific uncertainties can be daunting if not only executives can just throw up their hands in despair and confusion. Companies require stay on top of these and encounter the challenges no matter how complex, both to reduce risk and to pounce on emerging opportunities for their business.

This renovation of landscape requires refined business strategy. The capacity for innovation bringing imagination to bear to solve problems and respond to human needs. It all lies at the heart of success and Companies must find new and better ways to break out of the pack. Those that don’t will struggle to keep up in the marketplace.

Environmental strategy offers just this sort of opportunity. As a relatively new variable in the competitive mix and a market-reshaping issue, the environment a presents a lens through which to examine a facility, company, or industry and a way to bring fresh ill. to hear. Careful use of the environmental perspective can help to reduce costs and risks. But it also can drive upside gains, increasing revenues and the value of hard-to-measure but important intangibles such as reputation. Finding new market spaces, satisfying customer’s needs in new ways, and just plain doing the right thing—which many important stakeholders appreciate and reward all have the potential to add real value.

The business world is waking up to an inevitable and unavoidable truth: The economy and the environment are deeply intertwined. All goods depend on the bounty of Nature and the services it vised. Without careful stewardship, natural resource constraints will encroach on a growing number of companies and industries. Concern about these trends is driving laws, rules, and expectations that will further restrain business. The environment thus ranks as a macro issue right up there with globalization, the Internet, and the other mega forces that keep CEOs up at night. In this new, more complicated and interconnected world, environmental strategy emerges as a critical point of competitive differentiation.

Strategy no longer rests in the hands of narrowly focused planning teams. Today, every company’s financial future depends on executives who possess the ability for integrated thinking. The companies “in the barrel” of the Green Wave adeptly incorporate the environment into their core strategy. They work with a dynamic and holistic vision of how a company operates and engage the full range of stakeholders who can shape the company’s future. They create enduring Eco- Advantage by thinking differently, adopting tools to understand their companies’ challenges and opportunities, and embedding attention to stewardship in their corporate values. Companies will face many hurdles and risks of failure on the way to Eco-Advantage. But those who persist and learn from experience find ways to innovate, create value, and build competitive advantage.

Developing innovative products, bringing them to market successfully, keeping customers happy, and other elements of business success are difficult enough. Adding an environmental dimension opens  up new opportunities but adds another layer of complexity to the management challenge. Gaining an edge means learning new skills, operating in new ways, and working through some hard trade-offs. In truth, the story is even more subtle. Some initiatives “fail” by traditional measures but create intangible value for a company. It’s often hard to tell when hard-to-measure returns are worth pursuing.

We dig into real-world experiences in all their complexity, highlighting pathways to success but also analyzing initiatives that didn’t go as planned or absolutely flopped. We’ve extracted lessons, both positive and negative, from these case studies so that those now seeking Eco-Advantage don’t need to start at square one.

Who’s Riding The Green Wave?

Defining a leader in financial performance is fairly straightforward. Pick your metric—stock performance, cash flow, or net income—and find the companies with the best or the most. Determining who the environmental leaders are proves far harder. Reliable data are often not available. Companies tend to measure performance in their own ways, if at all. No set of commonly accepted standards has yet emerged. Fundamentally, the environmental arena lacks the structure and rigor provided in the financial realm by the Financial Accounting Standards Board.

We began our research by trying to identify leading companies using the information available.  We drew on the environmental and sustainability scorecards generated by the analysts at Innovate Strategic Value Advisers, Sustainable Asset Management (which Dow Jones uses to produce its sustainability index), and others in the field of socially responsible investing. We combined these rankings with our own data, including a survey of executives. After narrowing a field of 5,000 companies to 2oo, we examined concrete measures of environmental impact such as emissions and energy use. This process generated a list of leaders we call “Wave Riders“. While they are unavoidably incomplete, these rankings provided a starting point for our in-depth company reviews and interviews.

This list is a snapshot from early on in our research. Would the rankings today be different? Of course. A prime example is BP, which sits atop the international WaveRiders list. In the past few years, the company has had some serious breaches in safety and operations that have called into question its environmental and social leadership. Or look at Ford and General Motors (GM), which have been slammed by a seismic shift in consumer demand away from trucks to smaller cars. The key point is that we used this list as a way to identify which companies to focus on, not as a definitive pronouncement on which companies will lead the pack.

We explored several dozen of these top companies in detail, seeking a diversity of industry, geography, and perspective on critical environmental issues. Aware that perception plays a large part in the rankings, we added to the mix a few companies that were too small td be noticed generally but were well-known in industry circles—outfit such as the Swiss textile manufacturer Rohner Textil. We also sought out leading companies that tend not to trumpet their environmental friendliness, like furniture maker Herman Miller or cell phone giant, Nokia. Finally, we made a point of speaking to some companies, like GE and Coca-Cola, that were not considered leaders at the time but now are either expressly seeking Eco-Advantage or have elements their operations that are top-notch and worth studying.

Some industries are so well represented that it would have been repetitive to spend time with all the companies. Other stories are too unique to yield guidance for the typical business. Patagonia, for example, is arguably the most environmentally focused company in the world, but it’s owned almost entirely by the founder, Yvon Chouinard, who prides himself on putting values ahead of profits. Indeed, he often jokes that he never wanted to be a businessman.

We did not shy away from companies facing significant environmental challenges due to the inherent demands of their industries. Many of the WaveRiders are still big polluters—some of the biggest in the world. But they have smaller footprints than others in their industries. We believe that relative position matters. As long as the demand exists for energy, chemicals, and metals, we think it’s valuable to highlight those who do these dirty jobs best. But calling them leaders doesn’t mean that their work is done. In many ways, it’s just beginning.

The Bottom Line

Have WaveRiders been hurt by their focus on environmental matters? Much ink has been spilled trying to prove or disprove the connection between environmental and financial performance. We don’t want to add to wild claims in either direction, but when we examine the stock performance of the publicly held WaveRiders versus the market overall, the trend is clear (see chart). These companies have easily outperformed the major indices in the past 10 years.

A word of caution: Correlation is not causation. The relative stock market success of our WaveRiders might well be a function of high- quality management generally rather than any specific green focus. Indeed, a number of studies have demonstrated that environmental performance is a powerful indicator of overall management quality.

At the operational level, managing sustainability issues, no matter what the company calls them, works best with a defined focus. Thinking about environmental challenges alongside social issues such as health care, poverty alleviation, or how to serve the “bottom of the pyramid”—the untapped market of the world’s poorest people—quickly becomes daunting. Our research suggests that the skills needed to manage environmental issues and social concerns are quite distinct. For example, what’s required to ensure that a company complies with air-pollution permits, say, will have little similarity to what’s needed to develop a strong employee wellness program.

Moreover, the environmental agenda has a concreteness that’s often lacking on the social side. Obligations under the law are generally much clearer in the environmental realm, as are the opportunities for gaining a competitive advantage while doing the right thing. This is not to say that social issues are unimportant. Indeed, some are moral imperatives.

As Professor David Vogel of Haas Business School has demonstrated, however, the business case for taking up the social agenda is much harder to establish. For all of these reasons, we focus on defining the strategies and tools companies can use to take advantage of environmental opportunities.

Why Social Issues Can’t Be Ignored?

While environmental and social issues pose different kinds of challenges, they both connect to corporate reputation. Any company that thinks it Ali cover shortcomings in social performance with strong environmental results is kidding itself. Wal-Mart, for example, is a legitimate green leader, with large-scale initiatives and measurable results across its operations, from store energy use and fleet efficiency to product packaging.

But it won’t win any prizes for corporate responsibility if it falls short in the public’s eye on basic social issues such as wages, health care, and labor relations.

Goals for an organization can be splashy like Toyota’s or more concrete. Unilever, for example, set a fairly unsexy goal of zero liquid effluent from its 76 facilities in India. Watanabe himself set more realistic targets alongside his big 2oo-miles-per-gallon vision, including a sales goal of one million hybrid cars per year. Either way, fanciful or functional, stretch goals are a vital tool for provoking fresh thinking, promoting innovation, and building an Eco-Advantage.

As  Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter has argued, having to address tough environmental issues can be the spark a company needs to go beyond its comfort zone and find ways to innovate. Stretch goals drive creativity by asking the near impossible and demanding the reexamination of assumptions. They force everyone to search for new ways to meet old needs.

We’re not talking about lofty statements like, “We seek to be an environmental leader in our industry.” Visions help set a tone and establish priorities, but they don’t provide concrete goals or much direction. Nor are we talking about incremental gains such as “use percent less energy next year.” We’re focusing instead on big advances that present a challenge and might seem nearly impossible. The stretch goals we’ve seen animating corporate culture give life to the mindset principle “No is not an option.”

According to the research suggestion, that the sweet spot for stretch goals comes with targets that are clear and specific, yet far-reaching. Some are technically achievable but extremely challenging, like the 3M and Nike targets of reducing emissions of volatile organic compounds by 90 percent (both companies achieved it). Other stretch goals can seem purely symbolic, but in fact also drive execution. For years, DuPont has declared, “The goal is zero” when it comes to waste. While certainly an aspiration, zero packs a punch. It is specific and easy to visualize. If something is going out a pipe or into the garbage, you know you’ve missed the target. Furniture maker Herman Miller recently outlined its goals for the year 2020, which included zero waste and a 100 percent emission-free footprint. They’ve labeled these goals “Perfect Vision.”

Stretch goals help to clarify a company’s long-term direction and empower employees down the line to step up to the challenge. In 1999, Alcan set an ambitious greenhouse-gas reduction goal of 500,000 tons by 2004. Once unleashed, the company’s engineers found 2.2 million tons to cut in only the first two years. Alcan’s Dan Gagnier told us how management had missed the boat: “Executive management, no matter how well intentioned, was lagging behind operational management, who felt it was time the company did much better on these issues.”

But here’s an irony: While operational people often know inure about what actually can be achieved, they should not be expected to set stretch goals. In the words of DuPont’s Paul Tebo, “If you set goals by letting the organization tell you how to set them, you don’t have any goals at all. . . . you just get what people know they can do.”

Some WaveRiders are setting goals that help them cut environmental impacts beyond their own operations, up and down the value chain. Alcan, which consumes tremendous energy in making aluminum, has started talking about going “Beyond Zero.” Here’s the thinking: The production of every ton of aluminum creates about twelve tons of greenhouse gases (GHGs). If the transportation market uses more aluminum, lighter vehicles will burn less fuel and emit fewer GHGs. By Alcan’s estimates, a ton of aluminum added to a car saves about twenty tons of GHGs over the life of the vehicle.

Critics would say that Alcan is just trying to get out of reducing its own emissions or, worse yet, that it’s pushing this logic to sell more aluminum. Both may be true. There can be a fine line between broad thinking and issue avoidance. But thinking about how your products fit into the full value chain is the right approach and often the best way to find opportunities your competitors may have missed, which is the definition of Eco-Advantage.

Going beyond zero can inspire everyone in the company to find new solutions and do what was once thought impossible. Over time, goals that might have been symbolic become achievable. Herman Miller now expects to reach its goals of zero landfill and 100 percent renewable energy. Our research consistently shows that tough standards often spark innovation.

We heard the same thing almost word for word everywhere: “We didn’t have a clue how we’d get there.” Diving into the unknown can be scary. But this is why seemingly impossible goals like zero, or even beyond zero, are so important for breaking out of old ways of thinking. As Dawn Rittenhouse, DuPont’s Director of Sustainable Development, told us, “We’re not looking for continuous improvement. We’re looking for strategic thinking and transformation.”

What does this have to do with creating a corporate culture of environmental engagement ? Quite a bit. In 1989, when green issues were still off the radar screen of most of corporate America, DuPont’s visionary CEO Ed Woolard launched a board-level Environmental Policy Committee and established an Environmental Leadership Council made up of senior executives who met every month. Woolard’s green logic inspired fresh thinking across DuPont’s diverse business portfolio.’

Archic Dunham, Conoco’s chairman, sat on the council and was, Tebo proudly reports, “ a convert.” With the zeal of the recently converted, Dunham and other DuPont executives in 1990 made an expensive commitment to build only double-hull ships. They believed I it the reduction in risk to both the company and the environment was worth it, and were they ever right.

Many companies talk about having a culture of innovation, or they claim, “we put the customer first.” But what does that mean, exactly? Often, not much. Too many slogans are attempts at quick fixes and panaceas for corporate ailments—empty words unless backed with actions and results.

3M has long claimed the innovation mantle and can prove it with countless new, leading-edge products that have kept the company growing for decades. The company’s innovation record is no accident.

3M uses concrete organizational tools to stay fresh and drive new thinking. The company’s famed “15 percent rule,” for example, frees its engineers to spend up to 15 percent of their time on projects of their own choosing, no matter how wild.

Culture comes from more than just a high-minded mission statement or the words in a CEO’s “all-hands” e-mail. It’s built day in, day out with a conscious effort and incentives to shape people’s behavior. Companies can encourage difficult-to-measure “soft” skills like creativity with “hard” rules and metrics.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about a proverbial flywheel that gets moving slowly but, with constant nudges in the right direction, gains speed and momentum. Building a corporate culture that promotes environmental thinking is a flywheel project.

The rights tools help create the flywheel and get it spinning in the direction of Eco-Advantage. The WaveRiders we’ve talked to use four basic culture-building tools:

1. A vision, reinforced by stretch goals.
2. Practices that fold environmental thinking into every strategic decision.
3. Incentives for engagement with accountability for the environmental agenda.
4. Communications aimed at both internal and external audiences.

WaveRiders operate like all other companies, but they think differently. They include more than the obvious dollar payoff in their decision making. When considering the return on an investment, they factor in benefits such as enhanced brand image and corporate reputation, improved employee morale, community support, reduced governmental red tape, increased speed to market, and competitive differentiation. These intangibles are hard to measure, but smart companies include them in their strategic planning, despite the difficulty. Leading-edge managers have taught themselves to fold intangibles into their calculations at every turn because they know that immeasurable sometimes produce the greatest value.

We heard one story from industrial giant 3M that really impressed us. No company knows more about the beauty of small things than 3M, which has seen its little yellow sticky notes grow into a billion- dollar product. The creation of the first Post-it is a famous case of serendipity, but the growth of the brand into a mainstay of the company’s balance sheet didn’t just happen. The company has always had a remarkable eye for product extension opportunities. This isn’t a story about that, though. Instead, it’s a tale about revenues foregone, values stuck to, follow-through on promises made … and thinking broadly about what the real payoff of a decision is—a key element of the Eco-Advantage Mindset.

3M product managers had identified a new and fast-growing market for Post-its. Consumers wanted to put notes on vertical surfaces like computer monitors, but as millions of people were annoyed to find out, Post-its tend to fall off in these situations. The simple solution was to design a stronger adhesive, which the world-class scientists at 3M quickly did. But that led to a big internal problem.

The new adhesive required the use of industrial solvents that release dangerous pollutants called volatile organic compounds (VOCs). These toxic

Chemicals bring, with them a host of problems including air pollution, worker safety issues, and potential liability. To avoid these problems, 3M CEO Livio DeSirnone had declared in the early 1990s that no new investments would be made in technologies that produced VOCs. No exceptions.

That mandate left brand managers with a potential blockbuster product that they couldn’t bring to market. They asked the researchers to find an adhesive that worked without using VOC-producing solvents. Six long years later, in z003, 3M launched Super Sticky Notes to much success and millions of dollars in sales.

3M is keeping the opportunity costs of this six-year wait close to the vest, but based on the size of the Post-its business, we believe M gave up tens of millions of dollars in revenues to stick by the no-solvents pledge. Yet when asked today if the choice was worth it, M executives say “absolutely.” And this is partly because they look At their payoff matrix differently from executives in other companies.

In making this decision, 3M calculated what the company calls the “total cost” of using solvents, which includes some hard-to-measure but important expenses. By sticking to its no-solvents pledge by thinking in the strategic term instead of the short term-3M narrowed its exposure to new air pollution regulations, cut monitoring and compliance costs, and reduced the risk of EPA or state fines. Simultaneously, 3M showed its customers, local communities, regulators, and NGOs that it was serious about reducing its ecological footprint. The decision also made clear to workers that 3M puts safety ahead of profits, a message that pays big dividends in employee dedication.

As 3M Vice President Kathy Reed tells it, with these intangible benefits included, the total cost of not going the solvent-less route was too high. Of course DeSimone could not have known that the no- solvents rule would result in a six-year delay in sales, but he certainly knew there would be trade-offs.

In the end, finding a way around the solvent roadblock also turned out to be good for the long-term financial bottom line. As Post-it plant manager Valerie Young noted, “solvent-less technology is half the cost and two times the speed.” Avoiding all the special handling required of the toxic solvents sped up operations and removed some serious health risks.

The point, though, is that no one at 3M could have promised at the time that a solvent-less technology would ultimately he cheaper. Developing the new non solvent technologies and changing the manufacturing process looked mainly like an expense one the CEO demanded, but an expense nevertheless. Looking solely at the bottom line, 3M would not have delayed the release of the Super Sticky line. And without thinking beyond the financial cost and considering other softer paybacks, 3M would never have found a better way to go.

The “trees” that 3M could easily have gotten lost in were the immediate revenues and profits from launching the Super Sticky line. The “forest” was a stronger business that was safer for employees, better for the environment, and more profitable.

In some cases, seeing the forest can be literal. Smart companies in the natural resource realm (forestry, oil, and mining) are now taking into account how their actions affect wilderness and the plants and animals living there, or more scientifically, biodiversity. Almost by definition, extractive industries destroy biodiversity. Cutting trees or sweeping away the land to get to minerals or oil can demolish the local environment.

The word “green” probably doesn’t leap to mind when thinking about extractive industries, so we were more than a little surprised when we asked environmental advocates to name some companies handling biodiversity issues well. Glenn Prickett, the Director of the Center for Environmental Leadership and Business within the global NGO Conservation International, highlighted the work of mining giant Rio Tinto. As Prickett said, “Twenty years ago, an NGO formed just to go after Rio Tinto, so they’ve felt the pain. Now Rio Tinto has the most sophisticated biodiversity strategy out there.”

Rio Tinto needs access to land for exploration if it wants to continue satisfying the world’s growing demand for minerals and metals like copper, aluminum, and iron. But permission to mine is getting much harder to obtain as open land disappears. As Mark Twain once said, “Buy land. They’ve stopped making it.” Property owners, communities, native peoples, and local governments today have less interest in their land being sliced open, even for substantial economic gains. They require a show of good faith from any company that promises riches.

To find ways to please the communities that control the land, Rio Tinto became, of necessity, a good caretaker of biodiversity. But its commitment went beyond expediency. The company shared with us its internal guidance document, “Sustaining a Natural Balance,” which lays out why they care about biodiversity and how operational executives should manage it. This impressive manual describes a five-step process for assessing potential exploration tracts, working with communities and NGOs, and finding ways to mitigate as much of the damage caused by extraction as possible. Rio Tinto will never please all its critics, or even fully undo the damage from mining, but by working with stakeholders, the company is moving toward a better balance of economic growth and environmental protection.

Once considered merely nice to have, environmental plans and community engagement strategies have become must-have items. As Dave Richards, Rio Tinto’s principal advisor for environmental issues told us,” Our license to operate is granted not just by the community at the plant gate, but by society at large. If you play hardball with those interests, you’ll have a hard life. This is a conscious attempt to change a risk into an opportunity.”

Companies make long-term business decisions all the time. They spend millions on R&D when the potential payoffs down the road are, at best, uncertain. They enter tenuous new markets like China and India in the hope that business will boom. And they invest in leadership training to build up “bench strength” and prepare inn executives. The Eco-Advantage Mindset requires that companies bring the same long-term perspective to environmental strategy.

Rick Paulson is the Plant Manager for Intel’s multibillion-dollar chip fabrication plant near Phoenix, Arizona. As the head of “Fab 22,” he’s responsible for producing Intel’s latest chips in vast quantities using some of the most advanced technology in the world. And he has to do it quickly, cheaply, safely, and profitably. But like all Intel executives, Paulson must think beyond today’s operations. Intel lives or dies by its ability to build the next chip plant—and the next chip. Fab 22 will be outdated very soon. So Paulson has an eye on Intel’s future production needs. He knows that he must keep community groups, activists, and regulators happy for one simple reason: Their unhappiness can easily slow or block expansion plans, costing the company millions of dollars. No wonder Paulson talks about making decisions not for the short term, but for the “strategic term.”

How long is the strategic term? It depends on the business. It may be a year or two, or much further out. In the late 196os, executives at Royal Dutch/Shell began looking for ways to prepare for an increasingly unstable oil market. The result was a planning group that focused on painting pictures of possible futures scenarios that would help the company think about what its business might look like over the long term. Among other futures the team famously imagined was the rise of OPEC and the fall of the Soviet Union.

More recently, scenarios have helped Shell set environmental strategy. We talked with the head of the group, Albert Bressand, and a group of other senior executives. Over a lunch in headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands, they explained how scenarios help them devise better strategies.

“First, you should know that scenarios are not forecasts,” Lex Hoist, VP of Health, Safety, and Environment, said, “but consistent pictures of a possible future.” Added Mark Weintraub, the executive who writes the annual Shell Report,”We ask ourselves, ‘Will 20 percent of all new cars in 2020 be powered by hydrogen fuel cells?” We don’t know, but we can hold up a strategy to this picture and ask, “Is my plan robust in this kind of world?”

Will the world move toward increased energy efficiency and demand much more renewable energy? If so, Shell is facing company-altering, perhaps company-threatening changes. So it’s worth thinking long term, asking tough questions, and building pictures of the future. These kinds of scenarios helped Shell decide to move into the hydrogen business in the first place.

Other companies are talking more informally but still thinking long term. Executives at IKEA are exploring how their business might greatly reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. Given today’s infrastructure and technologies, could a furniture business consume no oil or gas? It might seem farfetched. But IKEA executives know that the world is changing and they want to be ready to move proactively into the energy future one step ahead of the competition. Even smart fossil- fuel suppliers like BP and Shell are planning for a day with much less fossil fuel in the mix.

What long-term environmental pressures could sink your business? And which of them might offer opportunities for growth? Until you ask those questions in a serious and systematic way, the future will control you instead of the other way around. Big difference.

So WaveRiders think broadly about time. Great, you might say, but taking the long view can create seemingly very tough choices 110w. And the market can be quite unforgiving in the short term. The trade-offs can look especially ill-advised if you consider only the financial costs. Changing or retooling longstanding production processes or reformulating successful products often costs a bundle of money upfront. But not paying attention to changing circumstances and new pressures, including environmental ones, can hurt a business far more.

WaveRiders build a foundation for Eco-Advantage by reframing how everyone in the company looks at environmental issues. For these companies, environmental thinking is not always the final word on strategy, but it is always a consideration.

In our research, we’ve found that this new mindset is absolutely critical to managing eco-risks, driving innovation, and turning environmental pressures into competitive advantage.Above point is highlight how WaveRiders use an environmental lens to change the way they think and sharpen their business strategies. After a while, these companies don’t have to focus consciously on finding an alternative perspective. Environmental thinking becomes intrinsic to how they do business. Deeply embedded, the Eco-Advantage Mindset arises naturally at every opportunity.

Some basic rules to get you there:

• Look at the forest, not the trees. WaveRiders think broadly about (a) the time frames involved in investment and strategy decisions, (h) the full range of potential payoffs from those investments, including hard-to-measure intangible gains, and (c) possibilities for adding value across the full chain of production.
• Start at the top. Every company we found leveraging Eco-Advantage had a commitment to environmental thinking at the very top of the organization.
• Adopt the Apollo 13 Principle—”No” is not an option. In leading companies, management gives the organization bold environmental goals and seemingly impossible tasks—and refuses to accept failure
• Recognize that feelings are facts. Top performers know that what NGOs, employees, customers, communities, and other stakeholders f’c1 about a company’s environmental performance and reputation can be much more important than the reality.
• Do the right thing. We’ve seen time and time again that WaveRiders make choices based on core values, including caring for the environment, even when it might not pay off in the short run.

Look At The Forest, Not The Trees

By concentrating on the forest, we found the strategic that advantage for market. WaveRiders in the corporate world do the same. True, many business books push broad thinking, but taking up the environmental lens requires stretching the mind in new directions. Nature, after all, cuts a very wide swath.

In factoring environmental considerations into their strategic thinking, WaveRiders broaden their vision across three critical dimensions. They consider issues in both short- and long-time horizons. They calculate payoffs more broadly than others and are more attuned to intangible costs and benefits. They don’t let the traditional boundaries of their business limit their vision, and they search for ways to improve performance throughout their value chains.

The  companies who “get” the interface between environmentalism and business—the ones that are on their way to reducing their environmental impacts, or “footprints,” while generating significant profits and sustained Eco-Advantage—have no single profile. They range from global conglomerates to niche textile makers. However, we found certain patterns. The leading-edge companies go beyond the basics of complying with the law, cutting waste, and operating efficiently. They fold environmental considerations into all aspects of operations. Specifically, they:

Design innovative products to help customers with their environmental problems or even create new eco-defined market spaces.

For the top-tier companies, environmental management started out s something they had to do. But that’s no longer the case. They’ve evolved to the point where environmental management is second mature and their focus is now mining the gold in environmental strategy.

Who Should Care The Most?

Some companies need to worry about these issues more than others. And some sectors are poised for greater upside potential. We see growing risks and rewards for companies with:

High brand exposure. Companies with substantial goodwill and intangible value (including Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and McDonald’s face special challenges.

Carbon exposure. Companies with big fossil fuel bills face a double whammy of higher prices and greenhouse gas emission charges.

1. Laws that once applied only to big business are encroaching on smaller enterprises. Even bakeries and gas stations must now comply with clean air regulations.
2. Small companies often have an edge in innovation. Of the more than $1, 00 billion in R&D money that each year is plowed into the i tin tech” marketplace, the bulk goes to new, smaller ventures win historically have produced more breakthrough products and services.
3. Going after the consumption choices of individuals remains difficult politically, but advocacy groups have no problem demanding that small businesses curb their impacts. So while personal cars may not come under NGO attack, the emissions from taxi fleets or delivery services make a relatively attractive target.
   
4. The Formation Age is reducing the costs of pursuing smaller-scale actors. New sensors, information systems, and communications technologies make tracking pollution and monitoring regulatory compliance cheaper every day. Even tiny enterprises now find it hard to fly under the radar.
5. Large customers are putting pressure on small-business suppliers to comply with environmental standards. One little New York- based software developer we know found itself answering tough questions posed by a Tokyo-based telecom company with an aggressive auditing program for its supply chain. To stay on the list of preferred suppliers, the company had to implement an Environmental Management System—much more than a company its size would normally do.
6. Small companies can he more nimble than their larger competitors. Entrepreneurial businesses can move quickly to take advantage of changing circumstances or meet niche demands. Q Collection, a “sustainable” home furnishings company, produces couches, tables, and chairs without toxic dyes and with wood sourced entirely from sustainably managed forests. The furniture is priced at the high end of the market, but the company has found a customer base of interior designers who want the natural option. And Hawaii based Kona Blue has launched an environmentally friendly fish farm to meet the growing demand for fish raised free of hormones and antibiotics.

In today’s world, no company, big or small, operating locally or globally, in manufacturing or services, can afford to ignore environmental issues. Of course, the opportunities and risks posed by the Green Wave vary by company and by industry. Context matters in the push for Eco-Advantage. No single strategy or tool will work in all companies or all circumstances. But Green Wave dynamics have become a fact of business life for nearly every organization.

• Lower its costs compared with the competition.
• Differentiate its product on quality, features, or service.

Portoer’s work on competitiveness proved a useful starting point for analyzing the Eco-Advantage strategies that WaveRiders using.

Some costs are obvious and relatively short term: inputs used, energy consumed, time and money spent on meeting regulatory requirements. More fundamentally, a great deal of pollution is waste and a function of outmoded production processes or poor product design. So improving the resource productivity of a business the amount of material or energy needed per unit of output goes straight to the bottom line. Similarly, eliminating regulatory burdens by avoid ii products, chemicals, or processes that require special care and do it mentation lowers overhead.

Companies that successfully manage environmental risks lower operating costs, reduce the cost of capital, drive up stock market valuations, and keep insurance premiums reasonable. They also avoid the indirect costs of business interruption and lost goodwill.

On the revenue side, the benefits of differentiation through good environmental stewardship are sometimes concrete like commanding a price premium or just selling more but are largely intangible: strengthened relationships with customers, employees, and some stakeholders. Some say that these intangibles are too vague to be measured, but they’re wrong. How much does it cost to acquire a new customer to replace a lost one? That’s the rough value of increasing loyalty.

How about employee churn? If improving morale and employee engagement in the company’s mission lowers turnover, how much would that save? And what about community support? What does it cost Intel in carrying costs, for example, if it can’t build the next billion-dollar chip plant for 12 months because of community unease about how much water the company uses? These measurable gains make investments in intangible values more concrete.

To help us think through the environmental strategies companies use, or fail to use, we added one more dimension to the analysis. We asked ourselves whether a strategy was fairly certain or less certain to generate value. To oversimplify, we say that “certain” is roughly equivalent to the short-term and “less certain” to the long-term.

Take cost control versus risk management as an example. If you decrease waste in your system, you can be pretty sure how much you’ll save. And you’ll have an easier time selling the project internally. But what will it save the company to substitute a less toxic substance that costs more upfront? The risk is lower, but what is that worth? When does the benefit come? These questions are harder to answer, so risk control is less certain, although it often pays off more in the long run. The same holds true for the upside: It’s easier (though not easy) to drive revenues than to increase brand value.