Sustainability: It's Not About Lightbulbs

22 September 2009:

The owner of a McDonald's franchise made news recently by opening an eco-friendly restaurant in Cary, N.C. It has energy-efficient refrigerators, low-flow toilets, tables made from sunflower seeds, and even recharging stations for electric cars.

This McDonald's (MCD) is surely going green. But that doesn't make it sustainable.

To many people, sustainability means solar panels, wind turbines, and LEED-certified buildings. And that means that too often, sustainability is parked over by the recycling bins and isn't core to the work. But sustainability is more than just going green or being green. It is, fundamentally, a mindset. It's a way of thinking about business—a mode of leadership and behavior that aims to create lasting value as opposed to piling up short-term transactional wins. It's not as much about wind turbines or solar panels or green buildings as it is about the reason we want those things: so that our companies and our world will be better off tomorrow than they are today.

We need to reframe and reclaim sustainability to take the term beyond "green" and make it relevant to the work businesspeople do every day. We need to recognize that sustainability is a powerful way to forge deeper connections with employees and customers.

Making these deeper connections with stakeholders is more important than ever. Let me offer a brief look backward to explain why. Throughout most of human history, sources of power were finite. In the land-based economy of the middle ages, the more land people owned, the more rent they could charge. In the capital-based economy spawned by the industrial age, the more capital people had, the more interest they could charge. Money talked. So did oil and minerals.