April 25th Social Investment Webinar: Climate Change & You
How Can You Build Sustainability Into Your Company?
Presented by Adam Werbach, CEO of Act Now Productions
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 8am PST/11am EST
About Adam Werbach
Adam Werbach is the CEO of Act Now Productions, a unique sustainability agency with the mission of creating a world full of happy people living on a healthy planet.Adam began his sustainability career in the second grade, when he convinced his classmates to sign a petition to oust U.S. Secretary of the Interior James Watt who was threatening to develop America's national parks. By age 23, Adam was president of the Sierra Club, where he oversaw a rebuilding phase for the 114-year-old organization. Adam left the Sierra Club to focus on creating social change through media. He founded Act Now Productions in 1998 with the goal of reaching all Americans with stories about the fate of the planet.
Act Now has developed a wide range of projects, including The Video Project, the nation's leading distributor of environmental videos to high schools and universities, and Ironweed, a progressive DVD film club which distributes thought-provoking documentaries on a monthly basis. Act Now has also set up a skunk works for new communications initiatives which researches methods for creating and modeling "nano-practices" that will change consumer behavior. Additionally, Act Now brings its in-depth knowledge of sustainability strategy to companies like Sony BMG and Wal-Mart.
Adam has appeared on television shows ranging from the "O'Reilly Report" to "Charlie Rose" to "Politically Incorrect" and has been featured in publications like the New York Times, People, LA Times, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, New Republic, Rolling Stone and TIME magazine. He is also a contributing editor at In These Times magazine, Commissioner of the San Francisco Public Utilities and a member of the six-member International Board of Greenpeace. His book, Act Now, Apologize Later, was published by Harper-Collins in 1998.Adam Werbach lives in San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood with his wife Lyn and their daughters Mila and Pearl.
I think there's a tremendous opportunity to spread sustainability across our workforces through what Adam Werbach calls Personal Sustainability Projects and Practices (PSPs).
We should also consider TSPs - Team Sustainability Projects, since group activities foster teamwork, engagement and fun.
As we know, every CEO has to be thinking about sustainability at some level -- Gartner's predicts that it will be a bigger boardroom topic than regulatory compliance by 2009 -- but even if you don't see the level of focus and concern coming from senior management that you'd like, you are in a unique position to foster grassroots awareness and action through employee volunteer initiatives.
* Survey employees to find out how important sustainability is to them
* Ask them to tell you about their own PSPs and TSPs
* Recognize and reward these projects and practices
* Report what's going on so management can see the interest and results
We'd love to look back across our client base in a year and be able to report on the number and variety of PSPs in which employees are engaged.
I think there's a strong case to be made that by helping our workforces incorporate the principles of sustainability into their lives, we will have created a strong cultural foundation from which innovative operational practices will emerge. These practices will represent cost-saving and revenue-generating opportunities while fostering sustainability.