sustainability
‘The payback is estimated to be six months. To call something like this “expensive” – or even an “investment” – is just not understanding your income statement’
firm that existed on selling devices, paper, and machine servicing, so the more it’s used the better. But at the core, what Xerox is offering is less total printing. That’s a big shift in business as usual.” Companies like Xeroxmust do this if they are to remain
relevant, arguesWinston. “The choice is between helping their customers use less, or someone else doing it. That’s the fundamental principle.”
Clean cleaning Another pet case study ofWinston’s is US cleaning com- pany Tennant. “It’s a great example of product innovation, he says.
“The reason I love this example is it was a sort of sleepy company from which no one would expect a major inno- vation. They’ve been around 150 years, and for years they have made the kind of cleaning machines you see janitors pushing around malls, which use the usual cleaning chemicals. “Then a new CEO came in – Chris Killingstad – and he
set an entirely different culture. He said: ‘Now we are going to be an environmental solutions company’. He put more investment into research and development, and when some of his team were in Japan they noticed that nurses cleansed wounds in hospitals with ionised water, a very simple technology. “They said: ‘Well, why don’t we try that on the floor
instead of chemicals?’. It was a real leap of thinking and now it is the fastest-growing product in their history. It’s shaking up the entire industry of chemical-based clean- ing. It has caused the whole industry to ask itself when do you need chemicals, and when do you not.” Of course, there are even more famous examples, like
the development of the electric car, and the development of the bestselling Toyota Prius. “It started back in the Nineties with the question: ‘Does a car need a combustible engine?’. It’s all about asking these very fundamental questions, and that’s what I think the leading companies are starting to do.”
Bottom line Not that Winston believes any of us has a choice in this. “Imean the bottomline is there are ever greater resource constraints, and pretending that the status quo is stable
60 Irish Director Spring 2011
is just a sure remedy for becoming irrelevant and your business disappearing,” he says. “That’s always been true but it’s particularly true now. “The pace of change on the planet is shocking even to
scientists. That’s the real joke about the debate around climate change and saying that the scientists are wrong. They have been wrong – they’ve been far too conservative as scientists tend to be. They have been consistently sur- prised by just how fast things are changing. Just look at the weather events over the last year and what it’s done to the availability and price of everything from cotton to rare earth metals to wheat – we’re feeling the effects of climate change right now. “We can talk about the business logic but really com-
panies have no choice.We have no other choice as a soci- ety but to figure out a way to use drastically less stuff to do what we do. And it’s not like we don’t have the tech- nology, we do in most cases.” He points to the US as an example of this. “The US uses
twice as much energy per dollar of GDP as any other country, so clearly we could get leaner. It’s not like we’re getting so much for that extra doubling of energy use. There are 10 other countries as rich as us and they’re using half as much energy.Why? “These are the things that I think companies need to
ask themselves, and many are doing that, and they’re dis- covering constant large scale savings just in rethinking how they manufacture,”Winston continues. “And I’m not even talking about heretical innovation here, just incre- mental change, finding new ways to use a lot less energy and produce a lot less waste and use a lot less water.”
Policy gap With the US failing to get its climate change bill passed, and the UN Climate Change talks in Copenhagen, and more recently Cancun, resulting in relatively slow progress on this issue of climate change, Winston ques- tions the relevance of policy. “There’s been some waiting for a global agreement, for
a climate bill in the US and that’s partly about business being smart, about waiting to see what the rules were going to be,” he says. “But I think companies need to ask whether compliance – traditional compliance – really matters anymore. If your biggest stakeholders, your
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