October 8, 2009
Dr. Sharon Nunes from IBM, opened her remarks on her panel at yesterday’s annual summit of the Women’s Network for a Sustainable Future (WNSF) in NYC, noting that in her career as an engineer, she rarely finds herself in a room full of women or with a long line at the bathroom. But at this event, she was in the majority.
A group of around 200 women (and yes a handful of men) working in corporate responsibility and sustainability gathered to share best practices and discuss ways to personally drive change in their companies, including panelists from Walmart, DuPont, IBM, Pfizer, TIAA-CREF, and the White House. The White House? Yes, today even the federal government’s challenging itself with new sustainability goals. The women who presented talked about how they are each applying the specific strengths and capabilities of their industry and organization to specific global challenges – from using technology to conserve water to public-private partnerships in healthcare to leveraging purchasing power to drive chain in the supply chain.
My main takeaway from the event was that a lot of the large companies that have been at this sustainability thing for a long time are facing similar challenges – moving to the next level of maturity along the CSR curve. We’re moved past some of the biggest hurdles of making the business case internally, we’re tracking and reporting on performance metrics, and we’re engaging directly with environmental groups who we used to shy away from. We’re working to engage our employee bases to embed these concepts into the culture and uncover new innovative ideas in the process. I wouldn’t say that we’ve quite reached “adulthood” yet – there’s still a ways for all of us to go – but perhaps we can say we’ve made it squarely into the “teenage” years.
To view the complete blog, click here.
Tags: Green Intel, green it, intel, sustainability, Teen Angst
