Organizational Change
The latest creative strategies and tools helping organizations to engage their teams in building market-leading, purpose-driven brands.
Q&A: How Social Design Is Creating New Markets, More Engaged Cultures
This is one of a series of interviews by students and alumni from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) with practitioners from the Sustainable Brands community, on a variety of ways organizations can, and are, Redesigning the Good Life.
Self-Disrupt to Redesign the Future of Work
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” — R. Buckminster Fuller
These 8 Core Values Helped My Business Achieve Long-Term Growth
Much has been said about how to grow a company and sustain that growth over time. From building a sales funnel and forming strategic partnerships to implementing the right IT systems and establishing parameters for how employees interact with each other, with management and customers, there is no shortage of advice.
How MOD Pizza's People-First Culture Drives Growth and Impact
Corporate culture sets the groundwork for how your team interacts with each other and your customers.
When Goals Become Values: The Key to Industrywide Change
Every day, millions of Americans drink, on average, 2.1 cups of coffee; each cup takes about a hundred beans to brew1. Each bean must go through harvesting, wet milling, drying, dry milling, storing, shipping, trucking, roasting, grinding and packaging before it is available for us to pick off a store shelf and bring home to brew. Coffee may be simple to prepare in the home — especially if you have a Keurig machine on your counter — but the work behind such a ubiquitous beverage is incredibly complex and starts, as with most things we love, with people.
10 Burning Questions: PMI on How It Will Create a Smoke-Free Future
Jennifer Motles and her colleagues at Philip Morris International (PMI) are on a crusade to end smoking. They know many of us probably won’t believe them. And they are OK with that; they just want the chance to prove it.
Caesars Begins Straw Phase-Out Plan; Sandals Resorts to Eliminate 21.5M by November
Hospitality giants Sandals Resorts International (SRI) and Caesars Entertainment have joined the growing, cross-sector fight against single-use plastics with ambitious phase-out plans for plastic straws and stirrers.
KPMG, Textile Exchange Develop SDG Roadmap for the Apparel, Retail and Textile Sector
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer many business opportunities for companies while addressing critical operational risks, according to a new report produced by audit, tax and advisory firm KPMG LLP; in partnership with the non-profit organization, Textile Exchange: Threading the Needle: Weaving the Sustainable Development Goals into the Textile, Retail and Apparel Industry.
Missions Critical: How PayPal Rallied a Global Workforce Around Sustainability
“Break down the silos” has become a bit of a catchphrase for business in the last decade, as companies have come to realize the benefits of cross-departmental collaboration. Today's sustainability teams charged with boosting the impact of their initiatives could gain a lot by adopting this mantra, too. Whether the goal is to cut CO2 emissions, reduce waste, conserve resources or all of the above, more and more brands have sustainability strategies in place. But making them a meaningful part of your brand is another story.
Reimagining Organizations as Brand Ecosystems
Who are you and why should I care? Since the 1950s, companies have turned to externally focused branding methods to answer these questions that consumers have about their businesses. Today, companies face an increasingly hyperconnected, skeptical marketplace where customers are demanding more. They want to know the substance beyond the sizzle of advertising. For branding to remain the economic engine it has been over the past 70 years, we need to ask: What’s next?
Fashion for Good, Partnership for Sustainable Textiles Take Shape with Museum, Roadmaps
60 members of the Partnership for Sustainable Textiles have revealed concrete action plans to ensure humane working conditions, greater environmental protection and fair wages in their own companies and in their suppliers’ production facilities. The Partnership — a multi-stakeholder coalition made up of companies, associations, NGOs, trade unions, standards organisations and the Federal German Government, formed in 2014 with the aim of making improvements along the entire textile supply chain —considers this a major step forward, as it means that many members agree on revealing even sensible information for the first time.
Liverpool Using Blockchain to Become First Climate-Positive City by End of 2020
The Liverpool City Council is committed to becoming the first climate-positive authority in the world by the end of 2018, through a groundbreaking partnership with the nonprofit Poseidon Foundation, in a bid to make Liverpool the world’s first climate-positive city by the end of 2020.
The First Step to Efficient Sustainability: Define Shared Goals
Energy and sustainability are inherently linked. Energy efficiency pays dividends by trimming consumption and costs. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), implementing energy efficiency initiatives is the best way to act on climate change, as it can reduce CO2 emissions by 38 percent. However, becoming an efficient, sustainable business requires a collaborative effort from almost all parts of an organization.
Ford Reveals Vision for Michigan Central Station, Reimagining Future of Mobility in Detroit
After opening in 1913, Michigan Central Station quickly became where dreamers in search of new jobs and new opportunities first set foot in Detroit. Once the last train pulled out of the station 30 years ago, however, it became a place where hope left. The station became a symbol of Detroit’s hard times, a monument to the city’s struggles. As the new owner of the building, Ford is making a big bet on the future.
Employee Engagement 3.0: How Starbucks, Unilever Go the Extra Mile
Last week, over 2,000 representatives from our global community of sustainability practitioners, brand strategists, product and service innovators, thought leaders and other change-makers converged at SB’18 Vancouver to share their latest insights on a multitude of themes pertinent to all of those committed to improving business around the world. Here, we dig into brand and organizational efforts to recruit, retain and support an engaged workforce — and go the extra mile for employees in need.
Q&A: Nestlé's Work to Become a 'Nutrition, Health and Wellness Company'
Nestlé has been active on a lot of sustainability fronts lately, from water and climate policy to deforestation and workers’ rights, to plant-based
Philip Morris International is Quitting Smoking — But Don't Take Their Word for It
Cross-Posted from Behavior Change. Jennifer Motles Svigilsky detests cigarettes. But she recently began focusing on the ambitious vision to help 1.1B smokers quit smoking within a generation. Which is how she found herself in front of a crowded room at SB’18 Vancouver, representing one of the world’s largest cigarette companies.
Hershey Releases 2017 CSR Report, Unveils SDG-Aligned CSR Strategy
Today, along with the release of its 2017 Shared Goodness Corporate Social Responsibility report, The Hershey Company unveiled Shared Goodness Promise, a new CSR strategy aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and centered around investments, collaborative programs and sustainable business practices aimed at making a positive difference in peoples’ lives.
Q&A: How TD Is Living Its Purpose, Driving SDGs with The Ready Commitment
TD Bank Group recently launched its corporate citizenship strategy to center on a new multi-year program, The Ready Commitment. Guided by the bank’s purpose, focus on creating shared value and desire to support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), TD is targeting CDN $1 billion (US $775 million) toward community giving by 2030 in The Ready Commitment’s four focus areas:
Can Transparency Alone Transform the Fashion Industry?
Transparency has become a bit of a buzzword in the fashion industry and judging by the number of times it was mentioned at this year’s Copenhagen Fashion Summit, it is a trend that we are not going to shake anytime soon. Quite the contrary, transparency is reshaping how brands and retailers interact with their suppliers and consumers. But can it really transform the entire fashion industry? C&A Foundation’s Leslie Johnston hosted a panel of experts to find out.
