1996 Electronics Industry Environmental Roadmap - Civil and ...

2.0 Strategic Business Opportunities
Strategic Business Opportunities
Imagine an organization that knows what its customers’ environmental concerns
will be ten years from now and knows how to win their business.
Imagine an organization where the president communicates the vital few environmental
strategic priorities, and every person participates in defining how his or her
work provides a measurable contribution.
Imagine an organization where everybody knows the methods to follow to
guarantee that the organization will meet its environmental objectives.
Adapted from Bechtell’s (1995) “Imagine” in The Management Compass
2.1 Scope and Objective
Corporations are beginning to incorporate explicit consideration of environmental issues into
evaluation of ongoing programs and strategic planning for the future. In the traditional way of
operating, an Environment, Health, & Safety (EHS) Department is responsible only for ex post
legal compliance with EHS regulations and laws, not for factoring current and future
environmental costs into operations analysis and planning. This traditional approach is rational
in a world where EHS laws and regulations are changing relatively slowly and/or not expected to
change substantially in the future, and where there is little public concern with a firm’s legallypermitted
environmental impacts. However, this limited use of EHS departments is not
recommended today for several reasons:
Valuable expertise will be missing from new process and product design decisions.
Public opinions about a firm’s environmental commitments and impacts can affect a
firm’s ability to obtain financing, to secure insurance, or to undertake other activities.
EHS laws and regulations tend to change frequently.
Accounting systems using out-of-date costing methods can obscure the magnitude of environmental
costs [1, 2].
This chapter is written specifically for three audiences:
Senior management interested in evaluating whether environmental needs and costs are
adequately factored into corporate decision-making,
Mid-level management interested in understanding which environmental needs and costs
are likely to affect them, and
Managers of Environment, Health, and Safety units who need to communicate the effects
of strategic decisions on the environmental costs incurred by a firm.
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