Talent Management in the current climate Brewing up ... - Ashridge

A few months ago I found myself
part of a rather odd conversation
over coffee at a climate change
conference. A senior executive of
a utility company, previously something of
a sceptic on the quiet, said: “Well, it looks
like this climate change thing really is real.”
To which someone who had recently set up
a carbon mitigation business said without a
hint of irony: “Thank God, imagine if it weren’t,
that would be a disaster!” I’m not joking and
neither was he. That little exchange summed
up a couple of things for me: a dawning
realisation of the profound effects we are all
having on the natural world and the need to
choose carefully when deciding who can help
us do something about it.
Ashridge holds a long-standing interest in
sustainability and corporate responsibility, with
our Centre for Business and Society recently
celebrating its 11th anniversary. But our most
recent response to the urgency so many of us feel
in our professional and private lives is in our newly
launched collaboration, Ashridge InterfaceRAISE.
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Nature as
INSPIRATION
By Adam Faruk, Associate Director,
Ashridge Centre for Business and Society
Interface is a quite remarkable company from a
sustainability perspective and we’re sure we’ve
chosen well.
As I’ve gone outside Ashridge talking about
this new venture some have asked: “Why
Interface?” For those of you yet to meet Interface,
it is consistently identified in global surveys of
sustainability experts as the company most
committed to sustainable development.* And
believe me, sustainability experts are a pretty
cynical lot, having come across more greenwash
than you can shake a corporate responsibility
report at.
Interface’s reputation comes from being as
interested in profit as any other company while
holding an ambition for itself that seems all the
more extraordinary, coming from a manufacturer
of something as humble as a carpet tile. It aspires
not only to be a sustainable company (in its terms,
to take no more from nature than it puts back),
but to join with others to become restorative (to
share learning and collaborate to undo
the damage that threatens us all). And
that’s where Ashridge with its experience
in organisation change, strategy and
leadership, and maybe you, come in.
Together Ashridge and Interface have put
some considerable effort into designing ways for
organisations to examine the evidence around
climate change, resource depletion and other
forms of environmental degradation, and then
explore the link to reputation and business value
to look at these issues without prejudice, think
them through in the circumstances specific to
each organisation and go on to take action. And
we aim to offer a route through the stifling doomand-gloom,
guilt and defensiveness that so often
characterise our responses to sustainability
issues, to work instead with opportunity and realworld
examples of sustainable business practice
from a range of sectors.
Not just a carpet tile . . .
Evergreen Lease TM
and ReEntry TM
are two such
examples that recognise the need for industry to
work with the natural world rather than continue
to exploit it as if there’s no tomorrow.