| Monday, June 7th 9:00am - 12:00pm |
Workshops Session 1 |
John Marshall Roberts, CEO, Worldview LearningWhat could your organization accomplish if cynicism and apathy were no longer present? How much extra revenue and goodwill could your brand generate if it instilled a deeper sense of meaning and purpose in customers? What would be possible if you could inspire common vision in even the most cynical of stakeholders? In this workshop, author and communications expert John Marshall Roberts will help you make this vision a reality. He will walk you step-by-step through the essentials of an empathy-based communication framework first popularized in his bestselling book “Igniting Inspiration: A Persuasion Manual for Visionaries”. Participants will learn: -The 7 customer value-systems or ‘worldviews’ and how to engage each for more effective and empathetic communications -The secret link between demographics and psychographics (based upon proprietary Worldview Design™ research data) -The 4 deadly species of cynicism that plague most sustainable businesses, and how to beat them -Creative tactics for overcoming the 3 perceptual filters that cynics use to tune important messages out -Inspiring real-world stories from forward thinking companies and innovators who have applied this information to create breakthrough results -An understanding of their own “communication worldview” and how this influences their understanding of their social world Overcoming cynicism is the hidden challenge of our times. This workshop will offer a fresh, scientifically grounded, common sense approach to empathic communication that is uniquely suited to help solve the communication challenges that sustainable organizations face. | |
Asheen Phansey, Adjunct Professor, Babson CollegeNature has spent 3.8 billion years conducting sustained ‘research and development’. Life has figured out how to efficiently and inexpensively generate power, obtain food, regulate temperature, transport itself, build its home, and raise its young, all in harmony with its environment. At our hands-on Biomimicry Workshop you’ll learn this process of turning to nature for solutions on the three levels necessary to design and deliver products and services more sustainably. You will learn how life appropriately senses its environment and launches successful products. When does it cast a thousand seeds, and when one well-nurtured seed? When does it grow quickly, and when does it develop carefully? Much can be learned about launching a product by looking to these examples that biologists and ecologists have studied for years and learning what we can about our own products’ “survival”. Finally, you’ll learn about Innovation for Conservation, a program that gives back to the organisms that inspired our sustainable choices. Linking a biomimetic product to the I4C program allows us to close the loop to create a complete story of your product and its connection to the earth. | |
Peter Salmon, Founder & Director, FischeThe future for sustainable enterprise is about rethinking opportunities, not imposing limits. Designing sustainable enterprise models is an innovation strategy that creates new thinking, more resilient outcomes and greater value. So: how do you begin, or make sense of what you're currently doing? How do you get on the right track? How do you create the interconnected pathways that will generate real transformative change? Fische Consulting, is a leading sustainability and business model design consultancy in New Zealand who counts Coca-Cola Amatil, The World Bank and Deloitte as part of their client base. They have developed a business model prototyping platform called NextPlays that has been successfully used to assist the transformation of NGO’s and businesses in both New Zealand and abroad. NextPlays applies scenarios and simple heuristic approaches to challenge business and social enterprises to think widely about the challenges and possibilities before them and then prototype solutions using seven researched approaches or Plays to design more robust and resilient enterprise models. This hands-on workshop demonstrates the NextPlays approach by condensing a two-day process into three hours. Participants will learn the basics of NextPlays and spend time designing new models by focusing on just one of the seven Plays. You'll come away inspired and equipped with some new ideas for growing your own sustainable business future. | |
Jennifer Rice, Principal, Fruitful StrategyMost think of brands in the context of communications. But building a strong, credible brand starts with laying the foundation: how customers experience your brand, and what they believe to be true about you. In this session we'll walk step-by-step through building a sustainable brand for B2B, B2C and retailers by: - Identifying where your brand is, and where you want to be, in our "5 Sustainable Brand Stages" audit - Selecting the right brand strategy and target audience based on your Brand Stage (where you'll get a sneak preview of our recent consumer segmentation research) - Learning the implications of Brand Stage on positioning, customer experience and marketing - Mapping your customer experience and embedding sustainability into the touchpoints that matter most This session is a preview of the latest for-fee workshops and Sustainable Brand Insight reports soon to be launched by Fruitful Strategy. We're excited to share this with the Sustainable Brand community and are looking forward to getting your feedback on content before we launch. See you in Monterey! | |
Alain Gauthier, Executive Director, Core Leadership DevelopmentThis workshop experientially explores personal and interpersonal practices that build leadership capacity for stakeholder engagement when designing and implementing strategies for sustainability. Based on ten years of experience with the SoL Sustainability Consortium – that led to Peter Senge’s latest book, The Necessary Revolution – I will focus the workshop on how to develop skills needed to collaborate across boundaries. We will also explore how collaborating is closely connected with the two other core learning capabilities for systemic change: seeing systems and creating desired futures. Workshop participants can expect three main learning outcomes: Understanding how to use the “sustainable value framework” to build the case for internal and external change. Improving one’s inquiry and advocacy skills to see reality through others’ eyes by using tools such us the “ladder of inference” and the “left-hand column”. Experiencing ways to convene the “whole system in the room”, engage in generative dialogue, and build shared commitment. | |
| Monday, June 7th 1:30pm - 4:30pm |
Workshops Session 2 |
Mike Mercer, Executive Director, NorthWest Earth InstituteConsumers are demanding a greater level of transparency relative to a company’s "green" actions, and increasingly, employees are too. Furthermore, the innovation required to transform your business to effectively respond to the coming sustainable economy will come from inspired staff from the lower half of your org. chart. nal transformation required for a sustainable economy. Top down driven initiatives with little bottom up support were a hallmark of the industrial economy. Today, in order to attract, retain and engage the best and brightest talent while at the same time helping drive true, sustainable culture change, organizations need a more integrated and engaged approach. In this half-day workshop, attendees will walk away with an understanding of how models for employee engagement have changed with the advent the sustainable economy and the "new millennial" workforce, as well as insights on one tested employee engagement tool that is being used by companies like Starbucks to begin to engage employees in the drive toward more sustainable behavior at home and at work. | |
Dr. Robert Epstein, President, Creativity InternationalDr. Robert Epstein, distinguished research psychologist and one of the world’s leading experts on creativity and innovation, will show you how to embed creativity and innovation at every level of your organization, from mailroom to boardroom. He’ll introduce you to scientific research and proven techniques that he teaches to MBA students at the Rady School of Management at the University of California and that he has used to boost creativity at companies like Bayer, Nestlé, and Procter & Gamble. Through fun games and exercises, he’ll introduce you to the four Core Competencies of Creative Expression—Capturing, Challenging, Broadening, and Surrounding. These are skill sets that be both measured and taught and that are excellent predictors of creative output in an organization. He’ll also introduce you to eight competencies that allow managers to elicit creativity in employees. If you like, you can measure your creativity competencies before the workshop by taking the quiz at http://MyCreativitySkills.com. He’ll tell you how idea generation can be accelerated though Embedding—that is, by making small adjustments in an organization’s policies and procedures. How you state goals, how you run meetings, how you arrange your desks, even how you order pencils—virtually everything an organization does can be tweaked to boost creativity and innovation and to make sure it keeps flowing year-round, not just during crises. For a short video on the subject from CNBC, visit http://www.cnbc.com/id/25338946/site/14081545/, or read about Dr. Epstein’s work in a recent cover story in Scientific American Mind at http://tinyurl.com/yegap8x. | |
Jay Bolus, VP of Technical Operations, MBDCandJessica Switzer, Blue PracticeJay Bolus, who manages the Cradle to Cradle Certification program for MBDC, will discuss the importance of measures of ingredient toxicity and material recyclability in branding products as healthy and sustaining. Joining Jay will be Jessica Switzer of marketing firm Blue Practice, as well as one of the nearly 100 companies worldwide that have gone through the rigorous certification process. Attendees will join a lively discussion and hands-on learning exercise. Ideas to be discussed include: Moving past “meeting regulations” and achieving the minimum requirements to efficiently and effectively using natural resources, designing systems to eliminate the concept of waste, and leadership within one’s industry for design excellence; How sustainable business practices build value for an organization including reduced risk and liability, brand differentiation, enhanced reputation and competitive advantage; and how the pursuit of a positive vision can inspire investor and customer confidence and strengthen employee commitment, and improve relations with public and private stakeholders. | |
Rainer Ochsenkuehn, President, ROC OneBy taking a comprehensive approach to GHG measurement and management, businesses and policymakers can focus attention on the greatest opportunities to reduce emissions within the full value chain, leading to more sustainable decisions about the products companies buy, sell, and produce. This How-to Workshop covers the new WRI/WBCSD Scope 3 (Corporate Value Chain) Accounting and Reporting Standard that covers both up and down stream accounting for GHG emissions. The Workshop will highlight the difficulties of the GHG accounting beyond your own fence line and show opportunities and benefits of measuring the greenhouse gas emissions of your products and supply chains. The workshop will also reflect on the results of the WRI/WBCSD pilot study with sixty international companies. | |
Maria Emmer-Aanes, Director of Marketing, Nature's Path,Marty McDonald, Creative Director/Partner, Egg Brand DevelopmentandHilary Bromberg, Strategic Director/Partner, Egg Brand DevelopmentFor the new conscious consumer, it’s not just about selling tastier, crunchier and healthier cereal anymore. Nature’s Path is serving its cereal with a generous and delicious topping of sustainability. North America’s largest organic cereal brand, Nature’s Path Organic, has unleashed its first integrated multi-channel consumer campaign, and yielded impressive sales results while fomenting cultural change. We’ll be telling the full story, beginning with the company’s unique history and market position, continuing on to describe the comprehensive brand development process carried out by their brand agency, egg, and then going into the strategies, tactics and creative work that brought this campaign to life and helped it gain a 33% lift in sales in a sagging economy. We’ll also discuss the company’s own sustainability efforts, their new CSR report, and how this related to the campaign approach. A centerpiece of the campaign was the “Path to Sustainability” concept, crucial to understanding consumer attitudes and behaviors around sustainability. This workshop will include interactive exercises that will dive into and illuminate this multi-faceted and vital way of framing the world that the consumers of sustainable brands inhabit. Participants will explore the path and gain key consumer insights all along the way. Going beyond marketing as usual, this is a campaign for a new brand era of authenticity and transparency. Most unusual is the idea that a company could and should sell the higher calling of personal sustainability, defined as health and wellness, through the portal of organic cereal, thereby making the brand a mouthpiece for the cause of sustainability through its products. In a competitive category, during difficult economic times, for a company with an invisible name and no huge corporate parent — this “sustainability as challenger” strategy is proving to be a powerful one. |
