Last week, Apple unveiled its new environmental responsibility site and accompanying reports. They are using this beefy new environmental site to be more transparent about the things they are doing right. Last week BusinessWeek published its first ever Top 500 Greenest Companies, Apple was listed at a very lackluster 144. This at first glimpse doesn’t sound bad, except they tout themselves as the makers of the “greenest notebooks in the world.”
Apple has long been conscientious of its impact on the environment. The company has been taking action behind closed doors, just as it does with all other aspects of product development; in a top secret fashion. Greenpeace, in particular, has been very hard on Apple publicly attacking the companies practices in request for more transparency and long-term environmental goals. BusinessWeek eloquently covered the recycling ramp up with this quote from Steve Jobs, full article.
"I thought Greenpeace was being very unfair with us at the beginning, and that they were using us to get visibility," he says. "To have people saying we didn't care and that we were callous in this area was very painful—and untrue." Jobs insists he won't start setting long-term environmental targets to satisfy critics. But Apple is becoming more transparent on its Web site and other fronts.
I find this a particularly relevant topic today, as corporations become increasingly transparent amid pressure from special interest groups, board members and customers. There is a growing trend of corporations measuring success not only by the old standard return on investment, but on new metrics such as return on innovation, social return on investment and Life Cycle Assessment. With this growing popularity of metrics to measure a corporations progress, how are we to tell their real success?
Return on investment is straightforward enough, but what about these new metrics? Corporations are beholden to no standards. They may develop their own standards to emphasize qualities they hold important or to appear more conscientious or successful than they truly are. How are we to compare?
For example, Apple has placed an emphasis on their products impact where as Dell is emphasizing their systems impact. Neither approach is wrong, both items compare environmental costs in a system. Both companies acknowledge the larger system at work. How will these discrepancies be reconciled? Embracing these new metrics is useless if we are not comparing apples to apples. Does this mean we need a governing 3rd part or governmental organization to set standards on corporate success metrics? I don't like the sound of that, and I wrote it. What do you think?
2009 has been a year to share what and how we work. Bright Innovation works hard to make our clients successful. And, in 2009 we did, three of our clients won awards for projects we had collaborated on. Our president, Tom Kubilius, has begun to share how we work to help spread design thinking tools. He was a recurring guest on Pittsburgh Business Radio several times this year and will continue this series into the new year. Our employees also stay active in the community through their work spear-heading the ecoDesigners Guild, a sustainable Pittsburgh outreach group. This past year the group pulled their diverse disciplines together to create the first green and screen plans for Penn Avenue Arts Initiative in Garfield.
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