Green and Sustainability

  • Daimler Collaborates to Reinvent Trucks

    Karl Benz is often credited with inventing the first true car. In 1885, Benz built the Benz Patent-Motorwagen powered by an internal combustion gasoline engine.

    Did he act alone? Of course not. We collaborators know that nobody achieves great feats by themselves. Karl Benz had help. One collaborator was his wife, Bertha, who funded the project and took a later version of the Benz on its first long-distance journey. Benz’s company eventually merged with Daimler Motoren Gesselschaft.

    Now the company that invented the automobile is collaborating to reinvent the truck.  At the Tokyo Auto Show last Wednesday, Daimler announced a purely electric truck and bus brand called E-FUSO and pledged to electrify all vehicles produced by Daimler’s Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Bus Corporation subsidiary. 

    Some hours later at the Mercedes-Benz Research and Development Center in Silicon Valley, journalists gathered for a briefing.  Before the event, Daimler leaders and I had a far-reaching discussion about how Daimler collaborates internally and with partners and governments. We also discussed how electric trucks and buses will change life particularly for those of us who live in cities.

    Daimler Fuso’s e-Canter all-electric light truck. Image copyright Daimler. All rights reserved.

    Daimler’s Fuso is currently selling the eCanter light truck which it assembles in Portugal for the North American market. 7-Eleven in Japan and UPS in Atlanta are using the eCanter which has a range of 60 miles between battery charges. The optimal use of the eCanter is for deliveries within cities.

    “We want to make the cities a better place to live. We want the world to change to the next level,” explained an energetic Marc Llistosella, president and CEO of Daimler’s Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Bus Corporation. Marc, who is anything but a staid leader, was animated and clearly comfortable climbing aboard the concept E-Fuso Vision One truck and giving us a live tour via real-time, interactive video.  The concept truck, which is several years from production, has a 220-mile range between battery charges and carries a payload of eleven tons. This would enable metro and regional delivery routes.

    Benoit Tallec, head of design for Mitsubishi Fuso, noted that a central touch display replaces dials and switches on the Vision One so that the driver focuses on the road. He compared the evolution of Fuso trucks to the evolution of boats from sail to steam power in the early 19th Century. Fuso’s technological advances are “the result of a team effort across three continents,” he said.

    Daimler FUSO’s Vision One concept all-electric truck. Image copyright Daimler. All rights reserved.

    After the discussion and presentation, I hopped aboard the eCanter and drove the quietly-purring vehicle by some of Sunnyvale’s

    technology company parking lots as some curious engineers took notice.

    Daimler’s E-FUSO unit faces two big challenges: infrastructure for charging trucks and increasing battery range. Overcoming these challenges could one day make electric trucks economically viable for longer routes. While consumers may buy electric cars as much for novelty as economics, truck customers demand a business case that proves electric vehicles create value.  Making that case through technology advances and cost reduction will require continued collaboration within Daimler, with business partners and with governments.

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  • 7 Success Factors for Collaboration Hackathons

    The hackathon has gone mainstream.

    Once a method used primarily by coders, the hackathon has moved beyond the boundaries of software development. From government agencies and universities to start-ups and Fortune 500 companies, organizations are embracing collaboration hackathons or what we might call collabathons to spark innovation, develop products and services, and improve processes for everything from quality control to recognition and reward.

    Collaboration hackathons inspire team members to step away from their day-to-day roles and solve a big problem or brainstorm a new direction with a tangible take-away.  The structure of a successful collaboration hackathon mirrors that of a collaborative organization. We’re talking about an ad hoc team that forms for a specific purpose, collaborates, and then disbands. The 7 Success Factors for Collaboration Hackathons mirror the 7 steps in my book The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration. These are:

    1) Plan

    2) People

    3) Principles

    4) Practices

    5) Processes

    6) Planet

    7) Payoff

    In the context of collaboration hackathons:

    Plan is a problem to be solved, product/service to be developed, process to be created or improved or key question to be answered

    People means broad participation in cross-functional collaboration hackathons regardless of level, role or region

    Principles are the collaboration hackathon’s value system, the guidelines in solving the problem

    Practices put principles into action through everything from a physical environment that fosters brainstorming to tools for capturing and refining ideas and putting them into action. Practices ensure that the hackathon is a collaborative group session (CGS) rather than a meeting.

    Processes let hackers rapidly prototype and test ideas.

    Planet puts communities in the center of the hackathons and inspires hackers to address how their ideas impact the communities in which the organization does business. The Planet step may consider everything from carbon footprint to privacy.

    Payoff is the work product of the hackathon which must create value

    These 7 steps prevent collaboration hackathons or collabathons from degenerating into meandering “bull sessions” at one extreme or turning into formal meetings at the opposite extreme. With The Bounty Effect’s 7 Steps, collaboration hackathons or collabathons succeed in solving big problems, answering key questions, developing products and services, improving processes, refining ideas and putting concepts into action.

    Collabathons can help shift the structure of the entire organization from competitive, command-and-control to collaborative. The possibilities are endless.

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  • Lagoons and Collaborative Development

    As the Falcon 2000LX reaches 41,000 feet, Uri Man begins answering questions from real estate developers. “It’s not stagnant. It’s circulating,” Man, the CEO of Crystal Lagoons USA, tells one inquiring passenger.

    Soon we would see for ourselves. Man had chartered the plush jet and scooped up some developers and this author attending the Urban Land Institute’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco last Monday. Now we’re bound for Cabo San Lucas to tour a human-made lagoon.

    “We are a technology company collaborating with developers,” Man explains. This unique collaboration for large-scale real estate development projects had piqued my interest. Crystal Lagoons has 300 lagoon projects underway globally.  Man did a stint as a developer before Crystal Lagoons founder Fernando Fischmann recruited him to accelerate lagoon projects in the U.S. “Right now we’re going to Cabo, because I can’t show you one yet in the U.S.” That’s about to change. The first Crystal Lagoon in the U.S. will reportedly open next summer at Epperson Ranch in Pasco County, Florida.

    Meantime, we’re headed to the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja peninsula to see what a 10-acre salt water lagoon looks and feels like. As Man begins a slide presentation on his notebook computer, I begin

    Crystal Lagoons Diamante web
    A 10-acre Crystal Lagoon at Diamante Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. (Photo credit: K.R. Hirzel)

    visualizing the collaborative potential of lagoons. Resort developers need a new amenity to differentiate their projects. Coastal resorts can increase their waterfront, and inland resorts can gain a coastal experience. A Crystal Lagoons architect and project team collaborates with the developer’s planning team until they conceive a project with a lagoon as the centerpiece. The Crystal Lagoons technology uses disinfection “pulses” that reportedly allow using up to 100 times fewer chemicals than a swimming pool and an ultrasonic filtration system that allows using up to 50 times less energy than conventional filtration systems.

    The Crystal Lagoons business model has nothing to do with construction and everything to do with licensing. The company has a major stake in the success of development projects, because it receives roughly two percent of every condominium and house sale and a similar cut of each time share dollar. For developers, constructing lagoons costs an average of $100,000 to $200,000 per acre.

    The Falcon 2000X lands, and a greeting party boards the plane and passes out hand-blown shot glasses. After a ride through some dusty Cabo streets, we arrive at the Diamante development west of the city on the Pacific Ocean. After we tour the resort, I change into my swim suit and plunge into the salt water lagoon. As I swim laps in a life-guarded area near one of two beaches, kayaks explore the expanse of this man-made mini ocean.

    En route back to San Francisco, Uri Man talks about the future of Crystal Lagoons with the gusto of a bond trader (he used to be one) and the chutzpah of a guy who once hit on Fox News anchor Ainsley Earhardt on live TV (which he did). That future may involve cross-sector collaboration among industry and governments.

    Crystal Lagoons-Uri En Route to Cabo web
    Crystal Lagoons USA CEO Uri Man on board a Falcon 2000LX en route to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. (Photo credit: K.R. Hirzel)

    “Parks are big money losers for states, cities and countries,” Man insists. So why not collaborate with governments to transform parks with lagoons? “Then it’s not just ten people showing up with their dogs,” says Man. “You could have hundreds of thousands showing up.”

    The licensing revenue business model, which the company would likely modify for government work, ties the success of Crystal Lagoons to the achievements of developers and their large-scale projects. Both parties share wins and losses. So Crystal Lagoons enters into collaborations carefully and works with developers to create mutual value. More broadly, business partners can achieve smashing success if incentives and business models foster symbiotic relationships and collaborative value creation.

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  • Cross-Sector Collaboration for Sustainable Development

    Accomplishing massive goals requires massive collaboration—far beyond collaborating within an organization or within an industry or among government agencies.

    Making meaningful progress on issues including eradicating global poverty and protecting the global ecosystem requires collaboration among governments, non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), private industry, farmers, indigenous peoples and unaffiliated individuals with ideas. This cross-sector collaboration is driving the agenda for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development which happens this June 20-22 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The conference, dubbed Rio+20, marks the twentieth anniversary of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. The 1992 conference established the Rio Declaration, which includes 27 principles mostly addressing sustainable economic development.

    Last Friday, at the invitation of the United States Department of State, I attended a planning meeting for Rio+20 at the Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The purpose was to distill ideas from cross-sector collaborators on how to bridge connection technologies with sustainable development. In a brainstorming session on “sustainable economic growth,” we tackled wasted talent and connectivity.  Think of the many people in developing countries with talent and ideas who have no outlet to connect and collaborate. This is our collective loss as global citizens until we tap that talent.

    The world’s wasting of talent in developing countries is analogous to the command-and-control organization that pays “knowledge workers” to think and pays everybody else to carry out orders. See my January 11, 2011 column for BusinessWeek.com on this topic. Such an organization squanders talent. This is because people throughout the organization—from the loading dock to the call center—have knowledge to contribute.

    One participant noted that wasted connectivity involves using the Internet frivolously, perhaps for pirating movies and other content, rather than for working together to eradicate poverty, create new markets and protect the environment. Similarly, wasted connectivity within organizations involves using networks and tools for chatter rather than for developing and producing products and services.

    Since the 1992 Rio Declaration, the Internet has grown from less than 16 million users to over 2 billion users, according to internetworldstats.com. Mobile phone users have grown from less than 23 million in 1992 to more than 6 billion in 2011, according to nationmaster.com. The current level of connectivity creates an opportunity for a more distributed, peer-to-peer (read inclusive) approach in collaborating for sustainable development. 

    Old models of cross-sector collaboration were minimally effective, because they involved “decision makers” or “thought leaders” shaping ideas and developing solutions which they would hand down to people impacted by the decisions. Now people in developing countries without affiliations can shape ideas with ministers and private sector leaders globally. Well, at least this is technically possible.

    As important to cross-sector collaboration as global connectivity and enabling technologies is a cultural shift in which governments, NGO’s and private industry embrace input from people regardless of affiliation or location. This is analogous to organizations adopting more collaborative cultures and tools so that people far from the home office or from executive corridors can participate in making decisions. The State Department has chalked up success with an emerging collaborative culture and tools including Secretary Clinton’s Sounding Board. For more on this, see my September 14, 2010 post.

    One of the people hashing out ideas in the sustainable development brainstorming session was Rio+20 Secretary General Sha Zukang, who is also the UN Under Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs. Zukang, who demonstrated particular talent at defining and outlining sustainable development issues, brushed against a live wire as the workshop concluded: intellectual property. The brainstorm was exactly three weeks after the collapse of U.S. House of Representatives support for the Stop Online Privacy Act and Senate support for the PROTECT IP Act backed by media and entertainment companies and opposed by Google and Wikipedia among other online interests.

    Zukang described the need to “find a balance” between protecting intellectual property and disseminating information. This balance impacts cross-sector collaboration in that people in developing countries often lack access to the same information accessible to their collaborators in developed countries. Providing affordable access will help level the playing field. Contrary to some viewpoints, collaboration—cross-sector or otherwise—by no means requires eliminating or dismantling intellectual property protection. IP protection creates incentives for people and organizations to collaboratively develop and produce products and services.

    Cross-sector collaboration takes collaboration beyond organizational and sector boundaries to create value on a global scale.

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  • Slow Money Collaboration

    In a cavernous, nearly empty room above the Readers Café & Bookstore in Building C of San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center, Woody Tasch sits at a corner table by a lone window looking out on the Bay. It’s the eve of the Slow Money National Gathering, and the organization’s chairman is putting the finishing touches on his opening remarks. He must fend off criticism that his model is “fantasy economics” and impress on the three hundred investors and five hundred or so other attendees that our industrialized food system has become as imbalanced as the financial system was during the depths of the 2008 crisis.

    Woody, a former New York venture capitalist who now lives off the grid near Taos, New Mexico, wants to change how we finance food businesses as dramatically as he has changed his own life and career. In the 1980’s, Woody worked as a self-proclaimed “small-time VC” making healthcare investments for Prince Ventures, owned by the Prince family of Chicago.  Ultimately, he transformed himself from a mathematics-driven investor to one with a social conscience with stops along the way as treasurer for a foundation and chairman of an angel investor network called Investors Circle.

    “It’s no longer about how much we can take off the table for ourselves,” Woody insists. After getting involved with the global Slow Food movement, the antithesis of fast food in its promotion of sustainability, Woody and his collaborators sought to address the difficulty many sustainable food businesses have getting financing. “It hit me that patient capital plus slow food equals slow money,” he explains.

    Woody and his colleagues are enabling microfinance for the food industry and, since 2009, have sparked $6 million in micro loans. Slow Money links growers, restaurants, organic farm suppliers and other food entrepreneurs with consumers willing to lend businesses a few thousand—or even a few hundred—dollars.

    “This is not a typical fiduciary model,” Woody explains. “What we are going to be proving over the next decade is that collective intelligence and local knowledge of groups of individuals effectively collaborating will produce positive outcomes both in arithmetic and impact on the community.” In other words, investors can do good and simultaneously get a modest return on investment. At the moment, 3 percent a year in interest is typical.

    Slow Money is evolving from advocating individual investments to promoting investment clubs. Compared to angel investing, for which investors must have assets of at least a million dollars or a yearly salary of at least $200,000, the investment club barrier to entry is much lower. As a model, Slow Food organizers point to the No Small Potatoes Investment Club, which provides low-interest loans to Maine farmers and food producers. So far, fifteen investors have each put up five thousand dollars.

    After talking with Woody, I stop by the rehearsal for the entrepreneur pitches. These five-minute presentations are not unlike those for technology companies at venture capital conferences. But there is something perhaps more wholesome and genuine and, yes, rougher around the edges, about these pitches.  Some of these food businesspeople have never before spoken at an event. George Weld, owner of both Egg restaurant in Brooklyn and a farm in Oak Hill, New York, speaks of the need to curb the “recurring alienation between rural and urban that plagues the food economy.”

    One of the better-received pitches comes from Dr. Hubert Karreman, a veterinarian and founder of Bovinity Health. Hubert’s company manufactures natural alternatives to antibiotics for livestock. He clicks through financials including $250,000 in sales in 2011, provides market share projections and leaves the rehearsal audience whispering "he's gonna get funded."

    Slow Food’s goal is for a million Americans to be investing one percent of their money in local food systems within a decade. Meantime, Woody Tasch offers his prescription for the economy. “What we need is rebalancing. Right now we’re lurching towards the global race to the bottom. It’s buy low, sell high, GMO [genetically modified organism], CDO [collateralized debt obligation] capitalism. We have to compete for cheap labor around the planet subsidized by cheap oil and ignoring the medium and long-term social and environmental impact.” Collaborating requires a longer-term focus, and Slow Money is helping enable that evolution.

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  • California Academy of Sciences Collaborates to Discover Mammals

    Collaboration requires long-term thinking. That’s where universities, libraries, museums, and research organizations often eclipse for-profit companies. Pressure to generate quarterly returns can compromise long-term value, particularly at publicly-held companies. With less pressure to deliver immediate results, research-driven, non-profit organizations can focus more on creating long-term value. Maybe it’s a new take on history or a scientific discovery. Regardless, the work product may remain relevant hundreds of years from now.

     

    That said, competition internally and within fields of study can prove more ferocious in the research arena than in corporations—whether it’s competing for limited grant dollars or for publishing articles in academic journals. Like corporations, the best research organizations mitigate unhealthful competition by thinking and acting towards creating long-term value. In this realm, long-term value can extend into eternity.

     

    Knowing the collaborative mindset of the California Academy of Sciences, I accepted an invitation to attend a briefing and preview tour last Thursday of the Academy’s new Extreme Mammals exhibit, which runs through September 12, 2010. For background on architectural collaboration in the Academy’s building design, see my February 17, 2009 post.

     

    San Francisco is the Extreme Mammals exhibit’s second stop after opening at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.  Over tea and cupcakes, I had a compelling pre-tour conversation with Greg Farrington, the self-proclaimed “chief penguin” or executive director of the Academy. Farrington, a chemist, is the former president of Lehigh University. “You might think everything in the world has been discovered at least twice, but it hasn’t,” Farrington noted. Touring the exhibit confirmed Farrington’s point.

      
    Elephant-shrew
      
    The exhibit features extinct, living and recently-discovered mammals including the striped rabbit identified as a new species in 1999 and the gray faced sengi or giant elephant shrew discovered in 2008. Galen Rathbun,  
    a behavioral biologist at the Academy and Francesco Rovero of the Trento Museum of Sciences in Italy and other collaborators discovered the gray-faced sengi in the Ndundulu Forest in Tanzania’s Udzungwa Mountains. It was the first new species of giant elephant shrew discovered in 126 years.

     

    Rathbun accompanied us on the tour and later took a small group behind several locked doors to view a collection of shrew specimens shelved inside fireproof cabinets in the Academy’s research collections. The collections include 26 million specimens of animals, insects, reptiles, birds, plants, fish and gems. Rathbun noted that several collaborating research institutions had loaned shrew specimens to the Academy for research.

     

    One participant asked birds and mammals curator Jack Dumbacher if we could look inside the special cabinet that contains extinct animals and so-called “type specimens” of newly-discovered mammals. Dumbacher obliged, and we walked down the aisle past many rows of cabinets until we reached a shorter cabinet set apart from the others. As Jack unlocked the cabinet, he unleashed a ripe odor along with a feast for the eyes of preserved birds, rodents, and bats. The treasures also include the largest egg in the world from the elephant bird of Madagascar. A model of the egg is on display in the Academy’s public area.

     

    Back to the public galleries and the Extreme Mammals exhibit. Scientists and administrators from global institutions have collaborated on the show, which the American Museum of Natural History organized. Collaborators shared knowledge, pieced together skeletons and gathered skulls, fossils and taxidermy specimens for Extreme Mammals. The result is a compelling experience for visitors who gain insight into the extreme variety of mammals and the awesome biodiversity of our planet.

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  • Cleantech Growth Impacting Venture Capital Ecosystem

    Two years ago, Ira Ehrenpreis was quick to extend a hand at the IBF Venture Capital Investing Conference in San Francisco. When the general partner of Technology Partners told other VC’s that he invested exclusively in cleantech, they smiled and nodded politely.

     

    “We could barely fill break rooms a few years ago. Now we’re filling ballrooms,” Ira told a ballroom audience during his keynote entitled “The Future of Clean-Tech” last Wednesday at this year’s IBF Venture Capital Investing Conference in San Francisco. Ira’s influence among venture capitalists has grown as cleantech has expanded from 1% of the venture capital sector a few years ago to 20% this year.

     

    Cleantech was once considered just solar and biofuels. Today it touches on everything from transportation to energy-efficient windows. “There’s been a historic underinvestment in cleantech from venture capitalists, corporate and others,” according to Ira. Driving the growth of cleantech as a sub sector of venture capital is a shift in our collective consciousness. Enterprises are increasingly embracing sustainability and “going green.” In years past, a few companies including Google, GE and Wal-Mart made real commitments and others “greenwashed” their products through disingenuous marketing. Incidentally, this mirrors the current shift from enterprises using collaboration as a buzz word or marketing hype to actually collaborating.

     

    The cleantech venture capital ecosystem is far more global than the incubation system for most information technology start-ups. While Silicon Valley is the traditional epicenter of start-ups and VC, different global regions lead in developing particular cleantech technologies. Europe, Ira notes, has been leading in developing solar and wind technologies.

     

    As cleantech grows along with global investments in information technology and biotechnology, the collaborative ecosystem that defines venture capital will become more global and less Silicon Valley- focused.

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  • Collaboration at Fortune Brainstorm: Green

    I came away from the Fortune Brainstorm: Green summit in Laguna Niguel, California convinced that collaboration and sustainability are inextricably linked. Collaboration connects us with a broader ecosystem that creates value for our businesses and also—in a broader sense—for the planet.

     

    Fortune Managing Editor Andy Serwer, conference chair Marc Gunther and their colleagues created a thoughtful, compelling forum in which participants not only exchanged ideas but also developed solutions together on the fly. In other words, people were collaborating and creating value.  

     

    Informality is key to getting collaborative juices flowing, and the relaxed physical environment helped. The conference room at the Ritz Carlton featured Herman Miller Aeron chairs and coffee tables with small, sleek monitors on which participants could view close-ups of speakers.

     

    Here are some highlights of the conference:

     

    Traceability in the supply chain is good for business. That was the consensus of a break-out session in which Arlin Wasserman, vice president of corporate citizenship of Sodexo, Inc., the food service and facilities management company, noted that we need a “massive reinvention of traceability and transparency” in supply chains. Jill Dumain of Patagonia discussed how her company’s web site reveals both the good and the bad. Check out Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles here. Now that’s transparency!

     

    Wal-Mart is collaborating with suppliers on a “360 scorecard” detailing social and environmental footprints of products. Leslie Dach, executive vice president of corporate affairs and government relations, insisted that this effort could affect thousands of products. He also indicated that Wal-Mart would build sustainability into every buyer’s job description.

     

    Fear of being accused of “green washing” has prevented Tiffany CEO Michael Kowalski from participating in any environmental conference until now. Kowalski described Tiffany & Co.’s efforts over the last decade to short-circuit the trade in “blood diamonds,” which are often mined by slaves controlled by militias and used to finance wars. Tiffany has reportedly removed blood diamonds from its supply chain by focusing on traceability and transparency. Tiffany can now identify the mined source of fifty percent of its products, according to Kowalski.

     

    Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, noted that he has focused on protecting research and development dollars, despite the downturn. This is clearly a longer-term view that’s critical to creating value through collaboration. As I explained in my book, The Culture of Collaboration, Ford has highly-collaborative pockets. Its challenge is to leverage those collaborative pockets to adopt an enterprise-wide collaborative culture. When Bill Ford joined the Ford board in 1988, he was told that he needed to stop associating with “known environmentalists.” Guess he’s having the last laugh considering the growing realization that green initiatives create value.

     

    Peter Darbee, President and CEO of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, challenged the state and federal governments to collaborate with utilities in transforming the economy. At the onset of World War Two, the United States migrated from a peace to war-time economy within two years. “We need to do that,” Darbee insisted. “The government needs to get out of the way,” and streamline the permit process so that utilities can build transmission lines in two years instead of eight or ten.

     

    Jeffrey Hollender, president and “chief inspired protagonist” of Seventh Generation, challenged participants to create products and services that “restore the Earth rather than being less bad.” He insisted that manufacturers should consider the entire lifecycle of products.

     

    In an incredible story of collaborative leadership, Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials, described how he reached out to union leaders after learning of a 6-day sit-in by workers at the shuddered Republic  Windows and Doors plant in Chicago. Rather than waiting to buy assets through the bankruptcy court, he proactively engaged the people who make windows and listened to their concerns. Serious Materials, which manufactures windows which Surace says are 400 percent more efficient than dual pane windows, ultimately bought the plant for $1.45 million and rehired the 250 laid-off workers.

     

    Former U.S. President Bill Clinton delivered the conference’s closing keynote with a call Clinton and Andy Serwer to action that federal and state governments and private industry move beyond policy talks and “operationalize” energy efficiency, carbon reduction and other green initiatives.  He mentioned two particularly interesting initiatives that the Clinton Global Initiative is enabling in collaboration with private industry.  

     

    Project 2 Degrees developed with Microsoft and others provides online tools that let cities establish a baseline for greenhouse gas emissions, create action plans, track successes for emissions reduction, and share experiences.  Cisco  is investing $15 million to reduce traffic congestion in cities through its Connected Urban Development Program, which uses information and communications technology to monitor emissions. 

     

     “What we don’t have is enough information sharing in real time,” President Clinton insisted.  Real-time information sharing is key to collaboration whether we’re reducing emissions or developing products. So the discussion of green initiatives comes full circle to spontaneous, on-the-fly collaboration.  I make the case in my book that the quest for value creation has forced the deserialization of work. The need for real-time information sharing is further evidence that sustainability and collaboration are joined at the hip.

     

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