sustainability

OK, here’s the download -- I mean, the low-down -- about Apple, the iPhone and Greenpeace.

Al Gore, the joke goes, was the guy who used to be the next president. What the U.S. missed from Gore’s inability to sway a few more electoral college voters and the majority of the Supreme Court back in 2000, it gained in a fuller understanding of Sustainability...that’s with a capital S. But what's less known is the story of the guy who wrote the check that made Gore’s Nobel Prize possible, an act that forever cemented the concepts Climate Change and Sustainability in the minds of global leaders.

We’ve seen a bunch of blog posts and reports on the Web about our Sept. 12 confab in Chicago, which dealt with the gamut of corporate responsibility and sustainability issues.

Dear Jay Whitehead (aka, my boss): I hear you say this almost every day–that is, the Corporate Responsibility Officer (CRO) profession is the fastest-growing career track in the hemisphere. And, the industry is spending more boatloads of billions of dollars annually than I can count.So, I see what you mean.Check out a few headlines about developments that made me briefly turn away from the New York Mets’ collapse and the Isiah Thomas/Madison Square Garden sexual harassment case (talk about blunders in crisis communications) over the last few days.

Here’s the deal. The CRO Conference has got you curious for one of two reasons. You were there and because so much went on you’re afraid you missed something. Or you weren’t and you’ve got the same fear. In addition to 1,000 little things, three big things happened Sept. 12 — one of the items is difficult to hear. Failing to recap all 3 would be a mistake.

What struck me yesterday during a focus group, the cocktail hour, numerous one-on-one conversations and panel discussions today at the CRO Conference in Chicago, is just how much the corporate responsibility industry is in flux.

Timberland dialed up a conference call the other day, featuring president and CEO Jeffrey Swartz and CSR subcommittee chairman Bill Shore to trumpet the release of the company’s new CSR report.