Going to SXSW Interactive

I am participating on a panel at South By Southwest (http://www.sxsw.com/) in Austin this week. (Bear with me; this is related to my class.) The topic of the panel discussion is, "Can Enterprise Save the World?" Now this conference is huge and it's really targeted toward creatives in music, film, and interactive digital media. Sustainability is only a recent focus area of the "Interactive" segment of the conference, and ours is one of the last panels on the last day of the conference, so I am going to be very interested to see who shows up.

Because I work inside of a number of the multinational mega energy companies, I was invited to comment on how the "cultural transformation" toward sustainability is going within these corporations. I am not going to explicitly drop company names on this blog because I am privy to significant insider information, and doing so would neither be fair nor smart. It took me a few sleepless nights of flipping and flopping mental processes to surface what I could reasonably say in 5 minutes or less about all this. Here's what it comes down to, in my opinion:

The move to sustainability is greatly stalled by an outmoded paradigm that I will creatively call the, "Wall Street approach to the publicly-traded corporation."

Here's an example of what I am talking about. A few months back, I met with a senior-level leader at running a multi-billion dollar oil platform within an even multier billion dollar multinational energy company. He was feeling a lot of angst as he told me that his people were very disappointed in him because he had recently made the decision that, in order to speed up production, they were going to flare more gas (generate more pollution) than they had originally planned. See, his part of the business wasn't hitting its production numbers, and production numbers translate to financial numbers. "Tina, I just can't get them to understand that sometimes you have to compromise your values to stay in the game." Now, this guy has a recycling container in his office; he was very active in the discussions to set the targets for flaring and emissions at reduced levels from the get go. He is a heartful guy. He is a good guy to work with. And what he knows in his bones is that if his part of the business does not hit its expected number by the end of the quarter:

• Bob's 401(k) gets halved
• Jane's IT project gets canned
• Jack, the HR person, gets laid off
• his boss' job is in jeopardy
• he probably gets "reassigned"

So what I am saying is that, while this might seem like "evil corporate empire" kind of stuff, this was a very personal and difficult decision for my leader friend to make. See, Wall Street has expectations. And they are financial expectations. And financial expectations must be met--every quarter. And you really should not plan to make less money than you did the same quarter last year. And, sure, you can have whatever other "values" you want to have (like green and safe), just make damn sure they don't get in the way of you hitting that number.

So this model (quarterly reporting with ever-increasing financial expectations and mostly non-existing interest in other, future-oriented metrics) needs to be deconstructed and put back together in a such a way that it supports sustainability. I mean to say that it looks like to me that train is on runaway, baby, and our future is lying on the tracks with a sock in its mouth (Hells yeah! That metaphor is jumping up and down it's so proud of itself.)