Initiative
2degrees

What was your ‘Al Gore moment’?

Burgess COMMENTARY
This is my contribution to this thread:

Peter Burgess Founder CEO TrueValueMetrics

RE: What was your ‘Al Gore moment’?

My 'AHA' moment predates Al Gore. It was 1975. Early on I had a fast track career and in my 30s I was the CFO of a fairly large US based international company. My background was engineering and economics from Cambridge, followed by Chartered Accountancy from Coopers and Lybrand in London. I was very committed to the idea that accounting and financial results were the 'Holy Grail' of performance.

We were implementing a project in Nigeria. This was shortly after the oil shock of the 1970s and Nigeria had become very wealthy as a nation. Our lawyers had an office in one of the most prestigious buildings in Lagos. One morning I was on my way to an important meeting in their offices and going into the building I passed two young children dead on the steps of the building. The juxtaposition of money wealth and death was a shock.

This has haunted me ever since. It highlighted the disconnect between money wealth ... money profit ... and quality of life. Ever since 1975 I have convcerned myself not only with money profit performance but also the impact economic activity has on people, society and the planet. It is not a pretty sight, and it is high time the metrics we use are reformed so that there are more meaningful metrics for a smart society.

In my view, there is a terrible trio of metrics that dominate modern business and economic reporting. They are (1) money profit for the business organization, (2) stock prices in capital markets for the investor and C-Executive class, and (3) GDP growth for macroeconomic observers. There are many metrics about social impact, environmental impact, etc. but none of them has much traction and are not mainstream. My own initiative in this space is called TrueValueMetrics. It has potential ... but is not yet part of any mass movement to deploy universally!

The world is blessed today with a huge body of knowlege and the biggest population of well educated people ever. These should result in a wonderful society. They will not unless society has a system of metrics that scores things right. It is well known that 'If you change the way the game is scored, you change the way the game is played.' It is high time we started to have metrics that matter as well as the terrible trio already described.

Peter Burgess

What was your ‘Al Gore moment’?

I am not a traditional environmentalist.

My upbringing did not promote a care for the natural world. Recycling, reusing and being careful not to waste material things did not enter my consciousness as a child or even young adult.

My career path pre-2degrees (and before that, Sustainable Business magazine) did not cross the work of green NGOs, environmental policymakers or regulators, and especially not sustainable businesses.

For me, the environmental movement was something far off in the distance that didn’t concern me, that was out of reach.

Of course, coming to edit the world’s biggest community for corporate sustainability professionals, you are placed centre stage and the good work that is going on – and the reactions to it, both positive and negative – are clear to see.

I feel my way around the agenda. I talk to business leaders. I witness new technologies, their application and potential. I’m often impressed; rarely appalled.

But it wasn’t until I met the founder of Interface, Ray Anderson, in 2006 that my focus became clear. I suddenly realised the enormity of the global environmental challenge and appreciated what could be achieved by smart people working in forward-thinking businesses around the world.

Many of us have had these moments of epiphany.

I’ve lost count how many of you point to a viewing of Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth as the turning point for your company – Commercial Group’s Simon Graham, included. For many, this was the moment when the reality hit home and you realised that you had to do something; that business-as-usual wasn’t an option.

Ray had one of these moments himself in the mid- 1990s. After reading Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce which argues the industrial system has destroyed the planet and only business leaders are powerful enough to stop it, Ray realised that the wheels he’d set in motion when he established his carpet-tile firm Interface back in 1973 was contributing to the global ecological crisis.

And, then in his 60s, he decided to take action.

I love the idea of specific moments in time making an impact – however big or small.

And I want to hear about your Moments of Epiphany – or as I’m calling them, your ‘Al Gore moments’. The aforementioned Simon Graham kicks things off with an Al Gore-inspired ‘Al Gore moment’ over at Commercial Group. You can read his story here.

What was it that convinced you or those in your business to stop, think and change its course? And how did you use it to get your stakeholders engaged?

It might be a moment that had as big an impact as Ray Anderson’s Paul Hawken moment which tipped the entire business model upside down. Or it might be as simple as the introduction of recycling bins in your office kitchen.

Send me your stories and I’ll post them across the 2degrees platform.

You never know, your story might trigger its very own ‘Al Gore moment’ in somebody else’s business.

Hi Tom, My 'Al Gore' moment happened a few years ago when I was working in Deloitte consulting. I really enjoyed my job but much like a lot of other 2degrees members I suspect, I had a long lingering desire to do something that made a real positive impact- something my family often called my 'lion tamer syndrome'. I often considered doing international development or similar work but it seemed a shame not to be able to put my business background to good use. I stumbled upon Jason Clay from WWF's video 'How Big Brands Can Save Biodiversity' and there I had it- a Pauline conversion to the power that big businesses could have in transforming markets, consumption patterns and resource use. Many of the brands that Jason mentioned were companies that I was already working with and I could see that they needed this kind of evangelical thinking to change the way they operated. After this I was lucky enough to convince Business in the Community to give me a role working with those same companies as before but this time on their sustainability strategies- we're a long way off saving biodiversity but at least we're going in the right direction! Though I also have a lot to thank Al Gore for...

In 1997 I stood at the roadside outside the Russian Arctic town of Monchegorsk and surveyed the worst environmental destruction imaginable - what should have been wooded taiga was lifeless shaley desert as far as the eye could see with just a few bleached white tree stumps to hint at what should be there. On the horizon I could see the chimneys of the town's nickel smelter pumping fumes up to a huge acidic cloud above. As an engineer, it struck me for the first time that such damage was not so much an ecological problem as a technical/economic one - I could trace the link back from effect to cause visually from my viewpoint. I took a picture before my Russian companions insisted I got back into the car - they were concerned for my health. Within 48 hours I had decided that I was going to dedicate myself to tackling that cause rather than fretting about the effect. Within 9 months I had secured a research job at Newcastle University on eco-design of large one-off engineering projects and the rest, as they say, is history.

In 1993, I was one of a team of engineers designing a power station for the Philippines. To build this coal fired power station (read big GHG emissions) a village was relocated, rainforest was bulldozed and a coral reef was blown up to let ships enter the harbour. I designed the settling basins for the slurry containing sulphur and the other nasty chemicals scrubbed from the chimney. I asked how big they needed to be and the answer from the client was big enough to hold 7 years' worth of material. I pointed out that the life of the power station was 50 years, to which the response was 'We won't own the power station after 7 years'. I decided that there had to be a better way and in 1995 began a PhD demonstrating that an environmentally considered approach to design (now called “green building”) offers significant financial and other benefits to occupants. After a spell running a portfolio of clean energy businesses I moved into management consulting (Bain and Booz), starting up Booz's Low Carbon & Sustainability business in AsiaPac in 2006. Nowadays our consulting firm Lavery Pennell is helping companies to be more sustainable AND profitable. One of these is Interface, where we are helping to complete Ray Anderson's mission of creating a zero impact company. It is a small world.

Not so much an 'Al Gore Moment' as an Al Gore cascade of moments. The first Earth Day arrived when I was 16 -in high school, and I've always enjoyed the outdoors - hiking, sailing, fishing. So, while I was aware of the imprtance of a good environment, the obvious successes of the 70's - early 90's had me lulled into a sense that things were pretty much alright. In the late 90's I was working on projects related to Lead Free electronic devices, and Halogen Flame Retardant Free circuit boards. Interesting technical stuff - until one of the major suppliers apparently spent a years R&D budget developing a product to meet another companies demand for a Halogen Free circuit board - and when they delivered the prototype that met all the specs, the customer said 'What - you used that ingredient? We can't use anything that includes that' My AHA! moment - we (as an industry) were very good at detailed tecnical performance specs, and had no idea how to consider the full Life Cycle impacts of the products we considered - The rumsfeldian 'unkown unknowns' that were not considered. Eye opening. The cost impacts & the unintended consequences are very real business risks,

My 'AHA' moment predates Al Gore. It was 1975. Early on I had a fast track career and in my 30s I was the CFO of a fairly large US based international company. My background was engineering and economics from Cambridge, followed by Chartered Accountancy from Coopers and Lybrand in London. I was very committed to the idea that accounting and financial results were the 'Holy Grail' of performance.

We were implementing a project in Nigeria. This was shortly after the oil shock of the 1970s and Nigeria had become very wealthy as a nation. Our lawyers had an office in one of the most prestigious buildings in Lagos. One morning I was on my way to an important meeting in their offices and going into the building I passed two young children dead on the steps of the building. The juxtaposition of money wealth and death was a shock.

This has haunted me ever since. It highlighted the disconnect between money wealth ... money profit ... and quality of life. Ever since 1975 I have convcerned myself not only with money profit performance but also the impact economic activity has on people, society and the planet. It is not a pretty sight, and it is high time the metrics we use are reformed so that there are more meaningful metrics for a smart society.

In my view, there is a terrible trio of metrics that dominate modern business and economic reporting. They are (1) money profit for the business organization, (2) stock prices in capital markets for the investor and C-Executive class, and (3) GDP growth for macroeconomic observers. There are many metrics about social impact, environmental impact, etc. but none of them has much traction and are not mainstream. My own initiative in this space is called TrueValueMetrics. It has potential ... but is not yet part of any mass movement to deploy universally!

The world is blessed today with a huge body of knowlege and the biggest population of well educated people ever. These should result in a wonderful society. They will not unless society has a system of metrics that scores things right. It is well known that 'If you change the way the game is scored, you change the way the game is played.' It is high time we started to have metrics that matter as well as the terrible trio already described.

Peter Burgess