[Welcome Leigh Stringer, and Host, Martin Melaver - bev] leigh-stringer-the-green-workplace.thumbnail.jpg

The Green Workplace: Sustainable Strategies That Benefit Employees, The Environment, and The Bottom Line, by Leigh Stringer 

While the books on business and sustainability have mushroomed into a cottage industry, there’s just a handful of writings that elegantly weave a book’s theme or thesis into the very fabric of the writing itself. Leigh Stringer’s The Green Workplace fits well into this small club. 

The evolution of The Green Workplace is a story in and of itself. Beginning as a blog site written by a small group of contributors (www.TheGreenWorkplace.com), the blog quickly took on a life of its own, with a growing list of topics, research, Web 2.0 style pooling and refinement of information taken on by the public at large (see p. 127 for a synopsis of this process). The result is a book whose very DNA is sustainability, epitomizing: 

  • A paradigm change in terms of how a traditional basis (book publishing) is practiced.
  • Creating a new type of publishing organization with a broad group of disparate stakeholders.
  • Recruiting into the fold numerous passionate, knowledgeable “greeniacs” all putting there various curiosities to work.
  • Leveraging a new technology to do more collaborative work utilizing fewer resources.
  • Greening the operation through a largely paperless and low-carbon set of practices
  • Being transformative in the way the overall product is designed and produced.
  • Changing the whole notion of where, when, and how one works.

The elegance of this process? It’s precisely the very argument Stringer makes in her book, argument by demonstration. The overall structure of The Green WorkPlace is a series of chapters that starts out mapping the need for changing how business works and then walks the reader through creating a green agenda, promoting green behavior internally, recruiting additional green talent, leveraging technology, and greening operations. At the end of the day (and the book), we find ourselves lock and step with Stringer as she brings us into the green workplace of the future, an idea-based economy that has replaced linear thinking with multivalent, systemic design thinking, where work happens everywhere, where investment in local economies is pervasive, and where green thinking is de rigeur. 

But what makes The Green WorkPlace compelling is not just its marriage of medium to message. It’s in the real world examples Stringer is able to draw upon from her work as one of the leaders of HOK’s Advance Strategies consulting practice, which provides the architectural firms’ clients with pre-design strategies that help enhance financial performance while reducing environmental impacts. Some of the more striking examples: 

  • Google’s conversion of its headquarters to run partly on solar, providing 30% of its buildings power.
  • Burt’s Bees program to recycle all company waste and to pay half of each employee’s cost of achieving carbon neutrality at home.
  • NRG Systems (wind-measurement device maker) creating company-wide incentives to employees to be more efficient and use alternative energies.
  • Sprint’s use of digital technology to create employee productivity savings of $40 million annually.
  • Use of virtual 3D worlds (Second Life, Kaneva, Entropia Universe) to shorten learning curves and introduce new products in a low-risk environment.
  • Use of Building Information Modelling (BIM) to link building design to project information/performance.
  • Enwave Energy Corporation developing a deep lake water cooling system, using cold water to provide HVAC to high-rises in Toronto.
  • Xerox’s creation of an imaging process where the prints last a day, enabling the paper to be reused.
  • Development of an office building in Harare, that mimics the design of a termite mound to super-efficiently regulate interior temperatures.

To make some of these cutting-edge practices more accessible to the general public, each chapter concludes with hit list of action steps most companies can adopt at short notice. 

From the perspective of someone who runs his own small sustainably-focused business, my feeling is that there is something in The Green WorkPlace for virtually everyone: the HR person looking to recruit, the marketing person wondering what to do about greenwash, the IT expert looking to help reduce operational expenses, the passionate newbie looking to assist with change management in a larger organization, the battle-scarred veteran wondering how to find opportunities in this sand-shifting world we find ourselves in. 

This book leaves me wanting to buttonhole our author with a barrage of questions: What does change management look like in the context of the big, multinational companies she works with; What are the biggest obstacles getting in the way of change; Does it matter what a company’s motivations are in making the move toward green; What key drivers would help accelerate the workplace of the future she envisions; What does HOK look like when you roll back the curtains and view it from the inside; What are some of the key things that need to happen for us to dramatically reduce our carbon footprint . . . and should we look to business (or government) to play the key leadership role here. 

Fortunately, we have two hours with Leigh Stringer during which we can address these and a host of other issues.