Green Your Board
from January/February 2008
by Don Morrison
If you missed this major corporate trend you must be living on another, less endangered planet: With energy costs rising and climate change threatening everything from polar bears to SUVs, more companies are going green. General Electric, HSBC, and other giants have pledged to reduce their overall carbon dioxide emissions. AT&T and Swiss Re are limiting business travel to diminish the damage their jet-hopping executives do to the upper atmosphere. FedEx is buying hybrid trucks. Intercontinental Hotels is replacing its light bulbs with energy-saving compact fluorescents.
Isn’t it time to extend this environmentally sensitive behavior strategy to the boardroom, and turn that cave of winds into a genuine eco-chamber?
A good place to start is the room itself. Is the conference table made from endangered rain-forest wood? Replace it with a tree-friendly laminate version, though you’ll need to watch out for harmful formaldehydes. If you have any potted plants in the room—aside from that over-the-hill director—make sure they’re air-cleaning varieties like English ivy, Chinese fern, or dracaena.
Air conditioning is notoriously planet-hostile, so cut the coolants and take off your clothes; that should also remove inhibitions to free discussion. As for drapes and floor coverings, try brands made from recycled soft-drink bottles. You will have to give up the soft drinks themselves, since their superfluous containers are choking our nation’s precious landfills.
So to quench your directors’ midmeeting thirst, offer powdered drinks mixed with tap water. That may not promote consensus, but it sure will give new meaning to the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid.”
Paper is another problem. Boards generate as much as 700 pounds per director a year, by some estimates. Switching from virgin to recycled will spare three entire trees. And see to it that board books and financial reports are printed on both sides of a sheet, single-spaced. Make sure “sleep” modes are an option on your photocopy machines, though not, of course, for your directors. Speaking of which, be sure to replace all your dim bulbs with compact fluorescents.
You can make amends for the environmental impact of a whole board meeting by purchasing carbon offsets—basically, payments to neutralize carbon emissions by planting trees, recapturing methane from coal mines, or investing in clean-power projects. Simply ascertain the number of people attending, the distances they will travel, the size of their hotel rooms, and a few lesser variables. There are consultants and Internet sites that will figure all this out for you. The cost is surprisingly modest: about what you would spend on a few limousine trips to the airport.
Some directors may balk at this much greenery. You can placate them with fair-trade gifts made by tribal artisans using recycled, organic, or shade-grown fibers. Better yet, you can reward a director’s attendance by planting a tree in his or her name, as Ricoh UK has done for good customers. Indeed, members of your compensation committee may find it useful to integrate such incentives into executive-compensation packages. Corporate governance fans will love that.
Some visionaries say the board meeting itself is an endangered species. Videoconferencing can accomplish much of the same work without the limo fumes and jet contrails. If a few directors find this option a poor substitute for face-to-face contact, the development of virtual-reality goggles and multi-player Internet gaming will someday improve the experience. In the virtual world, you can create a different identity each time you meet, a useful feature in an uncertain financial environment. Until then, controlling the noxious gases that boards emit will remain a challenge of planetary importance.
