A question of strategy

It's Blog Action Day, with an estimated 8,000 bloggers and 11 million readers focusing their efforts on combating climate change. Well, here's one more blog and maybe two more readers.


The focus on climate change is, by necessity, on the now and the near future. It has been asked whether dealing with this crisis will leave us any wiser, assuming we survive. One would hope so, but any victory will be claimed by authoritarians, capitalists and chauvenists as much as localists, anti-capitalists and progressives. So, while everyone (OK, nearly everyone ) is listening, we have to make our case for a fairer, more caring society, as a long-term method of avoiding future crises as well as a form of common sense.


Yet this is not nearly the only opportunity to evangelise about sustainability. The direct political approach makes most sense to me: seeking election at local level with a manifesto of responsible community control over community resources. But there are "ins" of all sorts, including the standards I work on in my day job.


Perhaps it's a sign of gathering momentum, but radical ideas are showing up in surprising places. Strategy for Sustainability by Adam Werbach (http://www.strategyforsustainability.com/) is one example, and currently a bestseller among business books in the United States. What's really surprising about Werbach's book is that, although it contains a lot of radical thinking, it is based upon work with some of the largest corporations in America, and should appeal to many others.


It attempts to bridge the gap between reactive, arse-covering attitudes to social and environmental issues, and genuine commitment to improving corporate culture. The book, and Adam's activity as a sustainability consultant (now for Saatchi and Saatchi S; saatchis.com), chimes well with advanced sustainable development thinking, including the thinking behind recent British Standards and a lot of my own beliefs.

If I had one serious reservation, it was that Adam doesn't emphasise the need for balance between different aspects of sustainability or the desirability of trying to be objective about which issues are most critical for an organisation. One particular case study, WalMart, is portrayed as a surprising success, which it is in mainly environmental terms, although most critics of WalMart are more concerned about its social impacts, particularly how it treats its employees.


Having mulled over the contents of the book for longer than it took to read it, my residual feeling is one of hope. If the megacorps of America are even taking Adam's advice in a lop-sided way, it will begin the embedding process and a mixture of improved management and stakeholder engagement will push them towards a more balanced approach.


Around the time that I was reaching these conclusions, I attended a seminar organised by London PR and branding (https://twitter.com/lonpr) and led by my friend Erica Grigg (http://www.carbonoutreach.com/) on social media PR 2.0 for sustainability. Although the time was taken mostly with using social media (blogs, facebook, twitter, etc.) for public relations, it did make me think about PR and its role in sustainable development.


Judging by what some people have said, the connections aren't obvious to them either, but PR is a perfect part of an organisation's strategy for sustainability. And sustainable development is where the distinction between marketing and PR is most obvious. Marketing is about communicating and selling to customers, but public relations is about communicating with a user community, and therefore building relationships with stakeholders. In other words, stakeholder engagement. When building transparency and inclusivity, the goal is to get the communications right for the stakeholders involved, and publicists should be the people who have the tools and knowledge to get it right.


New social media should be in the publicisist's tool kit because they allow the creation of virtual communities of concerned and interested individuals. They provide a way of getting the two-way communication that can seem impossible for an old-fashioned outfit. Even better, although it might be seen as a problem by some, a real community spirit will only grow under an open and honest approach. Which brings us back to the principles of sustainability.