• UN Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen: is it dead on arrival or too early to tell?
• If we can’t get effective climate policy, is it too soon to start thinking about water policy as well?
• When one moves, what does one do with that stash of outdated business cards? [Seriously, I want someone to answer this question for me.]
• How will Americans wean themselves off plastic?
• Has no one thought of a “green” pizza box before?

To sum up the most recent meeting of the United Nations Global Compact US Network, held October 19 at PricewaterhouseCoopers offices in San Francisco (I know, this post is terribly late):

Boards need to step up and listen up.

In his opening remarks, Allen White sounded the call that became the theme, reinforced and restated during each panel and discussion that followed. Companies need activist boards, he said, and he presented the following ideas for how companies can begin to cultivate boards that to meet the calls for better governance and attention to some of our most pressing issues:
1. Create a process by which boards reflect on stakeholder management, engagement, and governance.
2. Require all board members to build competency in sustainable governance.
3. Consider sustainability competency as a criterion for selecting new board members.
4. Require directors to hold management accountable for integration of sustainability.
5. Boards should set sustainability goals.

Carolyn Y. Woo, Dean of the Cardozo College of Business at the University of Notre Dame, acknowledged many of the challenges to effective board governance and noted that external pressure is one key to better governance. She also noted that board members need to demonstrate personal ethics and a “moral backbone”.
Several directors who attended and participated in panel discussions, including Dianne Dillon-Ridgely, Rinaldo Brutoco, and Bill Conway, echoed the sentiments of both Mr. White and Dean Woo.

I moderated a panel discussion entitled “Retooling the Board for the 21st Century. Panelists Helle Bank Jorgensen of PWC; Rinaldo Brutoco, director of Men’s Wearhouse; Brian Lowry, Deputy General Counsel at Monsanto; and Dean Woo addressed, in candid and lively fashion, how boards can be better educated, increase the ranks of women and minorities, and should oversee their companies’ sustainability performance. Key takeaways:

Everyone, from management to board members themselves, is responsible for making sure boards are educated on key issues of the day.

Boards need to make sure they understand stakeholder concerns; that may require greater accessibility to stakeholders.

Boards need to be more diverse. Much of the shift and change in the boardroom is due to diversity in terms of gender, ethnicity, background. Board composition should reflect the world we live in and the reality around us. Boards need to be presented, however, with the “good” reasons and data supporting increased board diversity.

The stakeholder panel, whose participants were Stu Dalheim (Calvert), Anne Simpson (CalPERS), Susan Mac Cormac (Morrison & Foerster LLP), and Jonathan Jacoby (Oxfam) addressed the trends in stakeholder engagement with boards, including the increased focus on shareholder rights and scrutiny on issues such as executive pay. A key takeaway was that boards need to be more open and engage more with stakeholder groups in order to better represent their interests.

Cecily Joseph, Director of Corporate Responsibility at Symantec and the UNGC US Network representative, closed with this succinct summary: Boards need to step up, be trained, have expertise in sustainability, hear from stakeholders, and be reflective of society. Hear, hear.

2008 Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Report PDF

The sustainability community is obsessed with the concept of “best practices.” Conferences promise to teach them; social media platforms encourage us to share them; and consultants are hired to impart knowledge of them.

Our tendency to focus on best practices is useful and necessary, in part. It saves considerable time and energy by narrowing the ever-evolving world of sustainability into bite-sized lessons from which practitioners can pick and choose.

At the same time, I can’t help but think that our fixation on best practices is short-sighted. Best-practice examples too often identify and celebrate outcomes while ignoring the processes that deliver said results.

This is troublesome because results are difficult to replicate when the circumstances change. Processes, on the other hand, can be transferred and adapted across industries, corporate cultures, and so on and so forth.

I am reminded of the well-known Chinese proverb: give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.  The premise of sustainability—in my opinion, to take a long-term view of key challenges and raise the awareness of others— is aligned more with the latter than the former.

So shouldn’t we also practice what we preach?