1. Make your sustainability and social justice initiatives self-funding, generating at least enough revenue/savings to cover their cost. This will make them kill-proof when belts get tight.
2. Go first for the low-hanging fruit that produces easy and substantial gains, then use the savings and new revenue they generate to go deeper.
3. Get deep buy-in up and down the hierarchy: C-Suite support is crucial—but so is support from line workers.
4. See your workforce as an “innovation factory”: set up systems to collect, acknowledge, and—where appropriate—implement site-specific and corporate-wide sustainability ideas and projects in ways that make the works feel not just seen and heard, but appreciated and valued. If not implemented, express gratitude for the idea and explain what would need to happen to make it viable.
5. Collaborate outside silos and even outside the company. See your work as helping the planet by allowing best practices to emerge and cross-pollinate.
6. Think bigger. Sustainability keeps things from getting worse. Regenerativity makes things better! Work to create and market profitable products and services—and mindsets— that uniquely match your company’s strengths and interests and that make a difference on issues like hunger, poverty, racism, other kinds of othering, and even the big, scary stuff like war and catastrophic climate change. Consider that most wars are largely about resource issues, and that a truly ecofriendly world would make a lot of those resource issues go away.
7. Remember that we already have solutions for many of these problems—but we have big marketing challenges to broaden awareness and adoption of these solutions, dispel the myths spread by those who see themselves at risk if the world changes, and change the course of development so it moves all of us forward to a better world. (For specific solutions, look to several of the books I’ve reviewed in this newsletter. Just in the past year, those would include The Climate Challenge, February 2024; From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want, November 2023; The Sustainability Scorecard: How to Implement and Profit from Unexpected Solutions, October 2023; The Blue Economy 3.0: The Marriage of Science, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Creates a New Business Model that Transforms Society, September 2023; Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take, May 2023. See also my older reviews of Drawdown, The Climate Almanac, Biomimicry, and Cradle to Cradle, among others. You should be able to find most of these at IndieBound.org (an alternative to Amazon that supports independent bookstores).
8. Look to nature for inspiration and for engineering. Nature has already solved most human engineering problems, better, more efficiently, and more elegantly than our best science has done. Watch Janine Benyus’s terrific TED talk.
9. Look beyond your own industry for ideas and possible collaboration partners. Remember that Velcro® was invented for the space program, and the drive-up window so popular with banks and food/beverage service has been adapted to many industries, even dry cleaning.
10. Reap the benefits. Once you’ve achieved some progress, start marketing those accomplishments (and your future path of even greater progress) to gain higher customer and employee loyalty, a better reputation, access to funding, and more. But don’t exaggerate! If you’re caught greenwashing or purposewashing, all those benefits will go up in a plume of CO2.

There you have it: ten best practices for sustainability and regenerativity. And if you want help from an expert, I’m offering my readers a half-hour consultation at no charge ($100 value) to explore how you might harness them in your own organization, through the end of April, 2024.