Helping businesses make cents of green practices

By Dick Hughes  

MAY 10, 2010 11:48 a.m. (0)

Furman University is offering a unique post graduate course to get beyond the polarizing rhetoric of a green economy and get to the bottom line for business: it makes money.

Starting this fall, the five-session course, involving 70 contract hours, is tailored for business executives and will lead to a post graduate diploma in corporate sustainability and seven hours of continuing education credits.

The first session starts Sept. 16; it ends Dec. 10.  The cost per person is $3,950. Enrollment is limited to 20, and admission is contingent on a review of interest in corporate sustainability.

It is administered by Furman’s Center for Corporate and Professional Development in cooperation with the David E. Shi Center for Sustainability.

Brad Bechtold, director of continuing education, said he sees the Furman program leading to other programs, including workshops for small businesses on weekends.

“What we tell students is that this makes economic sense,” says John J. Meindl Jr., senior associate with the center, whose course for undergraduates inspired the post-graduate course for businesses and who will be the lead facilitator.

He said lessons learned in the class will result in decreasing operating costs, increasing revenue and building valuation.

Meindl, who also works as a business consultant, says the executives will come out of the course not only with a perspective on why it makes financial sense but with practical tools on how to design, implement, evaluate and measure the value of sustainability practices.

“What are the tools you should utilize in terms of implementation so it becomes more of a key operating process as opposed to some nice program of the day, a nice slogan, you know, ‘we’re green.’ We call that green washing.”

Furman sees the ideal applicants coming from businesses that are sold on the strategy but who need help putting it in place and, secondly, from businesses where a person in charge of sustainability wants to move beyond programmatic things like recycling and changing light bulbs.

Meindl also anticipates applicants who are interested but not sold on sustainability as a business strategy.

Bechtold and Meindl said building the curriculum came out of a discussion on how to take Furman’s internal commitment to environmental stewardship beyond campus gates.

“We really want to take this subject of sustainability and educate, as well as practice, and we need to do it in the perspective of business,” says Meindl.

When Bechtold asked Meindl to follow up with one for post-graduate business executives, Meindl still wasn’t convinced it would work in South Carolina.

“What I told Brad is what caught me by surprise is that while I could see the program taking off in New Jersey, places like that, I think something else might take off here. So I have been caught by the interest of the number of companies.”

Meindl said he can see now that businesses in the Upstate are more responsive to environmental issues than consumers and politicians.

“I originally thought that in this economic crisis that wouldn’t happen.  But you’re seeing business after business plow through the situation to position themselves on the other side.  Why wait?

“We’re making it happen regardless of the political agenda in Washington or the economic condition on industry.  We’re seeing it happen because it makes viable business sense, and it is not just Fortune 500 companies.”

Meindl, who describes himself as a capitalist, worked in the Ronald Reagan administration. He combines missionary zeal for conservation with hard-nosed bottom-line resolve to convince business to move beyond the “1890 mentality of the industrial revolution.  We basically take it, make it and waste it.  It can’t work.”

“Back then,” he said, “natural resources were aplenty and the limiting factor was labor. So we outsourced, right-sized, automated.  All those factors of production were focused on labor, not nature’s abundance. How we operate right not is basically unsustainable. The U.S. cannot operate on $5-a-gallon gasoline. We know you can’t, you know you can’t.”

He sees the current lengthy and deep recession not as just another turn in the business cycle, but harbinger of a new economic order based on cheap overseas labor as an asset and scarcity of natural resources as a liability, expensive commodities.

This is where Meindl and Bechtold want Furman to lead through courses such as the one on corporate sustainability.

Says Meindl: “We see business really going out there, strategically looking at their footprint. How much energy do we use, how much water do we use, how much waste we’re creating.  This is costing us money, and what can we do to innovate the sucker to reduce our costs and improve the value of our business.”