The E+E 100 are the VPs, directors, managers and engineers who are making significant strides in driving our industry. See the complete list here or download the report for more detailed information about these leaders. And stay tuned for the Call for Submissions coming later this fall, when you can nominate your favorite sustainability or energy management professional!
Now, meet Gil Friend, founder and CEO of Natural Logic and Critical Path Capital. Critical Path Capital is a boutique strategy firm that works with companies, cities, leaders, and investors to help them orient themselves successfully and profitably to the very uncertain business landscape of the 21st century. The firm focuses on business strategy grounded in sustainability. When you look at business through this lens, you see ways of operating you didn’t see before, and that’s a good thing: Billions of dollars of value move to your side, Friend says.
What is the biggest challenge you have faced in the last year or two?
After all my experience doing this — I’ve worked with Coke and Levi, Avery Dennison, Hewlett-Packard, I’ve been in the game for decades — I find that most people, most of the time, still assume you’re either going to be environmentally responsible or profitable. But you don’t need to choose between making money and making sense. If your sustainability program is costing you money, you’re doing it wrong.
Also, people argue about whether they should invest in an energy management system because it’s a six-year payback instead of five, but they put a marble in their lobby and there’s no ROI to that. Companies are applying different standards to environmental sustainability. It’s still pervasive, more than I would have hoped at this time.
How have you addressed that challenge?
It depends on the person, their mood, the nature of their skepticism. We bring examples of their peers or others they respect who have accomplished things. We always say, “Don’t take my word for it, here’s evidence.” Another way is to ask, “What are your business concerns?” We say, “Here’s what we’re seeing in your company, here’s where there’s a waste, what can we do to help?” We try to engage them in the discovery themselves because you don’t learn by being told.
Then, often, a company will think, “Wow, what’s going on here? What I’ve just learned is at odds with what I’ve always known. Why is this so different, and what opportunities are open to me?” So at the very best, we take clients into that process.
We can learn from the Earth and we ignore it at our peril. If we pay attention to that, we discover an opportunity where other people are seeing risk. That’s a good thing in business.
What advice would you give other professionals as they try to accomplish their sustainability or energy management goals?
We seem to be trying to build a bridge between the human economy and the living economy, which is the Earth. That’s already a mistake. As my wife said, “There’s just one economy.”
My advice is to understand the relationship of your business to the life support systems on this planet that sustain everything we do. Those systems have to work well for us to thrive. We pretend that that’s not real. We pretend that only money is real. The advice is to get real.
