Sustainability. Corporate social responsibility. Good corporate citizenship. The triple bottom line. As much as we adore the concept, there’s no denying it’s a mouthful. Making it sound sexy is anything but easy.

Enter the new kid on the block, Conscious Capitalism®. Coming out of the States, this is the latest attempt to brand what most of us already know as ‘blended value’ or ‘sustainable business.’ Its aim: to “advance the integration of consciousness and capitalism,” in other words to promote business based on purpose, caring, integrity and wellbeing, as well as profit.

It’s a movement that’s going global: this month saw the launch of Conscious Capitalism Australia—a lavish breakfast affair by creative agency Human at Sydney’s Ivy Room, featuring a talk by movement co-founder and Bentley University Marketing Professor Raj Sisodia on his best-selling book, Firms of Endearment.

His opening slide was a caterpillar eating a leaf and a butterfly on a flower. Business, he said, needed to metamorphosize from high-consumption eating mode to value-creating pollination mode. A powerful image, but not new—this was the central message of John Elkington’s Chrysalis Economy a decade ago.

What was different in Raj Sisodia’s talk was a subtle shift in vocabulary. Instead of focusing on corporate shoulds, coulds and woulds, his presentation was anchored in companies that are. The ‘conscious’ (largely US-based) businesses profiled in his book—like Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods Market and Patagonia—do business that isn’t just about profit. It’s about purpose; making the world a better place; creating value for stakeholders. Theirs is leadership based on caring, trust, authenticity, transparency and integrity. And, significantly, these people- and environment-centered organizations are all demonstrably outperforming their competitors financially.

Making this link—proving that doing good is good for the bottom line—has been the elusive Holy Grail for sustainable business. We’re now reaching that point—and the Conscious Capitalism movement capitalizes on this.

Conscious Capitalism Australia describes itself as a ‘profit for purpose’ organization “created to inspire, connect and support the conscious business community in Australia.” There’s also a Conscious Capitalism Institute, a Conscious Capitalism Alliance and Conscious Capitalism Inc., with an annual CEO conference in Austin, Texas (November 9-11^th 2012) and an annual research conference at Bentley University (May 22-23^rd).

What strikes me about Conscious Capitalism® is that little ‘r.’ Whereas most sustainability concepts to date have been collective commons freeware that people can build on, apply and develop to push a shared agenda, this new breed is being trademarked. It’s a sign sustainability is becoming big business.

This latest name may not make sustainability either sexier or snappier—for that you could turn to the likes of namepistol—but the little ® proves beyond doubt that sustainable business is now mainstream business.

The Broadband Bridge: Linking ICT with Climate Action for a Low-Carbon Economy, a new report by the Broadband Commission for Digital Development

Building on the agreements achieved at the 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP-17), the report emphasizes the kind of transformative solutions that are enabled by broadband. It provides practical examples of how broadband can contribute to reducing greenhouse gasses (GHGs), mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change, and promoting resource efficiency, while at the same time building more prosperous and inclusive societies.

The authors, which include Commissioners and other experts, argue forcefully for a new policy framework and issue 10 recommendations on how to achieve it. The report was prepared by the Broadband Commission Working Group on Climate Change, chaired by Hans Vestberg, president and CEO of Ericsson which released the report at a meeting of the Broadband Commission in Macedonia, and who discusses its finding  here.

Several best-practice country cases from countries such as Mexico, Sweden, and Australia, underline the importance of moving beyond silo thinking to reach challenging goals, and not least, how broadband is allowing emerging markets to leapfrog. Other countries profiled, such as India and South Africa, may invest in broadband primarily to address poverty alleviation and economic development but the ability of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to enable the green, low-carbon economy is proving an added benefit not to be underestimated.

As one of the members of One Stone who served as part of the editorial team for The Broadband Bridge, I was struck by how individuals and organizations coming from very different perspectives on the climate change/sustainability agenda—from development NGOs to UN officials to CEOs and government ministers—were united in their view that broadband is a promising path towards tackling climate change. That is, provided the right policies and incentives are in place and that people are prepared to truly use the technology to substitute more carbon-consuming activities.

As Hamdoun Toure describes it, “Addressing climate change implies completely transforming our way of life, the way we work, the way we travel, shifting our model of development to a fairer, more sustainable model to ensure our survival. We need to put at stake all the resources available to us, and mobilize the political will to turn discussions and negotiations into agreements and actions.”

Take aquaponics, for instance. It’s a kind of fishy horticulture in which farmed fish and edible plants share a tank. Fish and plants are grown in a symbiotic balance – wastes from the fish provide nutrients for the plants, and in turn the plants filter the water for the fish. Plant off-cuts can then be composted in wormeries to provide food for the fish and so the cycle continues… Crops are constantly harvested and the system feeds and waters itself in a sustainable ecosystem for food production. Surround the system with a greenhouse, add ladybirds and other beneficial insects and a microcosm is born.

Sound too good to be true? It gets better. One of the leaders in aquaponics in the UK is a social enterprise, based at the University of Stirling to provide support for the growing aquaponics industry. They are bursting with bright ideas and have a neat website too. Here’s their youthful brain box Charlie Price explaining aquaponics at TEDx.

Sit back and be inspired. With innovative leaders like Charlie, we can make sustainability happen.

To be truthful, part of my frustration was over the UNGC’s off-kilter mid-February timing. In the last phases of a pressing reporting season, I wasn’t in the mood for having the rules changed.

Like I stated last year, the UNGC Advanced Level COP was half thought-through. It should have been better aligned with GRI’s 3.1 guidelines and taken tools like the Ruggie ‘Protect, respect and remedy’ framework into stronger account. But they didn’t. As a result, the UNGC has been playing a game of catch up. They issued two versions of the Advanced Level COP – and at least two additional corrections – over the span of one reporting cycle!

The UNGC’s second iteration, effective in January, 2012, involves an overhaul of their 24 criteria to closer align with core UN and Global Compact resources, including Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the Anti-Corruption Reporting Guidance as well as with GRI indicators. Like GRI’s 3.1, it now has Ruggie written all over it.

There are strong arguments to support the fact that the UNGC should have extended their launch into 2013. Companies are waiting for GRI to issue version 4.0 of their guidelines. There is little reason give the Advanced Level COP much heed when they don’t know how the GRI will change in only a year’s time. Especially when you look at the UNGC’s fickle track record of the last year.

Are continually revised reporting guidelines tearing your hair out? With the UNGC Advanced Level COP guidelines in its second iteration, with just as many corrections in ten months, the UNGC is not demonstrating the excellence that they expect of their reporters.

Maybe UNGC will be able to answer a few of these questions at their webinar scheduled for Friday, March 23. I’ll be listening in – I hope you will too!

In his Bloomberg Businessweek article, Benjamin Skinner traces the case of 24 indentured fishermen on Korean-flagged ships in New Zealand waters. Indentured labor is a form of slavery. Although they are 6,500 miles away from American consumers, the seafood they catch is sold across the world, including to the United State and Europe. Skinner links the fish caught by the Korean company to US suppliers to restaurants and grocery stores, including Cost Co, Whole Foods Market and Safeway.

The food companies are required by the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act to declare on their websites what, if anything, they are doing to ensure there is no slave labor in their supply chains. The companies mentioned have supplier codes of conduct that prohibit the use of slavery in their supply chains and solid practices of auditing direct suppliers. These practices are outlined on their websites and they are thus in compliance with the law.

However, the monitoring stops short in the supply chain. Fishing vessels sell their catch to consolidators who then resell the catch either directly to large retailers or to other consolidators who import the catch to the US. The buyers – be it retailers who make direct purchases or wholesalers that service restaurants and grocery chains – are not requiring the consolidators to monitor the fishing fleets. Thus, the push for transparency and accountability stops at the exact spot where labor and human rights violations are frequently found: at the site of extraction, harvest or catch.

It’s interesting to note that in response to the article, Whole Foods Market has reported that the are in the process of requiring all seafood sold at our seafood counters to come through the Trace Register electronic traceability system, which is designed to trace seafood back to the fishing vessel and location of capture.

As this case shows, minimal compliance with labor transparency laws is insufficient for companies dealing with food harvested or caught by poorly regulated labor. Fishing and hand-harvested crops are particularly plagued by poor labor standards.  In these cases, companies need to ensure that they illuminate their supply chains to the very end.  It’s difficult but necessary.

Consumers don’t want their fish fingers to carry slave fingerprints.

Of all the business leaders linked to environmental disasters, the most unlikely name is Stefan Schmidheiny. Yet this week, he was found guilty by a court in Turin, Italy over 3000 asbestos-related deaths and sentenced in absentia to 16 years’ prison and payment of substantial damages to victims and their families.

The charges relate to his time at the helm of Eternit, at one stage the world’s largest manufacturer of asbestos cement products. He’s accused of failing to comply with safety regulations, “willful failure” to protect employees and residents and concealing knowledge of the hazards of asbestos.

It’s a shocking outcome for the philanthropist, posterchild of the sustainable business movement and founder of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Schmidheiny was responsible for taking Eternit asbestos-free – a process that took nearly 20 years.

Based now in Costa Rica, he is expected to appeal the decision. But as business leaders around the world prepare for Rio+20, it’s a timely reminder that what passes for business-as-usual today quickly becomes tomorrow’s environmental crime.

The precautionary approach, always, is by far the wisest strategy.

That would seem to be the case in the public sphere, where a Washington Post investigation published Feb 7 found that 33 members of Congress have steered more than $300 million in earmarks and other spending provisions to dozens of public projects that are next to or within about two miles of the lawmakers’ own property, or in other cases, to companies or organizations where a family member was employed. These earmarks are not illegal, but they are not required to be disclosed, and therein lies the slippery slope. As the investigation continues to publish its reports, lawmakers defend their actions as perfectly legitimate, but undisclosed financial conflicts—whether in the private or the public sphere—mark a governance gap much like the one that helped tip the global economy into a financial crisis in 2008.

The US Congress does seem aware that, in an election year, it’s not a good idea to be seen as weak on ethics. A narrowly tailored ethics bill won broad approval this past week of a more far-reaching reform package , The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act that would impose new conflict-of-interest rules and mandate more transparency for lawmakers. These are changes that were not even considered five years ago when Congress last rewrote its rules with a bill from Sen Harry Reid, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007.

The STOCK Act passed in the Senate by a vote of 96-3. Most significantly the bill, which bans members of Congress from benefiting from insider stock trading, now covers the executive branch, as well, including the requirement that financial disclosure statements are now electronically filed to be available online and that the 30-day notice of stock or securities transactions also apply to a limited number of executive branch officials.

“This is mass repentance for past sins,” Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), who managed the floor debate, told The Washington Post.

When we see evidence that the STOCK Act will have its intended effect, and that ethics can rebound along with the economy,  we’ll be in a better position to grant that forgiveness.

More with Less: Scaling Sustainable Consumption and Resource Efficiency
does a good job of setting out the challenges and opportunities. It points out that over US$2 trillion in global economic output to 2030 is at stake, and that business-as-usual won’t work in a resource constrained world.

Business, it says, can play both a leading and an enabling role in scaling sustainable consumption by transforming:
• Demand through interactions with the consumer
• Value chains through new business models
• Rules of the game through public-private partnerships.

A thrusting and can-do proposal, but one that also suffers from tunnel vision. And without a broader outlook WEF has little chance of wooing partners and building the trust needed to deliver on sustainable consumption goals. The solution? Tackle a few uncomfortable truths head-on:

1. Credibility. The enormous popularity of Annie Leonard’s critique The Story of Stuff (15 million views and counting) shows that many people see corporates as the perpetrators of unsustainable consumption. So how will businesses persuade consumers, NGOs and governments that they are serious about driving the turnaround?

2. Laggards. If businesses want a lightly regulated ‘leading and enabling’ role in the transformation to sustainable consumption, they must show how they will manage their own slow-movers and laggards. They are currently way too silent and clubby on this topic. It’s time to break ranks.

3. Lobbying. Too many companies promote sustainability publicly and then privately lobby governments for short-term economic gain. To be credible, leading companies must fight for sustainable solutions and make loud protests against unsustainable ones. That means standing firm against, for example, irresponsible tar sands exploitation –unanimously condemned as ‘ecocide’ at a mock trial at the UK Supreme Court last year. Are they ready to do that?

4. More is more. Apart from mentioning Patagonia’s bold ‘don’t buy this jacket’ advert, the report fails to address the idea of how less consumption can be scaled, probably because most companies are just too uncomfortable with the notion. Nothing’s changed then in the 17 years since SustainAbility’s report Who Needs It? triggered similar reactions.

5. Values. The report’s business case of cost avoidance, cost reduction, revenue growth and revenue protection shows how financial value can be captured in the switch to sustainable consumption. But the values case is absent from the report, even though it urges ‘emotional’ communication with consumers to get them to embrace sustainability. Shame.

After a long e-mail exchange with colleagues over Amazon’s relative “sustainability” I was left feeling uneasy. A lack of bricks and mortar gives Amazon some real advantages in overall carbon footprint. And while it’s not definitive, conventional sustainability wisdom says driving your car to the mall is a lot less sustainable than having the man or woman in brown drop cardboard boxes on your doorstep.

A 2009 report by Cleantech determined that the wildly popular and fast-selling Kindle (it’s Amazon top-selling product of all time; one million flew off the warehouse shelves each week in December) is also a greener way to read. If you keep your Kindle, new or old, and download 22 books a year, you are having less of a carbon footprint than those of us that ride our bikes to independent local bookstores to get our reading fix. Or so says Cleantech. It would be nice to see a more updated study that follows people’s real Amazon habits vs. their car trips.

In any case, why won’t this seemingly green behemoth report to the Carbon Disclosure Project, give us some benchmarks about the Kindle’s footprint, or respond to the F and F+ it has received in 2009 and 2010 on its Green Grades’ report card(for paper use policies) from Dogwood Alliance and Forest Ethic?

Amazon certainly has green initiatives. Wouldn’t it be nice if when you googled ‘Amazon’ and ‘sustainability’ your first hit was their report detailing future aims and goals?

Unemployment. Inequality. Exhausted by catering to a corrupt system. I could see the desperate need for change in every person I met on the streets of Egypt’s Sharm el Sheijk last year. In Oman last week, the people I spoke to were proud, open and enthusiastic about their benevolent Sultan. On the other hand, they have to be; it’s against the law to be anything but supportive.

Beyond the not-so-insignificant issue of freedom of speech, the countries are on polar opposites of Arab nations.

• Egypt is the most populated of Arab nations with 79 million inhabitants; Oman is one of the tiniest, with close to three million.
• Oman ranks 57^th in a 2010 World Bank index of per capita purchasing power while Egypt ranks 127^th on the list of 215 countries.
• On Transparency International’s 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index on public sector, Oman has a rating of 4.3 on a scale of 1-10 (10 ranking as very clean), among the best rankings in the Middle East. Egypt scored 2.9.
• In Egypt, unemployment among young people was at 25% last year. Omani unemployment rate is 15%, and higher among younger people. The country has a young population – 43% are under the age of 15.
• Egypt’s gross domestic product will fall from 5% to 1% in 2011. In Oman, on the other hand, it is expected to grow by 3%

In Spring 2011, 500 Omani protesters demanded more jobs and greater democracy. Sultan Qaboos bin Said recognized the urgency of the problem of disenfranchised youth, and took to heart learnings from neighboring Arab states. He injected money into infrastructure, created 50,000 new jobs, raised stipends for university students by between US $65 and 234 a month and replaced six ministers in a cabinet reshuffle. He freed protesters almost immediately after arresting them at demonstrations. Things have been pretty quiet since.

The Sultan has also been slowly modernizing the business climate, too, with stronger focus on higher labor standards and anti-corruption measures. The country entered into an agreement with the ILO in 2010, called the Decent Work Country Programme, which covers both the interests of nationals and migrant workers.

Corruption is perceived as an issue among local businesses. In a survey of Omani businesses published by the ILO in 2011, almost a fifth of those surveyed believe that corruption and bribery strongly affects the performance of Omani firms and only under a third believe the Government is very committed to addressing the problem (p. 73). But small steps have recently been made and the cabinet reshuffle included reorganizing some of the government institutions prone to corruption.

Some improvements in human rights are visible too. The US State Department reports that in 2010 the Omani government has respected the human rights of its citizens and has established a quasi-independent human rights commission.  Key issues include discrimination of women in the workforce (although there is a law for equal pay for equal work), and cases where migrant workers were forced into labor or abused. Oman is wholly dependent on its ex-pat laborers. In fact, foreign workers constitute at least 50% of the workforce and as much as 80% of the private sector workforce, according to human rights NGO Freedom House.

I’m not saying that the Sultan of Oman is the poster boy for sustainable business climate–far from it.  But is there something that Egypt can learn from them? Oman’s investment climate will continue to grow in 2012. Meanwhile, in Egypt, the number of tourists was down by a third in 2011. Bankruptcies increased by 26%. The value of securities traded on their Stock Exchange fell by 67%. The number of companies started last year fell by 13%. A major acquisition by Standard Charted of the Egyptian unit of Greek bank Piraeus fell through. If the Egyptian government is not seen to heed the best interests of the people, this trend is bound to continue.

There is some indication of positive change ahead, though.  HSBC stated in a recent FT article that they are confident political change in north Africa will foreshadow economic renaissance. In the short term, demand for Egyptian labor increased by 10 points year-on-year in November 2011. The number of newly founded companies in December rose 27% compared to November. During the year, Egyptian investments and acquisitions were announced by Intel, Electrolux and US Oil and gas supplier TESCO, despite concerns of the market.

Like in Oman, anti-corruption measures, public investment and reforms to distribute wealth and human rights more equally among its people will be the linchpin for fulfilling business opportunities in Egypt. Here’s hoping that the winners of the Egyptian elections now ongoing are the same quick learners as Oman’s Sultan Qaboos.