Strategic Discipline Blog

Having just returned from Annual Planning with one of my customers in California, I’ve enlisted the aid of guest blogger, Karoline Clarke (click on the link to discover her blogs here on Strategic Discipline) to provide ideas on how to advance the concepts of green principles to enhance your business.  I’ll be next week with more on how to build a Strategy to Win.

Using the Green Wave to Enhance Your Business

Shedding the reputation it had as a purely new age concept, the process of being eco-friendly has come home to roost in modern businesses. According to Entrepreneur magazine, companies that emphasize their green credentials are already seeing considerable sales upticks, with a Nielsen study finding three businesses from distinct industries experiencing up to 13% increased growth in their sustainable sales categories. For both the success of the business and the well-being of employees, implementing green-centric business strategies is proving to be wholly positive, and can be completed without too much fuss.

The easiest step

By far the simplest step to improving your business' green credentials is through removing plastic in the workplace. As outlined by the WE Forum, plastic use has risen 20 times over the past 50 years, with the use of single-use plastic widespread in office inventories. The impact of this waste is often felt sharply, both in terms of waste produced on the office floor and in disposal costs. A great first step is to conduct a waste audit in the workplace, and to repeat it at regular intervals as a workplace ethos. From there, collect and push for responsible recycling of your plastics. This will efficiently reduce overheads and create a healthier working environment.

Growing efforts in other areas

Waste removal and related schemes to eliminate further waste is an effective first step. The next is implementing more considerable, but long-term changes. Prime among these is energy usage; according to Energy.gov, moving to energy-saving light bulbs alone can help to cut energy costs by 30%. This has a positive monetary impact on your business while also helping with holistic benefits – namely, less pollution in the air from energy production and a healthier, happier workforce as a result. Assess your energy consumption today and look at long-term plans, through switching contractor or renegotiating plans, to lessen your impact.

Building green values in employees

Work ranks alongside sleep as the activity that dominates the day-to-day lives of workers. Accordingly, those hours spent in work can have a huge influence - and this includes with concern to promoting eco-conscious attitudes. Putting a truly Eco-conscious ethos into the business and encouraging employees to get involved therefore has a considerable and positive knock-on effect. According to business consultants Network for Business Sustainability, building these values in employees will benefit their development and aid your business through enhancing its reputation – both as a green company and as an enabler of green behaviors.

Green business is not a fad; it has become a defining point for many modern, upwardly mobile businesses. Implementing a disciplined green-focused business plan that values preservation of a clean working environment will not only make your business good to work for and improve the health of your customers and clients, but enhance your reputation, too. Develop a holistic strategy to brings these factors to provide your business with a very modern and powerful face to the outside world.

Growth demands Strategic Discipline.

To build an enduring great organization, requires disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, to produce superior results, and make a distinctive impact in the world.

Discipline sustains momentum, over a long period of time, laying the foundations for lasting endurance.

A winning habit starts with 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics and Meeting Rhythms.   Forecasting, accountability, individual, and team performance improve dramatically.

Meeting Rhythms achieve a disciplined focus on performance metrics to drive growth.

Let Positioning Systems help your business achieve these outcomes on the Four most Important Decisions your business faces:

Positioning Systems helps mid-sized ($5M - $250M) business Scale-UP. We align your business to focus on Your One Thing!  Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com to Scale Up your business! Take our Four Decisions Needs Assessment to discover how your business measures against other Scaled Up companies. We’ll contact you.

NEXT BLOG – Play to Win – Low Cost vs. Differentiation

Michael Porter wrote in Competitive Strategy, the only ways to win (in other words, to create more value than our competitors) are either:

1. To operate with sustainable lower costs or
2. To differentiate by offering a significantly better product or service.

There are only two ways to create a sustainable competitive advantage, to be a low-cost player or to be a differentiator.  We’ll share two examples of low cost versus differentiation and how these strategies would look different for a cleaning company.