Wal-Mart & Your Exponentially Green Game-Changer

We have predicted the future (dating back to at least 2007 at Sunrise Advisors, and well before that individually and together) -- and your future is now.

From today's important update of the homepage of our Sunrise Advisors Website:

As of Summer, 2009, in the worst American and global economic, investment, and unemployment conditions in some 70 years, the major sustainability sourcing announcement by Wal-Mart, one of the world's largest retailers, that it now requires suppliers of all sizes to achieve new degrees of transparency and compliance that tangibly impact environmental labeling, other marketing and communications, and reporting is already having substantial (positive or negative for you?...your choice, as we at Sunrise Advisors have been saying individually and together to you and others since at least 2007) bottom line results on not only those businesses of all sizes, even those who do not do business with Wal-Mart today, but entire community and non-profit (non-governmental organization/NGO) support service infrastructures more than ever in this economy relying on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and/or (marketing and selling) earned income generation financial and other support essential now for your survival.

Whatever you or others might think or feel about Wal-Mart, the scale of this powerful corporation's financial, political, and (potentially) exponentially green impacts in communities in the United States, China, Mexico, and well beyond frankly cannot be ignored. Click here to learn more from the Cambridge and Boston area from one of the leading Harvard Business School professors on globalization, and specifically local impacts and empowerment since at least the 1990s, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, professor of strategy, innovation, and advanced leadership -- who writes very clearly to your benefit on what she describes as "Wal-Mart's Environmental Game-Changer." Professor Kanter has been named to The Times of London list of the 50 most powerful women in the world.

Click here for further details from a blog entry from "The TerraPass Footprint" from a leading carbon offsets company of how businesses of all sizes, non-profits, and communities will (in our consistently integrated view at Sunrise Advisors) have increasingly powerful financial bottom line and other incentives to integrate their operations and specific practices with doing well on -- and through -- the "Wal-Mart Sustainability Index." A highlight of this blog entry focuses on:

Wal-Mart engaged some 20 universities, a handful of environmental activist groups, associations like Business for Social Responsibility, many of (Wal-Mart's) key suppliers, and a small army of consultants. (The clothing and outdoor lifestyle products company) Patagonia's iconoclastic founder, Yvon Chouinard, has played a role. (Wal-Mart has) gone through a great deal of thinking and more than a few iterations. This was not some slap-dash (or exclusively public relations spin) effort...the most important question regarding...future impact is really just how committed Wal-Mart is to developing, refining, and publicizing the information they gather. At the moment, they seem quite serious about expanding their ruthless pursuit of supplier efficiency to encompass greener (definitely including more profitable) goals.

As a special section of the international business publication The Economist reports, a future of effectively communicating and achieving shared success is not just nice, but increasingly essential for your bottom line financial results. Click here.

INSEAD, another of the world's leading business schools (located in Fontainebleau, near Paris) has also made a compelling case for this timely thinking and business approach through its online "Knowledge." Click here.

Specifically, Renato J. Orsato, Senior Research Fellow at INSEAD, has written "Sustainability Strategies: When does it pay to be green?" as a practical guide to help companies obtain a competitive advantage out of their environmental investments; or in other words: How can (you) go about making green investments profitable? Because of the barrage of eco-investments ranging from ISO 14001 certification, reduction of CO2 emissions, to eco-branding that can easily (overwhelm) managers (and owners), Orsato says it is important that the right choices be made. In his words:

You need to be very specific in which type of eco-investment you want to invest (in your business or NGO/non-profit organization) and (know clearly) why. And the why depends very much on the kind of pressure you're having...it's not enough to be eco-efficient; it's not enough to reduce your impact, you have to show (that you are ever-deeper, exponentially green)."

As an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) reports (based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley where we at Sunrise Advisors are based; however, we serve America and the world), it is especially essential for your survival and success to get green-inclined consumers, purchasers, donors, and/or supporters to actually spend money (vote with their pocketbooks) and take further action(s) that benefit the environment through you, helping consumers to overcome contradictions between their words and those actions. Click here.

A highlight of this SSIR publication from the Stanford Graduate School of Business Center for Social Innovation focuses on:

...(increased revenues through removing) five barriers -- namely lack of awareness, negative perceptions, distrust, high prices, and low availability. In other words, (you) must increase (green) awareness, improve (green) perceptions of quality, strengthen trust, lower the prices, and increase (green) availability.

Real World & Measurable Green Solutions To Climate Change & Job Losses In A G-Local World

From a recent Tweet on Friday, July 10, 2009 at http://www.twitter.com/etpickett -- Greener monetization of data, and measurable outcomes helping the planet AND economy G-Locally, please seriously review http://tr.im/rLTd

American reGeneration this July 4th, 2009 and beyond!

Happy Independence Day America, July 4th, 2009!

We are learning of so much that is going on in Portland, Oregon that is hopeful in these very tough times there (Here is yet another example, with inspirational practicality, of "the we, not just the me." Cudos to Spencer Beebe, Ecotrust & the Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center.) -- and for so many across our country facing serious challenges, for our planet and for the animals really suffering here (near and on the California coast) and beyond in unprecedented ways. Frankly, not because it's "just nice," but because it's in our interests, we need to more than ever "hang together," or surely we shall "hang separately." Get it?!

The Power of Green (please watch the embedded video in the front page of the article) is now essential to the survival of your family, your community, your planet, and oh yeah...you!

From your young, hopeful British cousin, "see" what is possible now! This is YOUR call to action!

The Red, White & Blue must become very Green!

Road Map To Shared Green Business Success

This Weblink provides insightful information how businesses and organizations can now collaborate (even as they sometimes compete, though often they are in different industries) in lowering costs, improving overhead -- sometimes even profits from new products and services, and "exponentially" or "multiply" green-ing both their daily and strategic operations.

There was a movie that popularized a phrase very evident in recent years in society: Greed is good. We disagree, and tangibly, measurably, provably are all about demonstrating for the bottom lines of businesses and organizations that: Green is good (for you!).

Take Action For Frogs: Your Inconvenient Truth

At this moment of planetary potential pandemic flu hitting the United States, and watching how all of humans' and Earth's man-made challenges are directly, shockingly, and (shouldn't be so) surprisingly inter-related, a potential, sensible, scalable solution can be found in a reset of how we treat ourselves in harmony with nature, not in some type of sick lose-lose competition -- especially again and again, from the accurately foretelling movie An Inconvenient Truth to this more recent article, regarding -- IF we will have the will to change -- our green friends the frogs. There is a powerful, even tangibly edu-taining scene in the movie showing an animated frog who senses a hot flash and jumps away, BUT if the heat is increased gradually, is lulled into false confidence, laziness, or whatever inertia until it is too late for survival -- and then the only hope is that an outside force for good would have to rapidly intervene to rescue the frog and snap it into action elsewhere. Sound too familiar, people?

For your own personal survival, if not for a higher calling, take action, now, on the we, not just the me (so to speak). Ribbitt! And seriously, thanks. When scientists almost universally agree that there is a CO2 in the atmosphere exponentially-rising emergency, but mass communications are manipulated so that more than half the public relations issued questions the legitimacy of the climate change crisis, even if you are skeptical (hopefully not) about the severity of global warming, the literal bottom line in business and more broadly, personal and family survival, is trust your gut, your inner voice that whatever the specific triggers, it is beyond doubt now that mass selfishness on the part of more and more humans mis-using limited resources is definitely setting in motion flus and other events that cannot be restrained if we together do not rethink the whats of life -- and definitely the hows.

This is a time for unity, for caring, for hope through faith. This can also be, around those enduring values, a time of real sustainable income-generating, doing well by doing good, exponentially green business and job opportunities. As the great New York Yankees baseball legend Yogi Berra said, "When there is a fork in the road, take it." Literally, let us pray for answers the only way they will work, going forward -- together.

Earth Day 2009 and beyond: YOUR CALL TO ACTION

No longer is the alignment of environmental protection and business development merely nice, or about global warming publicity or green consumerism, and renewable energy alone. Devastation in economic empowerment and employment (lost jobs) -- and public health -- from abusing our planet for too long, and its many "neighborhoods," including yours (!), is no longer isolated, or someone else's problem. This cannot be ignored yet again for one more day.

Whether it's the local Bay Area news reporting dangerous drugs and untreated sewage being illegally dumped in the San Francisco Bay, or this accurate, yet shocking in its accuracy (its cold, "dead zone" facts), Frontline television report on the equally substantial US East Coast Chesapeake Bay genuine crisis, please take this very seriously as your CALL TO ACTION, personally and for your families and our communities (not some distant, abstract ideas) before it is literally too late. Not being alarmist, but keeping it very real, this Earth Day 2009 must be only the moment in your life personally and ours when there is no turning back.

The environmental and economic interrelated "cancer" upon each and all of us is worse than the truly terrible Dust Bowl situation in the 1930's Great Depression years -- and yet today, as then, there might be survival IF we really stop sticking our heads in the sand, so to speak, and move as Americans beyond greed to exponentially green new opportunities to "profit the planet." Thank you.

The Year We Make Contact? A Space Odyssey Indeed.

We often believe when there is a disconnect between nice ideas and real world priorities, we see opportunities to "bridge the gaps."

Fact: In every aspect of our desires in our project, business concierge, and coaching work with "exponentially green" nonprofits and creative community enterprises, it is now possible to add value together -- to survive in tough times through thriving into the future...increasingly, which must be, for all of us, "now."

Here are brief Weblinks well worth your time. "This" is no longer "science fiction."

sustainableindustries.com/breakingnews/43036587.html

youtube.com/watch?v=cWnmCu3U09w

We hope to be helpful in the development of shared, sustainable income in these challenging times for so many...yet "tomorrow" tangibly will not wait.

Are you ready?

enterprisesunrise.com / nonprofitsunrise.com