Gem of the day

In the space of merely two days, two new inter-industry initiatives to promote corporate leadership on sustainability. The Stewardship Action Council (great name, eh?) throws down the gauntlet with what you might deem a fairly ambitious slogan--"Creating a sustainable world"--and is focused around six "work groups" which are intended to help its founding members in their quest of "driving towards excellence." (Considering these include the companies BMW and Michelin, I'll assume for SAC's benefit that this pun is unintentional).

Back at UN headquarters, a competing initiative was unveiled with the flourishing of 54 CEOs: Global Compact LEAD will push a select group of high-performance Compact signatories to follow the UN Blueprint which was unveiled last year (and is designed, literally, on blueprint paper--the UN is so cute sometimes). Here's Global Compact director George Kell on how this new program will complement the existing program:

"[Global Compact LEAD] responds to the critical need for these leaders to scale up their efforts so that we can achieve tangible impact on global challenges."

From a performance--not to mention PR--standpoint, it makes sense to create a more challenging tier for Global Compact signatories (who include every major company and their best friend) to rise to.

But the casual observer can hardly be blamed for questioning why, oh god why, we would need yet another inter-industry platform, initiative or standard in the mix. The world of corporate sustainability efforts is already complex and twisted enough to navigate, from the GRI to GreenXchange to ICLEI to CDP. What we need is more collaboration and more transformational innovation, not more commitments and competing platforms.

So TBD on these two--not to mention TBC.