As someone that is passionately involved in getting clean tech businesses off the ground I can’t help thinking that some of the businesses in this space are missing a trick or five?

For the last few months I have been working with a renewable energy business that is crammed full of engineering and proven IP excellence, they have a strong business model, off-take agreements and contracts in place – an investors dream. But it is lacking one key ingredient – and that is business soul. The emphasis on the business is – due to the background of its people – driven on a project management and large corporate structures, they are keen to debate sign-on fees, investor restrictions, pension funds, multi-layered structures and confining operating procedures based on what they know.

Yet at the same time they are still a start-up and have a great opportunity to do things differently in how they build the business, operate and deliver excellence. The problem is, as I found out very quickly, that change scares the hell out of them due to the fact that they know no different. Now, what normally inspires me about what I do for a living is the freshness and enthusiasm of bright new businesses with strong ideals and thinking wanting to change the world. Sure a lot of what those businesses dream of is battered out of them in getting the company off the ground but they try not to be what they have left behind in terms of over-engineered process and tired and rusted thinking.

Back to my happy band of renewables, I invited them and their new investors to a workshop with a bunch of enlightened speakers that could show them the power of maybe and what if. The speakers came from businesses like thinkpublic who are a UK based design business working in the public sector that have developed a simple process called co-design where problem solving is overcome by bringing in all of the stakeholders (including customers) together to work things out – simple but very powerful.

I outlined the thinking of Conscious Capitalism that starts off by questioning the premise of why businesses start and end with a profit motive as opposed to building a great business, with strong ideals (including profit) built into the strategy as opposed to a bolt on sentence called a mission statement.

David Firth was there, he believes in ……

1. that people matter, and are more than simply resources
2. that work itself matters, and that we begin to demean its power in our lives and its contribution to our collective futures the moment we begin to see it primarily as an economic transaction
3. that we are capable of co-creating extraordinary futures – and that phrase may simply be another expression for ‘the Organisation’ – but as human beings we sometimes get in our own way
4. that traditional, popular, patriarchal ways of organising have not just outlived their usefulness, but have become a real example of how we unintentionally get in the way of our own best futures
5. that improving relationships up and down the organisation is always going to be a weaker option than creating a space for powerful, peer-to-peer, Adult-Adult relationships to develop
6. that following any instinct to minimise or sanitise anxiety in an individual or organisation (and common examples of this include appraisal systems, most training and your annual conference) is a result of not having understood 1. above.

…thanks David, I could not have put it better myself.

Within 2 hours my bunch of engineers had changed from shivering sceptics to wide eyed idealists that were already putting some of this thinking into practice of how they would run their business. The investor (who funded the day) was seen as someone that could help their business as opposed to an ends to a means.

The day was a long one and at the end – with a cold beer in hand – the brain was humming with a revised business strategy which evolved around creating a great business with collective responsibility, realistic and workable empowerment and a strong ethic that was bought into by most of the team – I say most as there is always going to be one that refuses to change… but I am still working on him.

[photo credit: Flickr]

Related posts:

• Green Tech Job Hunt: Follow the Money
• Cleantech Entrepreneur? Check Out The California Coast Venture Forum
• Clean Tech Events This Week: MIT & HBS in California
• Israel Conference: Clean Tech VCs & CEOs Meet in California
• Clean Tech’s 2010 Exit Strategies: Disagreeing With the Financial Times

As a recruiter, I’ve had countless conversations with excited, motivated and very eager people that are looking to break into Clean-Tech. Like many, they are looking to do something more meaningful at work and something that transcends and has a deep impact. Another group of job seekers, and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, are those eying the Clean-Tech space as a potential island in a very tumultuous economic sea.

Unfortunately, it is hard to assess just how much value you can provide to a sector that you know very little about. I will put forth that for a cash constrained company, it is difficult to project how success in an unrelated industry might translate to success in the industry they operate in.

My suggestion is that you need to do research;  lots and lots of it.  While the CleanTechies website provides some helpful resources (→Blog, Job Board, Resume Writing Services), there are fundamental skills that an employer is seeking and the job seeker must have in order to add value to the organization – especially in this economic environment where headcounts are being cut, not grown.  For example as a sales person, you will add value through your understanding of the management of a sales process.

That said, I don’t mean to suggest that a job seeker should not expect that he can project his past success in selling software as an ability to sell solar panels.  Before you go running off thinking about how to develop Clean-Tech credentials, it is much more meaningful to find a directly co-related skill set that is going to be needed in the industry you are seeking employment – and then develop relationships to capitalize on them, for example develop relationships and some market awareness.

What makes a good hire?
To demonstrate what I mean, I would like to introduce you to someone that I think is a very viable candidate for the right company in the Geothermal energy value chain, let’s call him Chuck to protect his identity. He is now keen on working in Clean-Tech, but before coming to that realization he has done some things that give him situational awareness and an ability to add value to the organization he may eventually join from day one.

As a high school student on Student Council he began to develop environmental health safety interests.  Professionally, he did not really do much more from that point on that would be related to saving the environment – but what he did do was to get a PhD in Marine Geophysics from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1996.

With the idea of becoming a professor, Chuck began to do work with 3D animation to allow students to have virtual tours into the deep. Then he took a job at Standford as a data center project manager to run systems that would allow students to have a simulated experience using GIS and more.  Given this experience, in 2003 he was pulled onto a team to do earthquake research – with the idea that he would help cope with the data that was going to be collected from the research.  The reality was that before the data could be collected, there was an immense amount of site preparation that needed to come together.  Given his Geophysics background, he was able to be a competent project manager for the tasks at hand and began dealing with the entire drilling process: finance, permitting, engineering and project management.

Chuck is now interested in applying his project management background to Clean-Tech.  Given his exposure to the entire drilling process since 2003 and his educational background, it is clear that he has a tremendous profile for any Geothermal company.  It is a value proposition borne of education, experience and a passion and interest early in his career that now has an application in Clean-Tech.  My advice to career seekers is that they find a niche within the value chain of some of the technologies classified as Clean-Tech that have a direct correlation with their work history.

Chuck has a background that will allow him to have meaningful conversations with potential Geothermal employers because he understands what their needs are and appreciates the constraints they likely face on at least some level of the company’s operations.  He might find the need to learn about the finer aspects of Geothermal electricity, but he understands some of the fundamentals of what needs to happen to get a project done and he can learn the rest on the job.

Capice?

[photo credit: MichaelMarlatt]

Related posts:

• China is World Leader In Clean-Tech Investments, Report Says
• Top 5 Resume Mistakes – Clean Tech Job Seekers Watch Out!
• Clean Tech LiveChat with Richard Kauffman this Thursday
• J-REC Conference: Jewish Clean Tech & Green Energy Leaders To Meet
• Some words of wisdom for career changers….