Hilton owns fewer than 50 of the 3,800 hotels that fly the Hilton flag, but the chain’s brand standards govern what the independent owners can do. While every big hotel chain has a sustainability program, reports Marc Gunther, Hilton was the first major hospitality company to require sustainability measurement as a brand standard. (more…)

While escalating conversations on topics such as climate change, carbon legislation, energy independence, and growing consumer eco awareness generate forward eco movement for some it simultaneously creates confusion and skepticism for others. To address these complex issues, it’s going to take all of us demonstrating eco awareness in our (more…)

A recent Forbes article, Why Great Ideas Fail, attempts to answer this question and offer guidance towards improved business innovation success. Drilling to the heart of the issue, the post explains that it is not the idea but more often the culture that fails. Instead of confining creativity to a closed-off lab, the concept of an open innovation model is (more…)

Given the big failure of the Rio+20 conference, it is clear that a top down approach by national governments around the world alone won’t cut our emissions enough to avoid a rise of temperatures below 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels.

Based on this, our civilization has to find a solution, (more…)

John Lennon wrote that life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. Apparently, the same is true of energy efficiency. Energy savings happen when we’re busy doing other things – Internet-based things specifically.

We use email, bank online and download music not (more…)

The five “keys” that I have developed over the last fifteen years and have been teaching for about a decade are those elements that I believe are necessary to build a unlock the full potential of sustainability as a business-supporting strategy. They have been the basis for programs that I have recommended and implemented for companies ranging from multinational (more…)

The University of Chicago, in Chicago, Illinois, has long been a leader of sustainable initiatives throughout the campus. For example, during winter break, the university powers down electronics to reduce unnecessary energy consumption, and the university has specific locations to recycle electronic waste, or e-waste. The University of Chicago greatly believes in (more…)

Twenty years after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro promised an era of aggressive action on biodiversity loss and global warming, the United Nations Rio+20 sustainability summit ended Friday with recriminations and a growing sense that international institutions will play an increasingly diminished role in solving environmental problems. (more…)

“Many companies suffer from disproportionately high breakthrough project failure rates because they find it hard to balance execution discipline with flexibility to respond to changing technical and market realities. When executing on breakthrough projects, use detailed maturity checklists to establish flexible yet guard-railed execution paths.” -CEB Views (more…)

The outcome of the Rio+20, the sustainability conference held in Rio de Janeiro this week and which folds today, will be a document that lacks focus and does not tackle the urgency of the problems the world faces, according to Celso Lafer, president of FAPESP, an organization that supports research in São Paulo. (more…)