Key events on energy efficiency finance and triple bottom line investing

Meet us at the the following events. We’ll be presenting about:

- energy efficiency financing

- responsible property investment metrics for high performance portfolios

- taking the green economy to the next level

In the weeks ahead, Lisa Michelle Galley will be featured at a number of key industry conferences. The topics covered by Lisa and other leading voices in the sustainable investment community will highlight the  latest trends and provide a valuable forum to learn about innovative solutions to some of the most pressing challenges facing the green building and finance sectors.

Presentation on Energy Efficiency Financing

GSMI -The Sustainable Buildings Series: Retrofits

October 21, 2009; 11:15am – 12pm, Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF
Lisa will cover the key considerations for different types of energy efficiency financing.  From there she will talk about how owners can more effectively coordinate their energy efficiency financing efforts across their portfolios. Lisa will be co-presenting with Peter Liu of New Resource Bank.

Presentation on Metrics for High-Performance Portfolios

Responsible Property Investing Council: 2009 ULI Fall Meeting
November 04, 2009 – Joint session of RPI and Sustainable Development Councils
Moscone Center South, San Francisco
Along with co-presenters David Wood, of the Responsible Property Investment Center and  Jean Rogers of ARUP, Lisa will offer fresh insights and recommendations developed in a year long study of the development and application of  responsible property investing metrics on institutional real estate portfolios. Lisa and Jean will discuss how the real estate investment ‘system’ has been impacted by sustainability.

Taking the Green Economy to the next level

Sustainable Industries Economic Forum in San Francisco
November 19, 2009; 9:30am -10:15am
St. Regis Hotel, San Francisco
Lisa will join a panel of industry leaders including Paul Hawken, author and CEO of the Pax Engineering Group, to discuss some of the most challenging aspect of successfully implementing triple bottom line solutions and how we can take the green economy forward. The event will offer valuable perspective on growing strategic partnerships as a core aspect of sustainable business.

If you would like to meet us at any of these events, please email us info@galleyecocapital.com

News about future events is available through our website.

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Green Real Estate Champions: Do You Know the ‘1% Rule’?

How does green building knowledge spread inside your company? Does the company focus on formal technical training? More on triple bottom line values? Concentrate the new knowledge on a ‘chosen few’ and leave it to them to transfer their green building know-how to others? Or is it a viral, water-cooler kind of movement?

The big real estate investment companies are making serious moves to adopt green building and sustainability and I’ve been talking to folks who ask, how’s it really spreading?

In any case, these industry pacesetters shoulder the greening of trillions of dollars of real estate not to mention (re-)educating thousands of professionals all over the globe. And they are doing this while the industry is turning on a dime to go green. So these companies’ competitiveness is riding on the success of their approach.

And back to the question –  how is green building knowledge spreading in real estate companies?

We don’t have the silver bullet answer, yet. In the meantime, I’ll share a hypothesis about knowledge ‘makers’ and ‘users’ from Church of the Customer – the ‘must read’ blog for marketers.

They call it the ‘1% Rule‘. It describes their theory of knowledge creation and sharing within communities. Paraphrased, it says that

roughly 1% of the people in your ‘community’ create nearly all the content. Roughly 10% of the employees actively synthesize it.

Basically, the authors observed that it is usually a small group of people who are having the most powerful effect on the knowledge that is created and spread within a certain community. If you believe them, then you will spend time and resources identifying this group of employees, customers, suppliers, etc. and engage them heavily. And give them a platform to engage you. Relying on formal tools like employee surveys and job descriptions is not useful for really getting to the people most likely to embrace and spread the gospel. They are motivated by other things.

And here’s one catch: the 1% Rule uses the phrase democratized community in the definition. Everybody in these communities has equal access to the information and equal opportunity to contribute their own opinions.

So what about spreading green building knowledge in investment real estate firms? A few questions:

• Is your company going for the mass marketing approach to spreading green building know how?
• Do you have democratized knowledge creation and sharing in your company?
• Do you know the sustainability 1%-ers in your firm, beyond the ones who have sustainability directly in their job description?
• Are you the green building 1%-er in your firm?
• Could and should the 1% Rule apply to spreading green building know how within investment real estate firms at all?

Share what you think with the Green Journey community!

Photo Credit: Flickr/Sue Richards - Knowledge

“Wash me… but don’t get me wet”

Any German will immediately recognize the above saying about people who are less committed to something than they publicly profess. Environmentalists call it ‘greenwashing’.  And here’s my devil’s advocate question:

What if we are confusing a company’s incremental progress on a complex long-range strategy with hypocrisy?

The Wall Street Journal has just updated us on General Electric’s (NYSE: GE) progress on its attention-grabbing Ecomagination strategy. It seems that there is resistance to Ecomagination’s promise and products from both customers and the ranks within and more limited C-level support than was widely assumed.

To its credit, GE leads the pack in establishing top-level leadership on going green. And its stated approach, to bring innovative environmentally-friendly products to market without sacrificing profits, raised our expectations of the bottom line benefits of corporate social responsibility. Yet, GE’s current business reality is that it backs proposals to cap industrial carbon-dioxide emissions even as it continues to sell coal-fired steam turbines.

And it is particularly troubling that some GE employees still question whether climate change is even for real. Huh? (Hint: Ron Nielson’s The Little Green Handbook is a number cruncher’s dream).  Also, CEO Jeff Immelt’s statement about limiting GE’s sustainability initiatives to only those things that made ‘economic sense’ sounds reasonable on the surface, but also leaves the loud silent question of whether sustainability initiatives are being shouldered with a heavier burden of proof (and performance) than status quo business practices.

With green building now emerging in our industry, this article provides deep insights about the realities of leading organizational and industry transformation and leads to a more concrete question:

What would they write about you?

If a Wall Street Journal reporter googled your company on its green building progress, perhaps even called you and your peers to find out more on what you’re doing, what do you think would be written about you and your firm?

• Can you compartmentalize the business of green building away from your personal beliefs about sustainability?
• Do you embed sustainability into your personal lifestyle?
• Do any of your peers and employees?
• Is favoring green building a moral or business choice, or a political necessity?
• What are the economic and political realities of embedding sustainability in your company?
• What business tradeoffs are you prepared to make?
• What tradeoffs will you absolutely NOT make to go green?
• How are you engaging your employees, customers and other important stakeholders about your efforts to go green?
• Are you retaining any other business practices alongside your green building efforts which may be in conflict?
• How do you explain that?
  

It is very difficult to make the necessary business decisions about green building without spelling out your level of personal and organizational commitment. I hope these questions help us to engage each other more constructively and authentically.