[MUSIC] This is Mike Rosenberg, in strategy and sustainability. We're in session three, on using the strategic options that a company might have and in the third segment I want to focus on one of those which I call wait and see. The basic place of wait and see is to do, a little bit more than maybe, the law requires but to start to improve or start to increase the environmental sensibility, mainly of the managers of the firm. Because the choice of the wait and see really comes when the external world regulators, customers, shareholders, partners. Nobody's really asking for change, nobody's really asking the company to do very much right now, but there is a sense in the company that, maybe we need to keep an eye on this issue and maybe we need to pay a little bit more attention. So the idea is, there isn't a lot of sensibility right now from the outside not a lot of pressure but there is a belief amongst the management team, that they're maybe catastrophic risks, that they're maybe issues connected to the social license to operate which might change overtime. Consumers maybe today are not saying, that they want more sustainable products and services but there is some indication, some leading indicators that some segments of consumers or some part of the customer base is starting to change. There is some new technologies on the horizon, maybe there's some small companies in this space doing something a little bit greener, a little bit cleaner, a little bit smaller or lighter. And finally, the firm does believe that maybe, they're not today in different jurisdictions which are different but maybe they will be tomorrow. So the point of all this, is that maybe tomorrow things will be different and therefore, it may be a better maybe, a good choice to start paying more attention today, on what's going on, wait and see keep an eye on things, because this is the basic idea. And if you go back to the first session, the fourth segment in the first session, we'll look at the kind of the history of businesses relationship to environmental matters. And what I try to show in that session is that, this stuff happens in waves, things happen in the world, civil society gets concerned about it, legislation is passed. Departments are created, people get hired to enforce those legislation, yeah. And maybe the world forgets, a little bit about what it was concerned about, but the legislators don't, the regulators don't, and the people who are hired to those departments, the environmental protection agency, they're still there. So then, along comes a new wave of concern, a new wave of legislation and so, if we think about the future, maybe there will be another wave. And if there is another wave and there probably will be another wave, at least in my opinion to keep an eye on it, maybe makes a lot of sense. So what's critical in this? Critical is to really know the, have a good inventory of all the regulations that a firm has to deal with, to make sure that there's somebody keeping track [LAUGH] and each product and service and each unit. What is the law and what's going on. And then also to know if there are any regional differences, in which this is important. It's probably a good idea to know, the environmental footprint of a firm both having life cycle models for its different products and services, as well as estimates for the firm's total footprint, in terms of carbon emissions, in terms of water usage, in terms of waste production, etc. Now, anybody who's close to this stuff knows that, these things are not easy to do. It takes time, energy and maybe a little bit of money, to actually start to do this kind of work. Tracking trends, one of the things is to have the inventory of the regulations, another is to actually pay attention to what's going on in the process of creating new laws and new regulations to know what to expect in the future. To look deeply into consumer behavior and different trends in civil society to see what people are talking about, to see if there are new things coming up again, which might effect the way the business is run. Finally, as a company gets involved in latency what they'll see is that, managerial sensibility the attitude of a company's managers and it's employees towards the environment will start to shift over time. It'll shift, because once you start paying attention and measuring things people have to fill out the questionnaires, people have to start tracking things, eventually things will get into their performance metrics and so you'll start to create more awareness just by, finding out where you are. But then as you look forward with this, if you really think that things might improve in terms of scrutiny, so as we moved forward with this, if you do believed that there maybe more scrutiny in the future then, it might make sense to start preparing the company's employees and managers for that future today. So it maybe useful to plan in placed, to really start and teaching and to start can having people get their heads around these different issues. So wait and see might sound, it's very easy but in fact it requires a lot of work. Many companies, what they've done in this, is they've created some kind of a sustainability council with representatives from the different departments, to really centralize a firms efforts and to make sure that everything is kind of coming together. The G4 guidelines and reporting might be helpful for this. So wait and see, I think is a very sensible strategy for companies, especially if you think the world is changing and there's a lot of things to think about. [MUSIC]
