Innovation + Responsibility

Interns
First and most importantly, I am looking for a summer intern. A first year MBA student who can work in the Bay Area (s/he doesn't have to be based here) to help our team on various CSR and Eco related projects, including the development of our next CSR report (coming this Fall!), our stakeholder engagement program and other initiatives. I am not even sure anyone reads this blog regularly, but if you do and you are (or you know) a fantastic MBA student looking for a cool opportunity for the summer, please go to Sun's Student Zone and apply here. I tried to create an internship that I would have wanted to do when I was getting my MBA (if I hadn't instead gone to Budapest for the summer to explore CSR in an emerging market and to also explore the life of a Hungarian wife!), so I actually think it's going to be a really great learning experience and a chance to do some real CSR-related work.

Stakeholder Engagement
Last week we kicked off the first prong of our stakeholder engagement program - the Sun Employee CSR Advisory Board. Approximately 20 Sun employees joined, via phone and in-person, for the initial discussion. It was a great and lively exchange with folks from all over the world (special props to Lori in Australia who called in at 3am her time!). I spent a good amount of time answering questions and then people just started offering up ideas and even challenging some of my assumptions. I recognize that not everyone in this group is going to stay fully engaged on CSR at all times - after all, they have other jobs to do! - but they definitely seemed fired up and eager to share their thoughts. As importantly, they seemed eager to be part of integrating CSR more deeply into Sun's culture. The best question was, "Where can I get information that tells me how I might be able to better integrate CSR into my day-to-day job?" Of course, I didn't have a ready answer to that one! But what I did tell them is that Sun's Eco Responsibility Program Manager (my partner in crime, Lori) and I were getting ready to launch an online community for Sun employees to discuss and debate anything and everything CSR (if you are a Sun employee and you want to know more about that community, shoot me an email and I will send you the link). We announced it to a small group yesterday and ten new members signed up already. It's my hope that the community will continue to grow and the discussion across and around Sun will spread.

Our external stakeholder engagement program is coming along, and I am really looking forward to our first meeting on May 17. With NGOs, customers, investors and Sun executives all in the room together, it is sure to be a spirited interaction! I am a little bit nervous but the folks from Ceres (who are going to facilitate the program) tell me that I should be nervous. In fact, they said, I should not be 100% comfortable with everyone that is invited. The idea is to get people in the room who are comfortable challenging our thinking, who may have a different but valuable perspective that we need to hear.

And More!
last week was a bit of a crazy week for me but it was worth it because I was exposed to some really interesting things. First of all, I went to the big Haas Alumni event at Gap Headquarters. Scott McNealy (one of Sun's founders) was going to be "in conversation" with Gordon Moore (Intel's founder and the Moore in Moore's law), moderated by Dean Campbell. The theme of the discussion was "Innovation." Before the event, though, there was a meeting between Scott, his wife Susan, Kim Jones (Sun's VP of Global Government, Education and Health Care), Gordon Moore and Tom Campbell to talk about Scott's amazing open source education project, Curriki. [Full disclosure: A dear dear friend of mine works at Curriki part-time; we have been friends for 15 years; his work at Curriki - and Curriki in general - is totally unrelated to my work at Sun. I just think it's cool!] Scott invited me to sit in on the meeting. Not participate (what would I say!?), but attend. And I was grateful for the opportunity. How many times in my life will I get to sit in the same room as these two giants of the technology sector? My guess is one time - and this was it!

The other cool event I went to last week was the Bay Area launch for the Grameen Foundation's Mifos Initiative. Mifos- or Microfinance Open Source - is an effort to create an open source technology backbone for the microfinance industry so that more lenders can reach more borrowers more effectively and efficiently. The Grameen Foundation wants to scale microlending - the goal is to reach 5 million borrowers! Technology is going to be an important component of enabling that scale. The other exciting thing is that java.net hosts a Mifos initiative developer community.

Planet Earth
Have you seen this insane documentary on the Discovery Channel? If not, you should. I Tivo-ed it this past weekend and have been watching it little by little each night. It's an 11-part documentary that took four years to film. The filmmakers go to the corners of the earth - literally - and capture on film some of the most mesmerizing and confounding natural wonders. My favorite so far has been the mating rituals of Birds of Paradise. Although the footage of the craggy Alps and the towering Himalayas was also jaw-dropping. After watching the first part, I sent an email to my "green" friends encouraging them to watch it, too (yes, I am one of those people!). Because if you work in this space - corporate social respnsibility, environmental advocacy, etc. - and if, as my good friend Libby likes to say, you ever have an aching forehead from banging it against the wall all day, this documentary will help you realize why we bother. This planet is truly amazing.

First I must make the disclosure that the term radical transparency is not mine - I first came across it a few months ago on Chris Anderson's blog (he's the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine; others may know him better as the guy who came up with "the long tail" concept). And next month's issue of Wired Magazine will feature a cover story about this idea (see this blog for more background on that).

Since Sun is generally a company that believes in transparency, what with more than 4000 unfiltered employee blogs (including our CEO and General Counsel!); and since our CSR and Eco Responsibility initiatives place importance on transparency, this was of particular interest to our team.

So, I cold-emailed (is that a term?) Chris and asked if he would meet with me to brainstorm about radical transparency and the corporation. Thrillingly, he agreed! So, we scheduled an appointment for Monday, March 12 (incidentally, I also had a call with Scott McNealy that day - the most productive three-minute call I have ever participated in! Anyway, these two meetings on this one day made it a pretty cool day for me. One of those, "I have a cool job!" days).

So I went to the Wired offices on 3rd Street in San Francisco and Chris and I sat at the table in his office and got to chatting. Mainly I was interested in his ideas about applying the notion of "radical transparency" to a public corporation, which is often inhibited by regulations, forward-looking statements, etc. We talked a bit about looking at transparency in two ways - internal transparency and external transparency. This is a different way for me to look at this because I come from the school of thought that anything internal is external. With the exception of some legal communications, I think that if you expose something to an internal audience you ought to be prepared to expose it to an external audience. Yahoo's "peanut butter memo" is a good example of why I think this.

But are there ways to apply radical transparency internally that may not even be relevant externally? What if we put our corporate code of ethics into a wiki or some other kind of tool and let Sun employees hack it? We don't have to make all the recommended changes, but we get their feedback and perspectives. And then the code itself is more relevant because employees have a hand in creating it. I like this idea. A lot. Not sure anyone would go for it but I think I am going to raise it and see what people say.

After my meeting with Chris I got to thinking about other ways to be radically transparent, specifically with respect to my job running Sun's Corporate Social Responsibility program. I was thinking: What if we put our CSR report online internally and asked employees to have at it? Again, they wouldn't actually get to edit it, but they could give input on it, provide proof points and anecdotes to bring it to life, and hold us accountable when things are unclear or just don't seem quite right. I am trying to find out if there is some kind of Web 2.0 application out there that would allow for this. Stay tuned!

Chris and I also talked about the notion of employee blogging. Mid-conversation, he got up and decided to check out some of our employee blogs. First stop: Dave Douglas' "Eco Notes." And as he scrolled through the site he gave me feedback and suggestions for how to make it better, more user-friendly, more transparent. It was great (I have since forwarded these comments to the marketing folks!). He did like my blog (how's that for self-promotion), mainly because he said my tone was quite candid, which is the value in being able to blog without a corporate filter.

At the end of our chat Chris gave me a draft, bound copy of the next issue of Wired, the one with the radical transparency cover story. I had to promise not to do anything with it until it came out on newsstands in a couple of weeks. I am telling you, it was burning a hole in my bag on the way home! I wanted to badly to take it out and read it on the bus ride home (and I admit, part of me wanted to just look cool with my unpublished magazine!). But I didn't. Instead I laid in bed that night before going to sleep and read it cover to cover. When my issue of Wired comes in the mail next week I will probably geek out and do a side by side comparison of the two to see what, if anything, is different.

I am excited - no, thrilled - to report on some of the momentum of Sun's corporate responsibility program. Fresh on the heels of our first CSR report, we are making some great strides in some key areas. I can tell you about some of those things now, and some will have to wait a few weeks (oooh, have I piqued your interest?).

THE UNITED NATIONS GLOBAL COMPACT
As of today, March 9, 2007, Sun Microsystems is a signatory of the United Nations Global Compact. The Global Compact is an initiative that was launched several years ago by then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan. It was created as an effort to join business, civil society and the United Nations together in addressing the challenges of globalization. The Global Compact is a declaration of ten principles focused in four key areas: human rights, labor rights, the environment, and anti-corruption.

By signing the Global Compact, Sun affirms its support of these ten principles and we commit to furthering them through our own business operations and within our spheres of influence. We also commit to communicating our progress to the UN every two years.

Many people criticize the Global Compact because it has no 'teeth' - in other words, some people believe that with such low barriers to entry, anyone can sign it and there are no consequences if you do not follow through on your commitments. While I do think there is some merit to this argument, I do not think that it means that the Global Compact does not play an important role in the movement to engage the business sector in the work of effecting positive change for its stakeholders.

Sure, there are going to be companies that sign the Global Compact as some kind of CYA or PR move. But the requirement that you communicate your progress every two years is real - in fact, the Global Compact has begun calling out signatories who do not meet this requirement. And any company that uses corporate responsibility as a PR initiative with no authenticity to it is asking for big trouble. What's great about the Global Compact is that it gives business, society and the UN a common vocabulary and context within which to talk about and address the responsibilities that come with operating a global company in today's marketplace.

Electonics Industry Code of Conduct (EICC)
Sun is joining the EICC. This is great news! The EICC is a consortium of 24 electronics providers who have come together to establish consistent requirements that promote the health & safety of our stakeholders and the social and environmental responsibility of our suppliers.

This is a great step in the rapid evolution of Sun's supply chain CSR program. We only recently formalized our supply chain CSR program (though many elements of it were already in place, there were some holes and no one "owner")but the folks who are responsible for it are going gangbusters! We have made a number of supply chain-related commitments in the CSR report and this group has embraced every one of them. Sun has a long and proud tradition of exempliary supply chain management. CSR in the supply chain will prove to be no exception.

Watch this space
That's all I can report on now. But watch this space in the coming weeks, as there should be more cool stuff to reveal.

In other news
The other day I sent an email complaint to the folks who run Sun's cafeterias (what can I say? I have that lethal combination of being both a former food-service worker and from NY;I am the mostly likely kind of person to complain when I have bad service!). I ended up speaking to the VP of Operations for the company - a really nice guy, actually. Once he was finished convincing me that the company was taking specific steps to address the shortcomings about which I complained, I decided to take the opportunity to strike up a different conversation with him.

I asked Rick (that's the VP of Operations) to tell me a bit about the foodservice company's practices - is anything organic? is the fish bought from sustainable fisheries? are the meats hormone-free? why don't we use compostable cutlery? etc. etc. I was surprised to learn that the company actually has a sustainability program in place. The fish is all from sustainable fisheries. The meat is hormone-free. The eggs are cage-free. Who knew? When I told Rick that I was pretty certain nobody at Sun was aware of these facts he seemes surprised that anyone would care. He told me that a number of other companies whose cafterias his company manages have asked for things like spudware - cutlery made from potatoes! - and composting programs. As far as he knew, Sun isn't interested in exploring these kinds of programs so why would anyone care where the food comes from!?

Oh Rick! How wrong can one man be? So I did what anyone in my situation would have done - I set him straight and offered him some unsolicited advice. I suggested that his company start marketing the kind of food they sell to Sun employees. Yes, it is great that the flat screen TV in the cafeteria tells me what is on the menu. But it would be so much better if that space was used to tell me about what goes into the items that are on the menu.

I am certain that if I knew the about the kind of sustainability programs for the food in the cafeteria, I would have been decidedly less frustrated an angry about the service shortcomings. I am sure I am not alone in this.