Tag Archives: Sept-12

#3 – WHY INVEST IN YOUR ENVIRONMENTAL HANDPRINT? – JON BIEMER – ENVIRONMENT@RISK

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There is a huge risk associated with exclusively focusing on the damage we do to our environment – our footprint.  The world knows that glaciers are melting, that the average temperature is rising, and that it would take eight planets worth of resources if everyone consumed as much as the American middle class.  But Katrinas, Gulf Oil Spills and Fukishima Daichis generally do not change our personal behavior.  With our current mindset we probably will not do enough to turn things around, no matter how much we recycle or how many Priuses we buy.

Better ways to practice our values are needed. The environmental handprint represents one such paradigm shift.

Simply stated, the environmental handprint is the good you do for the world.  Here are a few examples:  Exploring nature with a child, so she can grow up to care about it. Improving the quality of wind generation.  Requiring a five cent pass-through charge on paper bags in grocery stores.  Promoting organic food labeling.  Writing a book such as Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, inspiration for the Wilderness Act.  Making compact fluorescent lighting user friendly.  Inventing and commercializing and buying LED lighting. Planting a tree.  `

Can you feel the positive energy exuding from these efforts, large and small?  Can you see the leverage in working with children?  Can you celebrate how some efforts keep on giving long after you and I are done?

Here are five reasons why focusing on one’s environmental handprint is a lower risk strategy than focusing on one’s footprint:

  • Creativity, idealism, love, profit, and play are more powerful motivators than guilt, admonitions and fear.  Have you noticed how fundraisers are accompanied by entertainment?  The only bad news that motivates most of us happens in our back yard.
  • A positive feedback loop tends to amplify while negative feedback tends to dampen.  Good energy from creating good things feeds upon itself.  Profit provides incentive and capital for further innovation.
  • Handprinting plays on America’s strength.  With founding principles like Liberty and Self Reliance, we have become better capitalists than stewards.
  • You can magnify your own impact by influencing others.  By designing a more efficient aircraft engine, an engineer (and associated managers, investors and technician)reduces the CO2 releases of an entire industry. By writing this article I hope to motivate you.
  • The impact of your handprint is theoretically unlimited.  You can surpass the inevitable damage you do – your footprint. In 1993 I helped organize a conference focusing on industrial energy efficiency.  It has continued biennially ever since.

Financial advisors often say, “Sure there is risk in investing in the stock market.  But there is also risk in not investing in the market.”  The market outperforms inflation in the long run, even when you take into account recessions and the great depression.

Let us invest our time, money and energy improving our environmental handprint.   Our collective returns, our legacy, will be commensurate with our effort.

Disclaimer: Your personal returns may vary.

BIO: As a project manager with Quality + Engineering and  principal of Creating Sustainability Jon Biemer focuses on Organizational Development. He and his wife live in Portland, Oregon without owning a car. Mr. Biemer is a Certified Enterprise Risk Manager and a registered Professional Mechanical Engineer.

 

 

 

#3 – RISK CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING – CAROLYN TURBYFILL – TECHNOLOGY@RISK

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Sometimes we get so lost in auditing jargon, technology buzzwords, heat maps and risk assessments that we forget common sense.  We also forget how quickly the future overtakes our state-of-the-art present.

The risk with respect to a resource or event can vary by location, year, day of the week, week of the year, time of day, acts of war or nature or even possibly by the ripples made by a drop of water (possibly the drop that causes a catastrophic overflow).  Perhaps your Tsunami wall was high enough except for the fact that the tectonic plate your island is sitting on dropped a foot in an earthquake.  A single failure can cascade into tragic disasters.

Today – you could have the latest, most secure, perfectly configured infrastructure for your business needs.  Tomorrow – you could be forced to connect your beautiful infrastructure to an unstable and insecure network (like the Internet) due to business requirements, a merger or acquisition, or ill-informed management executing a misguided vision.  Possibly you will be privileged to have visionary well-informed management with a funded vision and a realistic timeline.  Nonetheless, your equipment or some critical configuration will be rendered out of date by a patch, update, new business requirement or new technology.  How many companies are scrambling to offer their service on a mobile phone or update their infrastructure to securely support mobile phones?

One example of time-based context would be IT restrictions on a company internet at quarter close.  Login’s may be disabled for most staff after hours.  Web access may be restricted.  Phone calls may be monitored for leaks of quarterly results.  The network and equipment are the same, but the operating and business context change IT priorities.  The year 2000 was another instance of time-based context, where the world scrambled to update applications the original developers assumed would be rewritten or made obsolete years before the new millennium.

The most critical infrastructure (i.e. SCADA systems) may be most in need of updating and ironically, may be too critical to update.  There are applications on Wall Street that can’t be rewritten or ported because no one is quite sure exactly how they work.  The business rules are contained in code and institutional knowledge that departed with one or more key employees years ago.

Of course, I am writing this article with 20-20 hindsight with respect to beliefs about context that have been invalidated by unexpected or unlikely circumstances.  In reality, I have spent plenty of time with “umption” along with the donkey in “assumption”.

#3 – RISK MANAGEMENT AND FEAR – ED PERKINS – LIFE@RISK

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERARisk Management is like vitamins; we know it is good for us, but we don’t always want to take it.  Why?  Human nature is to avoid discomfort and unpleasantness.  What does this have to do with risk?  What is the real impact of consequence of a Risk?  Why do we not want to face it? If you think about it, it is the underlying of risk – it is Fear.

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