Jim Ure’s Thoughts on Go Green 09

Jim Ure, a participant at Go Green 09, emailed his reflections from Darcy Winslow’s panel “Eco-Visionaries: Creating the New Sustainable Business Landscape” to us at DSW Collective and we wanted to share them with our blog readers.

I thought the Eco-Visionaries panel as one of the most thought-provoking sessions of the day.  Your panel members [Sheri Flies, Costco, Sarah Severn, Nike and Joyce Lavalle, Interface] all brought good reflection and preparation.  Most importantly, all 4 of you used it as a forum to present ideas and models for action.  Your point that we have a lot to do and a long way to go was a welcome and appropriate message.

Some of the other observations Ure made included:

1. Leveraging market presence for change: Organizations can leverage their market presence to affect real business practice change with suppliers, competition and customers.  This was Ure’s biggest takeaway from the whole day.  The examples discussed showed results with real impacts (Costco & product pricing, Nike & competitors + Green exchange).
2. The power of ideas & their expression in mantras:  Mission Zero, Get off oil, Closed loop products, Eliminate VOCs, Paul Hawken and Ray Anderson.
3. Valuable Wisdom: We can only be as sustainable as our suppliers and our partners (Darcy Winslow).  If you don’t hit bumps, you aren’t going hard enough or fast enough (Darcy Winslow).  Stay true to your highest intentions (Sarah Severn).  Meet people where they are (Joyce LaValle).  The person who disagrees with you is your best teacher (Sheri Flies).

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Jim Ure!  Did you attend Go Green 09?  Post your thoughts below!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.