Last week I went to Bar Harbor and visited Mount Desert Island on the occasion of my wedding anniversary. While there, I visited the College of the Atlantic, one of the nation’s premier colleges focusing on the subject of human ecology: the study of how humans interact with themselves and with their natural, cultural, and built environments. In particular, I visited Professor Jay Friedlander, the founder of the Sustainable Business Program at the college. I interviewed Jay for over an hour discussed the origins of his passion for Sustainable Business, including a stint in the Peace Corps in Mauritania, how he transitioned from the COO in a startup he helped found, O’Naturals, to academia. Other topics included his experiences teaching a wide range of hands on experiential courses in sustainable business. We also discussed Jay’s methods of addressing sustainable business, one of which is termed the “Abundance Cycle”.
The abundance cycle methodology starts off by having the company identify its purpose, beyond merely “maximizing shareholder value”; focusing on the real reason the company exists beyond making money. This is key to aligning strategy with sustainability. The next step in the process is to focus on your competitive strengths, within the “abundance cycle”: incoming, operations, outbound, marketing, service, and including unsold production. The third step in the process is to maximize competitive advantage through the identification of one or more “abundance tactics”. One of these could be, for example, the “Zero to Landfill” design approach I have been advocating for regenerative design. The last two steps are to communicate in your company’s language and implement, and to measure, report and repeat the cycle. A discussion of the process and the abundance tactics can be found in Jay’s website at www.abundancecycle.com.
