Green Business Energy Use

The greatest challenge and the source of some of the greatest opportunities in greening your business will come in the area of business energy use. Energy, at least for the present, is inextricably linked to carbon emissions that are fueling the dramatic changes to the world’s climate that we are already beginning to experience. Human energy use is, by far, the main culprit behind climate change—literally the fossil-fuel-belching smoking gun, pointed directly at the earth’s climate. As such, reining in energy use and changing basic energy sources—from old fossil-fuel-based to new renewable—are at the very heart of any efforts to effectively green the business world.

The growing consensus among both the scientific and business communities is that humanity must, at a minimum, reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by around 80 percent in the next few decades in order to begin to stabilize the global atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content and, hopefully, avoid the worst manifestations of climate change. To reach this astonishing reduction will require an almost unimaginable transformation of the world’s energy infrastructure. Whether you agree with this assessment or not is completely irrelevant to its coming impact on your business. The immense changes that will be required to meet this goal will devastate some businesses and provide enormous opportunities for others. Like any sweeping change, those businesses that begin now to prepare for this transformation will be on the winning side. Those that ignore this inevitable future will falter and eventually fail. The best time for your business to begin its transition to a ruthlessly energy-efficient future was, well . . . 1978. The second best time is today.

The fundamental benefits of green business are simple

Jeffrey Hollender, CEO of Seventh Generation, the fastest growing brand of environmentally friendly cleaning and personal care products in the U.S., with sales over $100 million annually, explains: “You generally make more money when you do the right thing. When you do the wrong thing, people sue you, governments fine you, sales plunge, disgusted employees sabotage you, community groups start picketing you, reporters show up . . . . And, ultimately . . . pollution is waste; waste represents inefficiency; and inefficiency is simply not profitable. It’s that simple.”

Business owners are often lulled into a feeling that the current status quo is a permanent condition—that what has been true in the past will be true in the future. History, of course, teaches us just the opposite. Change is the only real certainty. In the modern world, where technology is changing daily and other very powerful forces—from population, to health care issues, to religion, to peak oil, to climate change—are putting increasing pressure on society, those businesses that are able to act on change, in fact, thrive on change, will be the ones that will prosper. Greening your business is ultimately about changing your business—about making your business better. Greening your business is a long-term commitment to enter into the process of continually moving your business in a new and sustainable direction. It is a direction that you will find is highly rewarding, both for your business and, ultimately, for yourself personally.

Product and Service Design for Green Businesses

As you examine your business from the ground up with an eye toward building a greener, more sustainable operation, you will enter into the process of carefully analyzing each of the products or services that your company provides. As you look at each product or service through the lens of sustainability, you will begin to seek better and more sustainable product or service design—design that has the least impact on our fragile planet. This will move you into the exciting world of design for the environment, cradle-to-cradle design, and biomimicry—three relatively new ways to look at human products and services in a manner that seeks to bring the delivery of products and services more closely in line with the rules of the natural world, rather than the rules that govern the economic realm. This area is actually the heart and soul of creating a sustainable business—the fundamental examination of what your business really is and how best to operate that business. Reimagining your business can be the most exciting part of the process. We’ll examine these and other green business concepts later in this blog.

Moving your business in a greener direction is a process, a continual process that has as its central goal the profitable and productive delivery of goods and services in a manner that has the least possible harmful impacts on the world around us. As you begin this process with your own business, you will begin to reap all of the additional benefits that a greener business can provide—dramatic cost savings from reduced energy, water, and material inputs; striking reductions in waste and, perhaps, new income streams from the recycling of any remaining waste; greater employee pride, motivation, health and safety; more customer loyalty stemming from your new commitment to operating your business in a less harmful manner; greater competitive advantage in the marketplace over other less environmentally sensitive companies; and exciting new possibilities for improved product and service design.

Naturally, the costs to implement all of the various green business practices are not free. Oftentimes the initial costs may, in fact, be rather steep. Part of operating a greener business, however, is beginning to take a longer view of your business—a view that stretches farther into the future than you may be used to looking. By taking a longer view of your business and by examining the full cost of operating your business in an inefficient and less-than-green manner, you will begin to adopt a new business point of view that looks at the longer-term costs and benefits of each of your activities. Yes, it may be expensive up front to change all of your company’s lighting to all compact fluorescent lighting (or, better yet, all LED lighting), but when you look at the long-term savings—in terms of actual costs of energy use, the resulting reductions in emissions, and other very real benefits—the up-front expenses begin, in many cases, to look like real bargains. There will, of course, be many balancing acts you will have to perform. You can’t implement all of the innovative green techniques, policies, and operations at once. You will, of necessity, have to develop a long-range plan to achieve all of the various ideas that you will find in this guidebook.

Competitive Advantages for Green Businesses

By adopting a cleaner, greener, and leaner business model, you will begin to appreciate what green businesses worldwide have already noticed: green business has a distinct competitive advantage over most of its traditional “brown” competitors. By reducing or eliminating the environmental compliance costs of a business, green business owners are finding that they are more flexible in how they can operate. Because their businesses are operated in a more efficient and streamlined manner, their overall costs are often much less than their dirtier competitors. This efficiency in operations can have benefits beyond the bottom line. More efficient and cleaner operations will most likely find their insurance premiums falling rather than rising as the health and safety benefits of the new operations methods begin to take effect.

If raising outside capital is important to your business, the cleaner and greener a business is, the better the access to capital will become. Banks and investors find clean, green, and well-run companies much more appealing than companies that are continually struggling to comply with government regulations, dealing with rising energy, water, and materials costs, and shouldering the high costs and dangers of handling and disposing of hazardous substances. Because you will be ahead of the curve in insuring that your operations are run in a clean and safe manner and that your products are safe and nontoxic, you will be well-poised to avoid any surprises as new environmental, health, and safety regulations are enacted. Likewise, a cleaner, greener business is less likely to be confronted by legal surprises, such as lawsuits stemming from product toxicity, violations of state or federal regulations, and other expensive legal difficulties. As an environmentally sensitive business, you will be able to differentiate yourself—in vibrant and cutting-edge fashion—from any of your stodgy status-quo competitors.

The greening of your business can also provide a competitive advantage as you may seek to expand your business. Increasingly, large corporations are examining their entire supply chains to insure that all of their suppliers are certified as environmentally sound businesses. We’ll examine certification programs later in this blog. There is also a growing tendency for financial analysts to upgrade the investment quality of a firm based on its perceived environmental performance and sustainability. Increasingly stringent environmental regulations are also taking hold in some regions—from tougher air quality regulations in California to comprehensive take-back packaging rules across Europe—and, as a green business, you will be poised to enter these markets more quickly and with less retooling than other businesses with less advanced leadership.

Finally, climate change is poised to dramatically affect all businesses across the world—creating, at once, the largest change in business and the largest new market (for carbon) in a century. Governments around the world are gearing up for major initiatives to confront climate change. Europe already has a market in place for trading carbon emissions, and the Chicago-based Climate Exchange is set to trade greenhouse gas emissions on a large scale with a commodities-like market exchange, with hundreds of companies already registered to trade. Sooner rather than later, carbon emissions emanating from business will begin to be inventoried and then regulated as a pollutant. A recent U.S. Supreme Court case confirmed that the U.S. EPA has such regulatory authority. Carbon taxes are another distinct possibility as the world struggles to find ways to wean itself from fossil fuels. Whether via carbon trading or taxes, a market price for carbon will be created that will have major effects all across the business world. Large corporations are already taking steps to adjust to this eventuality. By beginning the process of examining your carbon emissions and seeking ways to lessen them now, you will be years ahead of competitors that ignore this reality. All of these advantages to greening your business will provide your new lean and clean business with distinct competitive advantages over competitors.

Customer Loyalty to a Green Business

Much as your shift to a greener business can motivate your employees, doing so will generally also foster a sense of loyalty in your customer base. People simply like to do business with companies that care about the impact of their products and their operations on their communities, their regions, and the wider world. By understanding your business at a deeper level, you will also begin to better appreciate your customers’ needs and can help them understand the goals that your new green business direction is striving to fulfill. As a conscientious business, your products or services will have greater appeal to a public that is itself struggling to live in a more sustainable manner. Without resorting to “greenwashing” your efforts, you can begin to position your business as a leader in its field or community and increase its market position in relation to other less motivated business competitors.

By holding true to your new mission of creating a sustainable business, you will develop a customer trust in your business that is, in many ways, priceless. By being honest with your customers and the public about the new direction of your company and the actual steps that you are taking, you will likely avoid any sustained attacks on your company or your company’s image regarding current social and environmental issues or problems related to the type or makeup of the products that you sell. The community or communities that you work in will also likely respond in positive ways to your new and smarter way of doing business. By working steadily to provide a better quality of life through your business, you will find that your reputation in your industry, your community, and with your customers will be pleasantly enhanced.

Employee Motivation in a Green Business

Introducing a green business culture to your enterprise can also have a dramatic effect on your employees’ motivation and morale. It is far more rewarding personally to work for a company that is making every effort to operate in a clean, honest, and progressive manner than to work for a company that is polluting its environs, ignoring regulations, and wasting material and energy. Improving your employees’ (and your own) pride in their work and in their company can build a highly motivated work force that is more loyal, has less turnover, and is much more involved in the process of innovation. This employee motivation and involvement can drive additional cost savings as you move your company toward a greener and leaner future.

You will also begin to attract the best and the brightest employees—those who share your values and commitment to actively creating a better world. As the best employees are drawn to your company, you’ll also notice that they will tend to stay longer—thus reducing your costs of retraining new employees. You will have far less turnover as your employees find much greater satisfaction working for a company that mirrors their own personal values. People want to make a positive difference with their lives and their work. They want their lives to be meaningful. If they are able to find this in their work, this satisfaction will translate into increased productivity as they apply their efforts to helping the company become ever more environmentally and socially responsible.

Increased employee commitment to a greener company mission will also provide you with an excellent early warning system regarding potential problems, as your fundamental shift in focus to greener operations will foster a closer appraisal of all aspects of your company by its employees. You and your employees will be more likely to notice aspects of your business that can be improved once the mission of the company is directed toward a continual improvement of the environmental impact of the business.

A cleaner, more efficient business, one that has reduced its waste stream and its use of toxic substances, will also offer its employees a much healthier and safer workplace atmosphere that will in turn inspire greater employee confidence in and loyalty to your company. A healthier and safer business will also be a workplace that is far less prone to accidents, spills, or other emergencies. You will find that the benefits that accrue to your business from the process of striving for sustainability will begin to show up in ways that you never anticipated. And those benefits will continue to grow as your outlook on your business changes to a more hands-on approach to finding and exploiting every possible measure to green your business.

Waste Reduction for Green Businesses

A detailed look at the waste stream of any business will show the owners the true cost of the waste they produce and make plainly evident the maxim that “waste is money.” Looking at waste from a new, sustainable perspective can often show how waste, rather than being an expense item, can instead become an income item—that what may have been your company’s waste in the past can be an important input for another company’s industrial process—that, in fact, it isn’t really waste unless and until you actually waste it.

By looking at your company’s waste stream in detail, you will begin to understand the true cost of waste: that every single thing that your company disposes of—every single thing that leaves your business not as a saleable product, from used packaging, to trimmings, to waste oil, to smoke stack emissions, to plant effluents—was initially purchased. When purchased materials become waste, you are quite literally throwing away money. Waste not only doesn’t make environmental sense, it just doesn’t make business sense either. How to reduce, sell, or eliminate waste in your business is a major component to greening your business.

Cost Savings for Green Business

The cost savings associated with running a cleaner, more efficient business are the first and most obvious benefit to greening your business. Real money can be saved (and applied directly to your bottom line) when you take the steps necessary to look at your energy, water, and material inputs and trim them in every way possible. The task of looking at these inputs in detail can nearly always highlight dramatic savings that might otherwise be overlooked. The same careful examination of business transportation can almost always clearly illuminate striking savings possibilities in fuel usage. The complete analysis of how your business uses energy, water, and other inputs and a comprehensive exploration of how to reduce each and every one of these inputs is a critical component of greening your business. Such a careful look at your entire business operation can also provide a clear basis for better and more accurate costing and pricing of the products and services that your company provides. By looking at your business operations in a new green way, direct and measurable cost savings are not only possible, but highly probable.

Related to reducing your businesses inputs is operating your business in a leaner, more efficient manner. Lean manufacturing or production is a business concept that has been implemented in nearly all large corporations over the past few decades. Operating in a leaner mode by introducing “just-in-time” inventory methods (where new orders are fulfilled with inputs that have just been received by your company) can have many clear benefits. Lean, just in time operation reduces the cash that you will have invested in inventory. It also generally shortens the time between buying your material inputs and payment for your ultimate output of products. It can lower equipment needs by streamlining your production processes, and in turn, make it easier to increase or decrease your production runs. Lean production can also often reduce the size of facility needed. Tighter inventory controls can improve audit performance, reduce inputs, and make it easier to recycle any waste.

Implementing a lean and green system also can foster an overall culture of waste elimination among employees and management. Such attention to your supply chain can alert you in advance to any likely problems or upcoming price increases or shortages in the materials that your business may use. Finally, green operations tend to lend themselves to continual improvement in the entire production or manufacturing process. Green operation can also be applied to service businesses by, again, examining the entire process that your business uses and carefully looking for every possible place to reduce inefficiency and waste.

The real and often immediate cost savings associated with running a more energy-, materials-, and waste-efficient business are one of the prime reasons for greening your business. By operating a more efficient business, it will be nearly inevitable that you will be more successful and profitable in clear and quantifiable ways.

Creating a sustainable and greener business

Creating a sustainable and greener businesscan have a dramatic and profound positive impact on our shared environment, but most business owners must also look at the pragmatic details of greening a business. How will it affect my business? Does it make economic sense to “green” my business? Is it a good business decision to begin to work towards creating a sustainable business? You run a business and you run it to make a profit. As much as you might support environmental issues and sustainability, first and foremost, your business needs to be successful. Can it be both green and successful?

The general public perception is that making our life-styles and our businesses more environmentally sensitive will, almost by definition, be more expensive than the status quo of business as usual. It is commonly assumed that there will be an “environmental premium” assessed for doing the right thing. Hybrid cars must cost more; organic produce must be more expensive; products that are nontoxic must be higher priced than their hazardous equivalents. All of us have a variation of this perception ingrained into our thinking, including our thinking about how we should run our business.

Unfortunately, for the most part, it simply isn’t true. Common sense should tell us (if we listen) that food produced with fewer chemical pesticides and herbicides and with more efficient use of water should actually be cheaper; cars that are lighter and more energy-efficient should probably be less expensive, rather than more; products with fewer toxins and less hazardous waste should actually cost less to produce. The misperception that green = expensive itself has been fueled by many status-quo business interests in an effort to convince the public, government regulators (and, perhaps, themselves) that it would be much too expensive for them to ______________ (you fill in the blank):

• Upgrade the fuel economy of the cars they produce
• Make products without the toxic chemicals they use
• Treat the waste water leaving their factory
• Mine minerals without damaging the environment
• Grow crops without chemical pesticides/herbicides
• Build homes without using hazardous non-renewable materials
• Produce milk without bovine growth hormones and antibiotics
• Produce enough energy without using coal, oil, or natural gas
• Et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum

But, as more businesses every day are realizing, the real world impact of greening a business is actually far different and almost universally positive. There are manifold powerful benefits to making your business more sustainable and greener.

Greening your business will provide a multiplier effect

Your work to create a more sustainable business will have a powerful ripple effect—flowing out in all directions from your enterprise—positively impacting its employees, its community, its investors, its competitors, its suppliers up the supply chain and customers down the supply chain. These effects will, in turn, influence all of those players to themselves take more positive steps toward achieving a sustainable future.

The process of greening your business is a major undertaking. It will constitute a new direction for your business and for you personally. The steps taken will take time, money, and a commitment to operating your business in a new and different manner. At the core of this process will be a reimagining of what your business really is and what, ultimately, it should be. Again, from Paul Hawken, writing in The Ecology of Commerce: “To create an enduring society, we will need a system of commerce and production where each and every act is inherently sustainable . . . We must design a system . . . where the natural, everyday acts of work and life accumulate into a better world as a matter of course, not a matter of conscious altruism.” But for now, at least, it will still take a conscious decision to take the first step—and the next—toward that sustainable system of commerce. Taking the action necessary to begin greening your business involves steps that anyone—in any business—can take today to make a difference in the quest for a better future.

All of us in the world of business need to understand the importance of taking these steps toward sustainability and, also, the critical urgency in taking them now. As we rapidly approach the peak of human population, the peak of oil production, and the tipping point of catastrophic climate change, the next few decades will very likely determine the future trajectory of humanity. That direction will be decided, in large part, by the combined decisions made by all of those involved in the business of the world. Each of us, as members of the world’s business community, will have few opportunities in our lifetimes to make a decision as profound, far-reaching, and fundamentally important as the one we make in deciding to take our business down the path to sustainability.

Setting the Business World on a Sustainable Course

It is difficult to conceive of the magnitude of the opportunities that are presented by restructuring the global economy to become sustainable, but a few visionaries have tried. Lester Brown, director of the Earth Policy Institute, states, “Restructuring the global economy so that economic progress can be sustained represents the greatest investment opportunity in history.” Stuart Hart, professor of management in sustainable enterprise at Cornell University, writing in the Harvard Business Review, echoes those sentiments: “Sustainable development will constitute one of the biggest opportunities in the history of commerce.” And finally, getting to the heart of the issue, Fisk Johnson, CEO of S. C. Johnson & Sons, Inc., says: “There is no inherent conflict between making the world a better place and economic prosperity for all.”

Business, in all its myriad forms—from the smallest mom and pop enterprise to the largest multinational corporation—is where the ultimate solutions to these deep societal problems must lie. However, as Albert Einstein cautioned, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Rather, business will need to begin to use a better, more informed kind of thinking to solve the problems that we all, collectively, face—a better and more informed kind of business thinking—green business thinking.

Smarter and More Principled Business Decisions

Smarter and more principled business decisions can immediately confront and begin to correct the entrenched and very complex problems that we collectively face. Business can lead the way in eliminating any additional emissions of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere. Business need not wait for governmental regulation to begin to lead the way in halting air pollution and acid rain. Business can begin—today—to stop habitat loss and increase the biodiversity on this planet. Sound business decisions can stop ocean pollution and prevent overfishing; stop top soil loss and the overuse of crop chemicals; reverse deforestation and dramatically slow the depletion of our shared natural resources. Moral and thoughtful business decisions can eliminate toxic chemicals and hazardous waste from ever even entering the world. And finally, business can step up and lead the way in alleviating the abject human poverty that threatens to overwhelm vast portions of humanity. There can be no greater business purpose than to commit to providing solutions to these deep and challenging problems.

Business drives the global economy in ways that were solely the realm of governments in the very recent past. As recently as 1970, 70 percent of the money flowing into the developing world came from government and only 30 percent came from business and the private sector. Today, that situation is more than reversed—80 percent of the money flowing to the developing world is from business and the governmental input has fallen to just 20 percent. The economic, social and environmental impact of business on both the developed and the developing world is enormous and growing every day. Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce and co-author of Natural Capitalism, perhaps said it best: “Business is the only mechanism on the planet today powerful enough to produce the changes necessary to reverse global environmental and social degradation.” Business has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lead humanity into a sustainable future. Of all the tasks we have assigned to business, this one is the greatest, the most profound.

Mission Statement: Greening Your Business Blog

This blog is about possibilities and opportunities—the endless possibilities and enormous opportunities that can come from answering this challenge by taking your business on the road to sustainability. The greening of your business can be a quest, an adventure even, as you work to build a leaner, stronger, and healthier business. As science has been telling us about human health in recent years, in order to become healthier we need to cut out the fat, become more active, and lower our bodies’ intake of harmful chemicals and additives. To create a sustainable business is to follow that same general plan: cut the inputs of energy and raw materials to an absolute minimum, make the business more resilient to change and risk, and eliminate toxic materials wherever possible. The results, as with a successful human fitness plan, can be stunning. Reductions of energy use can be well upwards of 70 percent; materials use can likewise often be reduced by half, or even more. Waste can, in some cases, be virtually eliminated or, better yet, sold for a profit or converted into additional useful products. Hazardous chemical use can be dramatically reduced or eliminated. And best of all, by creating a company that is healthier, a company that is poised for the future, a company that is lean and strong, you will almost inevitably generate greater profits, while eliminating many risks.

Like a highly trained athlete who is deeply in tune with her body, you will also begin to understand your business as never before. You’ll understand intimately where all of your material inputs come from, where every kilowatt of your company’s energy is used, how your supply and distribution chain operates, the exact make-up of each of your products, the intimate details of the services you provide, and precisely what materials comprise your waste stream. At each step of your journey towards sustainability, you will find ways to do things better, more efficiently, more effectively, safer, and with dramatically less waste and energy. You will be joining thousands of other businesses and millions of people around the world in the quest to align business with the real needs of humanity.

Components of Sustainability

Sustainability is generally accepted as having three critical components: economic, environmental, and societal. The central question that is posed by sustainability is: how to bring a higher quality of life (economic) to the masses of humanity (societal) without destroying the natural foundations upon which life on Earth is built (environmental). This particular question in turn becomes the central goal of the greening of business by adding one crucial word (shown following in italics). How can we profitably bring the benefits of a better quality of life to all humanity without destroying the natural world? This single question, perhaps more than any other, may be the most important that humanity has ever grappled with. And it is one that this current generation of humans, for better or worse, has the profound responsibility of answering—for we are today at a climactic point in history when inaction and the continuation of the status quo will surely provide an answer if humanity does not.

Sustainability is often referred to as “sustainable development” to emphasize the crucial component of ensuring that the benefits of modern society accrue also to the developing world. “Sustainable progress” is perhaps a clearer definition of the task. Can we continue to spread the progress that perhaps 20 percent of humanity has enjoyed in the last 50 years—in health care, education, communication, transportation, food, shelter and basic comforts—to the remaining 80 percent of humanity, but do so in ways that, ultimately, do not do irreparable harm to the natural world? As China and India and other developing countries accelerate their efforts to pull their people out of deep poverty, the answer to that question will be answered—for better or worse—in the next few decades.

Challenge of Sustainable Business

Greening your business is the challenging and highly rewarding task of pursuing the path to sustainability. Over the past few decades, in what writer Paul Hawken, in his book Blessed Unrest, describes as “the largest movement in the world,” millions of people across the globe, including thousands of businesses, have been pursuing a goal of sustainability. A very elusive concept, sustainability has suffered from many attempts at a clear definition. “Meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” the somewhat cumbersome definition from the 1992 Earth Summit and the earlier Bruntland Commission, is one of the most common. But the clearest, most succinct definition that I’ve seen comes from a presentation at an environmental education conference by folklorist Susan Fowler. Susan accompanies all of her wonderful storytelling with sign language. She was struggling to come up with appropriate signs for “sustainability,” and hit upon a simple solution. The sign language description for “extinction” is the two signs of “death” and “forever.” In a flash of insight, Susan signed “life” and “forever” as sign language shorthand for sustainability—life forever—the diametrical opposite of extinction. Life forever—the valiant attempt to keep life, in all of its myriad variety, flourishing for as long as humanly possible, and for as close as we can get to forever, is as clear a definition of sustainability as I have seen.

Promise of Green Business

Business drives the global economy like never before. Trillions of dollars flow around the world as businesses, large and small, meet the growing needs of people everywhere. Business, in all its manifestations, has an enormous, almost overwhelming, impact on every facet of life on Earth, and one of its greatest impacts is on the natural world. Global climate change, acid rain, deforestation, overfishing of the oceans, air and water pollution—all of these serious problems are negatively affected by how it is that we humans go about our business. And, in turn, the impacts of many of these environmental issues are growing at increasingly exponential rates—from deforestation to overfishing the oceans to fresh water shortages to loss of biodiversity to concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere.

If we have any hope of solving the profound problems that will confront humanity in the next few decades, our collective solutions will also need to grow at exponential rates. For that to happen, humanity will need to enlist every possible source of assistance. Chief among these is the sector that employs the most people, uses the most technology, has the greatest impact on the natural world, and is at the very heart of many of the environmental troubles we collectively face the business sector—including heavy and light industry, high and low tech businesses, ancient and cutting-edge businesses, and the enormous businesses of forestry, farming, fishing, and extraction of oil, gas, and minerals.

Each and every one of these types of businesses can begin to examine its own powerful impact on our fragile planet and begin to develop new plans, methods, policies, and means to insure that all business—including yours, whatever it may be —is actively engaged in creating a better and, ultimately, sustainable world. Thousands of businesses around the world have already discovered that, instead of aggravating and intensifying the profound problems that humanity faces, business can become an integral part of the solution—and in doing so, become an enormous force for positive change.