business IS personal

I think I’ve mentioned before that I find the McKinsey Quarterly’s free resources available by signing up for their newsletter to be top notch.  This quarter’s entries for top strategy articles are no exception.  The descriptions below are taken directly from the e-mail newsletter.  I’ve deleted the ones that are only available to premium (paid) subscribers.  I’ve only read the climate change and Brad Bird/Pixar ones so far, but both were excellent.

This blog post reports that “Southern California Edison plans to install 250 megawatts’ worth of solar panels on commercial rooftops, generating enough electricity to power 162,000 homes.”  Great post/article that goes into the long and short-term business implications of this decision, including a potential short-term price hike as demand spikes before an eventual price fall as economies of scale ramp up, and potential faster adoption of thin-film solar panels, which use far less silicon than traditional panels.

This report coming on the day that we’re hosting a screening of the documentary Kilowatt Ours with a Q&A session from director Jeff Barrie seems like some sort of good omen, or at least a pleasant coincidence.

MapEcos is a joint venture led by business school professors at Harvard, Dartmouth and Duke. It “brings together information about companies’ environmental management, provided voluntarily by managers in real time, with companies’ pollution data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,” according to a recent article in HBS Working Knowledge.

The New York Times reported today that Virgin Atlantic will conduct a test of one of its Boeing 747s using biofuels. The most interesting thing to me is that there seems to have been a lot of thought put into both the sustainability and the business aspects (even though this first step is actually a blend of 20% biofuel and 80% conventional jet fuel).

Sustainability: Virgin spokesman Paul Charles is quoted as saying the company rejected fuels derived from crops like palm oil because of the land that would be needed to cultivate such crops, and that the biofuel production would not compete with food or freshwater resources.

Business: This joint project between Virgin, Boeing, and GE Aviation splits the costs of innovation among several companies, and had smart business requirements. For example, the test plane will use one of GE Aviation’s CF6 engines as a “drop-in solution,” meaning the use of biofuel requires no modification, and will not affect the engine’s performance or range.

I recently read a New Yorker article about Branson and his work with Al Gore to create the Virgin Earth Challenge with its $25 million prize.  I’m impressed that he’s so intent on solutions that are market-driven, commercial, and don’t require major lifestyle changes, as I believe that these are the ones that are truly scalable.  An excellent article that shows that for Branson, business is very personal.  I just wonder whether he’ll consider himself eligible to win his own prize?

Consulting giant McKinsey & Co has a free subscription service offering a subscription to their business publication, the McKinsey Quarterly. While they do have some articles that are “premium” and require you to purchase full access, a startlingly large percentage of what they put out is free. It’s shocking, but they offer more free content than any of the other business knowledge services I subscribe to (HBS, SSIR, Net Impact) with the exception of Origo Inc’s cross-sector news which is totally free and published less frequently. N.B. All of these services require registration, which means giving out your name, e-mail address and company affiliation, but I find that the information I receive is worth far more than this small amount of personal data. Also, links to each of these services can be found at the right side of this page in the “Social Entrepreneurship Resources” list - no time to create individual links today - sorry!

Today I received an e-mail with the McKinsey Quarterly’s top interviews of 2007. I thought that folks might be interested in one with Al Gore and David Blood on investing in sustainability.

The others from the list that I found particularly helpful and/or interesting were:

Strategy’s strategist: An interview with Richard Rumelt
A giant in the field of strategy ruminates on strategic planning, diversification and focus, and the role of the CEO.

Crafting a message that sticks: An interview with Chip Heath
The key to effective communication: make it simple, make it concrete, and make it surprising.

Promoting growth and social progress: An interview with the president of Chile
Michelle Bachelet discusses her views on the roots of political upheaval in Latin America, and the link between economic development and the fight against poverty.

Leading change: An interview with the CEO of Deere & Company
Bob Lane details the steps his company took to engage the whole organization in an operational and cultural transformation.

Since one of my colleagues is going to be starting a blog on sustainability at the Museum, I’ve been keeping my eye out for potential resources for him. I had an hour of relative downtime this morning, so I started clearing through some of my unread e-mail, including November’s free newsletter from Origo Inc. Sidenote: I love their newsletters, but they’re so full of information and articles that I want to read, they often remain “marked as unread” for quite a while. I have the same problem with my physical/paper issues of the New Yorker, which I generally skim immediately and, if possible, tear out articles to read later (although often there are so many articles I want to read that I end up just putting the entire issue in a pile to be read later).

One of the several links I followed was to a site called Blue Egg, a “beta” site for all things eco. Great design, interesting articles, and ambitious video. Nice enough for me to recommend a look, but not quite enough for me to sign up for their newsletter, on first visit at least. The thing that actually excited me the most about this was a link to Free Rice - a vocabulary quiz game that provides donations to alleviate world hunger via banner ads at the bottom of each quiz question. I answered about 10 questions and was disappointed in my score of 40, and kept going and slowly my score rose. I checked the FAQ and found that the best possible score is 50, so I’m pretty happy with my score now. With 20 grains of rice for each correct answer and questions that get harder or easier depending on your score to date (like the GMAT), I’ve currently earned 1200 grains of rice (that’s 60 correct answers for the math-impaired) and risen to a vocab level of 44. Thanks for making me take Latin, Mom! Thanks for making reading with a dictionary close at hand a pleasure, David Foster Wallace! To be fair, many of my correct answers have been guesses - the multiple choice format has always helped me in this way - but I have been surprised at how many words I’ve known without resorting to multiple guess. I’m guessing squire on this next one: