What do you Know About Disruptive Innovation?

Posted on January 20, 2013 by Chet Brandon

Disruptive Idea PicI have noticed a new term that is often chanted in the business world: “Disruptive Innovation”.  It seems to occur with frightening frequency in the technology sector.  Apple famously disrupted the music recording industry with iTunes as an example.  Can EHS be disrupted?  If so how? Hypothetical discussion you say?  I’ll bet that’s what the entrenched music industry people said…

CM Christensen

Disruptive Innovation is the term coined by Clayton M. Christensen (renowned Harvard
Business Professor) to describe the impact of  innovations that enable a new business model to prosper at the expense of existing models.  Typically it is cheaper and allows a bigger group of consumers to obtain the product or service.  It may also solve problems for customers or other stakeholders that the existing products or practices don’t .  Frequently it is a new entrant into the market that is not encumbered  by the need to focus on sustaining innovations to fend off other existing participants and does not have to worry about existing profit margins on upscale products.

This is an important theory because it can be used to understand the future of markets and thus set the stage for effective business strategy to result in continued business success. Companies that fail to understand this theory can end up realizing too late that their products, services, production method or business model has been replaced in the consumers decision making process . If they wait until the moment the market (consumers) signal them, it’s too late. The incumbents usually can’t make changes fast enough at that point. It’s also quite likely that they don’t have the financial resources to invest in such a transition.

What if EHS was disrupted? How would you serve your customers as an EHS Professional? How would you lead your company to take advantage of this new disruptive technology? For these reasons it’s important for EHS & Sustainability (EHS&S) professionals to understand the theory and remain vigilant for disruptive innovations affecting our markets.

Fast Company published a good article on how to create disruptive innovations and it’s what started me on this post.  I would love to prove my skills as the EHS&S Oracle and legendarily predict the most significant disruptive innovations that will occur in the next 5 to 10 years. The only problem is, I don’t know them… yet. I too am on the journey to understand this model. There is a great video on “How to Spot Disruptive Innovation Opportunities” from the Harvard Business School (HBS) that builds on Clayton’s video above. The speaker in the video lists several key aspects of markets to look at as genesis points.

I want to focus on one method/aspect in particular: find the pain points and deliver a simple and cheap answer. What are the pain points for our customers in the EHS world? I came up with the following list:

  • Existing training methods
  • The difficulty in complying (human behavior)
  • The cost of compliance

We have learned from the videos that it’s not usually technology that creates disruptive innovation, it’s alternative business models. What is the typical EHS Business Model? I’ll try a stab at it in a sentence or two:

EHS & Sustainability professionals serve their markets (internal and external) by being subject matter experts.  They take specialized knowledge and attempt to deliver useful tools for the organization/customer to use. They attempt to influence the organization/customer to use these tools to improve their operations and activities.

I have simplified the mission and methods of our profession for the ease of this discussion. So what is an alternative business model? Here’s a couple I’ve been thinking of:

  • Crowd Sourced EHS – Essentially, it’s using the existing knowledge of the workforce to deliver EHS tools.
  • Outsourced expertise – a 1-800 EHS&S service that you call only when an issue or significant need arises. The EHS organization would have a large number of subscribers.
  • Free EHS&S service – The cost of EHS would be born buy sponsors who hope to sell their products to the organizations being serviced by the EHS&S organization.

It was not my goal in this post to develop these theories further. Perhaps in another post. My goal today was to get you thinking about disruptive innovation.  How to watch out and prepare for it, and to attempt to do it. Those who are successful at disrupting a market leave an indelible mark on our world. Wouldn’t it be great to leave such a positive mark for EHS&S in our world’s great institutions?

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Innovations in Environmental Science

Posted on January 1, 2013 by Chet Brandon

fungi3-600x400I was perusing my Twitter feed yesterday and ran across a collection of articles from Fast Company recapping innovative solutions to environmental issues.  It’s a good collection, I retweeted it, but thought it also worthy of some discussion time on my humble blog.  I will say the author of the summary article has a rather negative view of the environmental protection progress as of 2012 that I don’t necessarily share.  (For instance, the Washington Post, among many others, reported in the spring of 2012 that the US is leading the world in CO2 emissions reductions.)  One article in the collection caught my attention in particular.  It was titled: Fungi Discovered in the Amazon will Eat Your Plastic.  The subject was originally published in the journal Applied and Environmental Biology, July, 2011.  From the Fast Company article:

“The fungi, Pestalotiopsis microspora, is the first anyone has found to survive on a steady diet of polyurethane alone and–even more surprising–do this in an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment that is close to the condition at the bottom of a landfill.”

I recall reading a similar article some years ago about a fungus discovered in the south pacific during WWII that would quickly digest cotton and other plant based fibers (strichoderma reesei).  The article identified this as an important finding for the industrial scale production of ethanols for use as synthetic fossil fuels.  As we now know 2011 and 2012 were very productive years in the field of synthetic fuel development.

Where I am going with this is that, depending on the byproduct of this organic process, we may see a similar evolution of the industrial process for recycling plastics or even using spent plastics as feedstock for fuel production.  It would be a huge win indeed for the environment to make the reclaiming of plastics economically viable.  It will be interesting to keep an eye on this discovery to see if a solution for our real-world problem presents itself.

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Leadership is a Conversation

Posted on August 26, 2012 by Chet Brandon

There was a post a while back on HBR’s Blog site that caught my eye. It was titled: Leadership is a Conversation. It attracted me because I happen to believe this is very true. I worked once with a great Plant Manager who led a high performance team that used this skill to pronounced success. He made it a point to stand by the time clock at shift changes each day and engage all the people he could. I noticed he would spend most of his day talking with team members. He rarely used email to communicate, but used face to face interactions to lead his team.

A Leader’s use of conversation is the skill of engaging those being led in a genuine interactive dialogue with emotional content. It requires the exchange of ideas and results in the influencing of the employee to action.  The classic leadership text, The Leadership Challenge, identifies the need for a leader to “listen deeply to others” (p. 118). This involves the ability to hear what is important to others and integrate it into the shared vision the leader is using to unify the team for common action. In The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management, the author identifies responsiveness, reciprocity and finding common ground is critical in achieving influential conversation with team members. By the way, this is a great book I’ll be discussing later.

I believe that many of our fellow EHS & Sustainability peers are not influential as leaders. This is a threat to our profession and a missed opportunity for the organizations we work for. Only through the interactive communication of a shared vision can we achieve alignment of the people in our organizations and motivate them into action on the achievement of EHS&Sustainability improvements. That’s our mission. We have to do a better job of leading with conversation.

Make it a priority to have interactive dialog with those you lead today. Practice the skills of active listening, finding points of shared vision, and concisely communicating ideas. I had a boss once who said: “if you’re explaining, you’re losing…” His point is: the concept you are communicating needs to be pretty easy for your listener to pick up. You want them thinking about how to do it, not what it is. Intimacy is part of the communication process. Intimacy sets the stage for trust to develop. The team member knows when you have let your guard down and knows this is a sign of trust from you. They will return the favor if you can align with their values.

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EHS is Knowledge Work

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Chet Brandon

After being in my profession now for over 20 years, it has occurred to me that much of what we do in EHS is that of “knowledge work”.  The ever trustworthy Wikipedia defines a Knowledge Worker as:

 “A knowledge worker in today’s workforce is an individual that is valued for their ability to interpret information within a specific subject area. They will often advance the overall understanding of that subject through focused analysis, design and/or development.  They use research skills to define problems and to identify alternatives.  Fueled by their expertise and insight, they work to solve those problems, in an effort to influence company decisions, priorities and strategies”.

This is an interesting wiki on knowledge work worth your reading.  That’s a pretty good explanation for what HSE Professionals do at the higher levels.  At this point in my career, I spend much of my time attempting to influence leadership to support and drive ideas that my experience and judgment tell me are important for organizational success regarding my area of expertise.

It is critical that we use this accumulated knowledge to do more that tell our companies personnel “no”.  To be of real benefit to our employers and our fellow workers we must use this knowledge to enable activities that both maximize EHS performance and support the attainment of the organizations other business objectives.  If I were asked by a young person just starting in this field what is the key to success, I would answer: help your team solve problems vs. saying “no”.

That’s why we are knowledge workers.

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The Purpose of this Blog

Posted on April 28, 2012 by Chet Brandon

I have been thinking about this blog for some time and finally got around to creating it.  In my mind a see a work space where I can spend a few minutes a week looking for, thinking about and documenting new ideas in EHS & Sustainability that will help my profession remain a vibrant source of value for industrial organizations.  I hope to have a few close friends and fellow practitioners adding to the ideas with thier own comments.

The picture in this post is of my own workbench in my tinkering workshop at home.  This blog space is my tinkering shop for different and forward focused concepts around protecting people, planet and profits.  I have read that a great source of innovation for a particular field is to look at other fields and knowledge centers to learn of their new ideas.  The innovation can occur when someone from one field adapts and applies another field’s good ideas.  I spend a fair amount of time tooling around on the web just looking for new ideas and will start trying to apply them to my field in this space.  Who know’s, I might just come up with a heck of a good idea…

One of the areas I think is ripe for new directions is that of leadership in the industrial organizational setting.  As my career has progressed I see the increasing value of being a good leader.  It it my experience that this facet of an EHS & Sustainability professional is the greatest determinate of success.  I have spent much of my career watching those I consider great leaders and I continue to look for such examples.  Since I’m in my 20th year in this vocation, I have honed my own leadership skills carefully and I believe I have some things to share also.

The main page of my blog will focus on leadership discussions applicable to EHS & Sustainability.  I have the sub-pages for more technical ideas in the EHS & Sustainability field.

So, we come to the end of my first post.  It feels pretty good to get started.  I am excited about the future of this project.

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