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Taking Stock of Impact: Is It Good for Business?

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If there’s anything good to come out of the devastating BP oil spill, it’s a renewed awareness and interest in the corporate decisions that directly impact our shared environment. Certainly more than a few BP execs are kicking themselves right now for grossly underestimating how an environmental catastrophe of this magnitude would impact their bottom line.

BP’s executive team may not be the greenest group around, but they certainly must be wishing they’d paid greater attention to the costly environmental risks of their business practices. As stock values plummet and once-loyal customers boycott the BP empire, the business value of green becomes painfully apparent.

The 24/7/365 global lens isn’t doing anything for winning over any new customers either. Even Facebook presents a platform for expressing anti-BP sentiments without any words at all: Just take a gander at how many of your contacts have changed their profile pictures to oil-covered birds. On CNN or PBS, you can watch the real-time gushing of the oil or see the number of gallons spilled on a live counter. Spend a moment watching these feeds and you realize the obvious business value in aligning with and marketing a pro-environment approach, or at the very least an environmentally cautious one.

One aspect of the spill that surprised me is that we don’t have to be on the Gulf Coast to feel the direct effects of the spill. Nearly two thousand miles to the north, Minnesota’s migrating bird population stands to suffer a great loss when unsuspecting loons, ducks and other birds fly south for a winter soak in the oil-saturated Gulf of Mexico.

Of course, BP isn’t the only entity out there putting profit and personal gain above all else, come what may. We’re all guilty, at one time or another, of eclipsing our awareness of impact by profit, comfort, ease, speed, [insert motivation here]. The BP debacle is a frightening reminder delivered via worst-case scenario to tread lightly.

Recently, a 5,500-year-old leather shoe was found in Armenia. It reminded me of a shoe from the Twenties that we discovered hidden inside a bathroom wall during a remodeling project. Mesmerized by the find (and after frantically searching for a body that may once have been attached to the shoe), we did a little research and discovered that builders of yore would place a single shoe in the wall of a home to attract good fortune. Usually the builders selected a wall that was close to the center of the house or the chimney. In our case, it was both. Did I buy the whole good fortune story? You bet I did. The shoe we found was gold, after all.

A shoe is an obvious symbol of our individual footprint—and shoes in bathroom walls or Armenian caves illustrate how our impact can linger long after we’re gone. What we can all learn from BP’s unscrupulous lack of preparation is that our ultimate impact–whether it be business or personal–is born of a single choice. Had BP invested more in understanding the dire environmental impact of its business decisions, it might have emerged from a near-disaster as a hero, rather than staggering from a full-blown global catastrophe as an environmental villain.

But don’t take it from me. Just ask BP’s executive team, employees, and investors: Can an organization’s impact be costly? If they don’t live under a shoe, they’ll probably all agree: Impact is, indeed, costly—30-billion-dollar costly.

Has the BP spill inspired you to make any changes to your business practices?


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