frankwork

If you’re like me — confused by what exactly clean tech includes, who it serves, and how it’s defined — then check out this 2008 Greentech Market Taxonomy from Greentech Media. The chart displays a vast array of product and service solutions that includes water, energy storage, power generation, transportation, and more targeting individual, residential, industrial, government, utility, and commercial customers.

From a job seeker perspective, it shows that the range of companies you could work for is vast. And if you are looking for work in this sector, you might start by checking out the companies in Greentech Media’s list to the Top Ten Startups (the article includes quite a few other companies as well).

Everything starts somewhere, but those first phases – the nurturing the seed so that it sprouts, and then nurturing the vulnerable sprout so that it is rooted and strong – have always challenged me. I have no problem coming up with ideas, recognizing the seeds of some possible business venture, book, or career path, but it’s nurturing those seeds so that they sprout where I run up against a set of personal challenges.

In some respects I see these challenges as demons, haunting my efforts toward meaningful, personally satisfying action. But I realize their role is subtle, more complicated. The demons reflect my own internal neediness, for love, support, appreciation, recognition, and security. They are teachers as much as demons, because they are feeding on feelings such as doubt, confusion, and fear. In my inability, unwillingness, or stubborn refusal to address the fact of my insecurity and vulnerability, I am confronted, over and over again, by their phantoms.

Seeds knowingly come in multitudes, as if anticipating the problem of nurturance. Think of the 50 million sperm that seek the egg in the magic dance of conception. Their abundance would seem to confirm the natural world’s attitude toward starting anything: It’s not easy or, perhaps: Of multitudes, one.

This recognition doesn’t keep me from at times obsessive self-criticism regarding my failures to nurture so many promising possibilities – the real estate investment I didn’t make that would have paid off handsomely, the novel I didn’t write that would have been handbook to these times we’re in, the journalism career I didn’t follow because of some unreasonable opposition to the nature of newspaper storytelling. These are not exactly regrets, because the choice I made felt right at the time or (with regards to the novel) I simply didn’t have the discipline to carry the idea through. But I can also see that the demons played no small role: Fear, self-doubt, confusion crippling my ability to make a choice other than the one I made.

And they build on their successes. A fresh failure provides fresh ground for a new round of self-criticism, self-recrimination, or straight up self-flagellation. These are mental acts, done in total silence, automatic. The mind simply replays the script, reinforcing a belief that has, inside it, confidence only in failure. It is a false but powerful belief, a kind of mental demagogue.

What’s harder to fathom is that the failures are okay, essential to any creative act. It’s the most natural thing in the universe for seeds not to sprout. It’s a miracle when they do. The obstacles are, in fact, real, even when they are merely phantoms; that they are intangible has no bearing on their force.

Watching the demons work – which is easily enough done by listening to the ever-present, silent-to-the-world-but-endless stream of chattering going on inside my head – I gain some measure of power. I can acknowledge they exist. I can recognize them, be patient with them, be kind, as I would be to any child. I can watch them with a wider awareness. And by doing this it’s my hope I can more effectively get started, nurture one of the trillion-gazillion seeds within me. I can override the most damaging messages of my demons, but perhaps more importantly start to offer them what they need, which is merely the emotional nourishment that I need, but am afraid to ask others for or too absorbed in the demons’ chatter to provide myself.

Yesterday I went to a day-long seminar with Tsultrim Allione, who presented about her new book Feeding Your Demons. The concept behind the book is that when we feed our demons, rather than fight them, they become our allies, and it strikes me as a highly useful skill in the world of work. On the way to the office this morning (aka the coffee shop), I found myself contemplating my specific workplace demons. There’s the demon of procrastination, the demon of self-doubt, the demon of fear-I-don’t-know-enough, the demon of confusion-about-what-to-do, the demon of fear-of-calling-people, the demon of annoyance-at-coworkers. Then there are the yet-to-be-identified demons behind all of these.

The practice for feeding the demons draws on ancient Buddhist practice. When we resist a demon, we give it power over us, stoking our fear of it (and its power over us). Yet this is often what we do. Allione used Hercules second labor as a metaphor for what happens when we fight or go to war with our demons. In this labor, Hercules fought the hydra, but each time he sliced off this multi-headed created, two more heads emerged. Finally he used a flaming branch to close the heads before new ones popped out but the main head was immortal, impossible to kill, so this one — after slaying the body — he covered under a rock. Her point in using this story is that even if we do manage to defeat a demon in battle, the best we can do is hide it under a rock. Push the rock and it pops up ready to fight again.

But if you feed the demon — give the demon what it wants, which is often love, respect, attention — then you help it meet its needs, and its reason to fight you dissolves. In its place, you may find an ally

A few days ago I wrote a post about big consulting firms, most of whom are starting to elbow themselves into the sustainability consulting market. If you’re looking for a job in sustainability consulting, places like Boston Consulting Group, A.T. Kearney, Accenture, and McKinsey all have growing practices. However, I think much of the innovative work in the sustainability consulting market is likely to be work performed by boutique firms over the next couple of years. Blu Skye Consulting in San Francisco, for example, is doing particularly interesting, deep work with Wal-Mart. There are a host of other firms that are positioning themselves to be players in the carbon trading market. And many of the people who are best educated on sustainability work for themselves or in small, boutique groups — such as Hunter Lovins at Natural Capitalism, Inc., Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute, and William McDonough and Michael Braungart at McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (which is now hiring a chemist and a project manager.) Then you’ve got all kinds of other boutiques, around the country: Strategic Sustainability Consulting in Maryland; Domani in New York, Chicago, and Denver; YRG Sustainability Consultants in New York and Denver; Natural Logic in the SF Bay Area, and many, many more. If you want a career in sustainability consulting, check out the boutiques — in a new market like sustainability, many of these have the equivalent, if not deeper, experience than the major firms.

Want a sampling of careers in the green sector? Fortune has profiles of a climate strategist, green recruiter,  carbon trader, eco-investor, and more here.

And then there’s this interesting blog post critiquing the article, such as:

To become an eco-ANYTHING, there is no separate set of rules, no regulations, certification or licensing requirements, or tests to pass, because none have been invented yet. To hire an eco-person to perform your mundane tasks with this so-called “higher ethic” is to pay extra for the services, products, and the good feeling that goes along with it. Basically, anyone with a law degree, real estate license, house cleaning skills, investment broker license, or any other occupation that requires some sort of certification or licensing as a part of that occupational field can call him- or her-self an “eco” worker.

Imagine the redundancy of an eco-landscaper or eco-lawn care company. These might be the only fields that won’t be able to take advantage of the “green” movement, because they were there first.

Not true. The eco-landscaper would use native plants. The eco-lawn care company would  certainly never touch a petroleum-based fertilizer, and might solve a pest problem problem by using a natural pesticide. Then there’s an assumption a green professional will come at a higher price: not the case. Many “green” professionals working in consulting (such as at Saatchi & Saatchi S) or socially responsible investments make less than their counterparts at mainstream firms. While many green products cost more at the register than their conventional counterparts (which tend to cost more if you factor in the environmental damages they cause over their lifecycle), don’t make the mistake of thinking professionals in the green sector cost more.

Green doesn’t mean everything is going to be perfect. It doesn’t always mean that a person in a company is doing much to move the ball. But they’re trying. That’s the point of all this energy. Know that if you go into a green career, you’re going to have to push papers sometimes and face dull projects and sometimes complain about your work. But you will be making a difference. It won’t be at the magnitude you might initially expect (although it might be), but it’s billions, if not trillions, of small gestures that will reshape our civilization so that it’s green. Will there be scams? You bet. But over the long haul, on the balance those working in this sector are passionate and care about real transformation.

Recently back from Pepperdine — what a beautiful campus — where I participated on a green panel at the MBA Career Services for Working Professionals Alliance, here’s are some things that came out of the Q&A and moderation that anybody looking for a green career might like to know:

• Disney, which is one of the top hiring corporations for corporate social responsibility  roles according to the CSR Jobs Report 2007 by Ellen Weinreb and Net Impact, has a long way to go before sustainability is part of its DNA.
• A growing number of finance professionals want into the green sector, and these folks should realize there are opportunities for them in emerging carbon market trading sectors (including consulting firms) as well as at clean tech startups.
• The dizzying array of terms, like “cradle-to-cradle,” “green nanotechnology,” “biomimicry,” and “triple bottom line” confuse a lot of people. What do all these terms mean? (Wikipedia has serviceable definitions.)
• Working professionals who want to break into the green sector often don’t know where to start; one great place to start is by volunteering, whether it’s in your community or organization. This provides experience, contacts, and direct skills related to the green sector.
• To break into the green sector, figure out where your skills might fit by networking. Find people you know, or you know who know others, working in the green sector. Or visit local nonprofits or other organizations working on green initiatives. Do some information interviewing. This is the best way to learn where you might fit.
• If you’re an MBA from a top 25 program and in the workforce, you have some great people advocating for you at your school. Take advantage of them!

Everybody knows the adage “do what you love,” the problem is putting it into practice. While some people pursue their highly focused interests with determination, many others, often out a sense of caution, instead hedge their bets, trying to get well-rounded by forcing themselves to master many different disciplines and, in the process, sometimes forgetting exactly what they’re passionate about in the first place. That’s what makes this article, Working Life (High and Low), about the work culture at Patagonia, where employees can take two hours off in the middle of the day to surf, so refreshing. It’s a reminder that if you go pell-mell toward what you care about, as did founder and CEO Yves Chouinard, who’s passion for falconry led to a passion for mountain climbing (and the development of a stronger piton and the creation of an innovative an apparel company), you can end up with something very special indeed. But Patagonia is also an example of a company that puts a priority on its people. Compare this to FedEx (featured in the first part of the article), whose support for one its drivers led to termination when that driver was unable to run her route due to cancer, but whose CEO made more than $17 million in 2007. Back to Patagonia, which offers yoga and Pilates classes at lunchtime. What’s wrong with this picture?

Item #2 in today’s Times is the first-person essay I Waste People’s Time Online. How? Don’t Ask Me, in which an editor for CollegeHumor.com talks about his job and how items are selected for the site’s front-page. Does a balanced curriculum of physics, history, foreign language, and politics prepare you for this type of work? Maybe — but not necessarily. Perhaps a more interesting question (and if you are one of the handful of people reading this, please do weigh in with your answer), why exactly are we a culture that’s so eager to waste time online? (My answer has something to do with that first sentence of this post.)

If you’re looking for a job in CSR at a Fortune 1000 company, make sure you check out this report (2007) by Ellen Weinreb and Net Impact. While there are a growing number of jobs in CSR — corporate social responsibility — demand among MBAs is outpacing supply, so landing one is going to be competitive. While many of these roles provide hands-on opportunities to affect various areas of a business in positive ways, MBAs — and others — should also realize that CSR is not the only source of career opportunities in the sustainability arena. Many people I’ve talked to have indicated the more interesting opportunities are in line functions, where you can affect profit and loss. One at Autodesk, for example, indicated there’s one sustainability director in marketing, but the better source of opportunities are taking a functional job and helping green it. Why is that? CSR roles are often considered a cost center, and even at Fortune 500 companies are generally represented by fairly small teams, so if you’re in a line function and can make a case for creating greener operations, say by reducing energy or materials that go into a product or its distribution through a manufacturing, product design, supply-chain management, or other role, you may find it easier to garner organizational support as well as greater opportunities to affect the business.

Could our cultural focus on technology, both as tool and entertainment, be undermining our ability to provide stewardship for the planet?

Let me back up and explain how I came to this question.

The other day I watched King of Kong – an excellent little documentary about Steve Weibe’s efforts to unseat Billy Mitchell as the record-holder in Donkey Kong. As an avid video game player in the mid-80s, I have some sense of the skills needed to take this crown: Pattern-recognition, patience, persistence, concentration, and will.

A little later I read Tigerland in the April 21 New Yorker – an essay about a journey into the Saznekhali Wildlife Sancutary in India, a mangrove forest haunted by man-eating Bengal tigers. The author travels with Dr. Pranabes Sanyel, an expert on mangrove forests, capable of identifying the 28 mangrove species, and tigers. No doubt his skills, developed over years, depend on pattern-recognition (such as for the female tigers pawprint, which is slightly rectangular, from the male tigers, which is more square), patience, persistence, concentration, and will.

The romance of the article, for me, stems in part from a fascination with nature – an abiding, but largely unexplored, interest in animal behavior and forest ecology. My upbringing in an urban setting (Sacramento, California) didn’t exactly preclude me from exploring these interests, but the distractions in that urban environment (reruns of the Brady Bunch and Hogan’s Heros, video games such as Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, and Joust) ultimately took more of my attention than, say, studying the ladybugs, ants, and bees near our backyard swimming pool. Even today, in an effort to deepen my understanding of sustainability, human psychology, and my own purpose, I find myself periodically distracted by games, such as Fantasy Basketball and Desktop Tower Defense.

However interesting, game-playing isn’t my interest today; rather, it’s how the skills these games require, which could translate easily to a deeper study and, quite possibly, empathy with the ecosystems that support our daily endeavor, but instead seem to redirect toward – well, what? I’m not sure. The point is Steve Weibe’s mastery of Donkey Kong is pretty much a luxury. What if he’d turned that attention to bats, bees, or native plants? The skills, I suspect, would translate, and who knows what good it might bring our ecosystem.

I’ve been doing a little research into sustainability consulting for an article I’m writing, and while I haven’t reached any conclusions, it’s clear that the large consulting firms have growing practices. All the big firms have practice areas and/or publications on the subject — see these links for Accenture, Deloitte, BCG, McKinsey, PwC, and A.T. Kearney — suggesting an effort to position themselves as thought leaders.

In some cases, the firms offer sustainability as a component of risk management, but where the work is more exciting is when it’s integrated into how a company operates. Over the last 18 months A.T. Kearney, for example, has created a sustainability practice but also integrated sustainability thinking into all its other practices–which is really, I think, how sustainability needs to be delivered. Kearney has also created a far-reaching internal program to go carbon neutral by 2010–a serious goal, considering how much consultants travel, and one that, one suspects, might have a correspondingly positive affect on work/life balance.