Yesterday, I gave an introduction for Hannah Jones’s (Nike VP for Sustainable Business & Innovation) sobering and inspiring keynote at GoGreen Portland 2011. One of the themes during her speech was “Cooperation is the key to sustainability.“ In the face of major global economic challenges, the path to finding solutions and achieving sustainable success in the most resource efficient way is through cooperation and collaboration.
But how do we do this? Here are some ideas given our experience in this area:
1. Connect your change agents
Ideally, this audience is a group of folks who have worked together already. That way, the social connections are stronger and increases the chances for success. Creating change is hard. Build an online community so they can connect with each other to ask questions, find solutions, develop a working relationship, and support one another along the journey. You can create a closed or open social network on FMYI to bring people closer together, whether they’re in the same town, across the world, on mobile devices, or dial-up Internet connections.
2. Share information
Knowledge is power of course. By centralizing links, best practices, documents, events, and more, you’ll give them the tools to take advantage of opportunities. And since finding sustainable solutions requires constant innovation, having a steady flow of new information is critical. Not only can you flexibly tag information on FMYI and set up email alerts, you can also benefit from our “Thought Leader” feature to identify the experts on specific topics within your FMYI site.
3. Achieve your goals
Once people connect and share information on the site, they can catalyze new ideas and turn them into projects. This is where you can cooperatively and collaboratively get things done to scale your results. Project teams should be assigned (or can self-organize) around accomplishing the goals your initiative has established. On FMYI, you can easily set up project pages and track tasks to achieve your mission while using the world’s only sustainable collaboration platform provided by a certified B Corporation.
My GoGreen 2011 introduction for Hannah Jones, Nike VP for Sustainable Business & Innovation
Good morning! I’m honored to introduce Hannah Jones, Nike Vice President for Sustainable Business & Innovation.
We first met ten years ago while we were working for Nike in Europe. What I’ve admired is her ability to collaborate for change and innovation, from Nike senior management to global NGOs and across many other stakeholders.
As we all know, going green starts with being a change agent. Hannah’s success in integrating sustainability into design, marketing, throughout Nike’s supply chain, and across industries serves as a blueprint for sustainable innovation.
Her team’s mission is to embed sustainability into the heart of the Nike business model and mobilize employees, consumers, policy makers, civil society and other businesses to power a rapid transition to a sustainable economy.
Before joining Nike, Hannah served as a consultant to Microsoft and Kimberly-Clark on their community affairs programs. Prior to that she worked for CSV, a European non-governmental organization, where she led media campaigns centering on youth issues. Hannah began her career as a reporter, researcher and producer for the social action unit of BBC Radio One and Radio Five.
Hannah is a founding member of the business advisory council to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and was named a Global Young Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2007.
It’s inspiring to have a global sustainability leader right in our backyard. I’m looking forward to learning more about what’s next so we can all collaboratively build a sustainable future together. Please join me in welcoming to the stage Hannah Jones!
In 2010, the Focus the Nation team (pictured left, in our favorite colored hard hats) was looking for tools their small Portland, Oregon based team could use to engage hundreds of students around the country. Such tools needed to be user-friendly and foster collaboration for both the short and long term. At the start of 2011, FTN partnered with FMYI to help redefine collaboration between Focus the Nation and their stakeholders, increasing their ability to do what they love – empower the next generation of clean energy leaders. With the help of FMYI, they were able to more than double the number of student teams they are working with, including teams at University of Hawaii at Manoa, Clemson University, Miami University, and University of Oregon (Go Ducks! Yes, FMYI is an Oregon-based company).
