"The goal of SBD is to improve and expand a company, organization, or agency in ways that have economic, as well as social and envirionmental value." - Sean SchmidtThe Journey from Snow Leopards to Sustainable Business & Development (SBD)
I first used the term "sustainable business and development" when I was working at Nordstrom, Inc. back in the late 1990s. Having started at the company in 1988, I had already worked in many roles in the company, including sales, customer services, corporate HR, corporate IT, and corporate procurement. When I was tasked to take on the role of coordinating the company's efforts to transport goods more efficiently and reduce waste in the stores and distribution centers, I looked at multiple options that existed at the time to name and define our efforts and strategy in this area. CSR was still a fairly new development in business operations at that point but even then I felt that it's genesis was outside the business world, somewhat prescriptive, and more reactive than proactive. What I wanted to create was somthing that would add value to the company in a strategic way, not just respond to new and evolving external interest and pressures.
I had already been at Nordstrom 10 years at this point so had a pretty good understanding of retail marketing, sales, and operations. I also had several interesting internships as I made my way through college at this time. I happend to be studying concervation biology in college and because I took Russian in high school and college, I started working in the area of snow leopard conservation in Russia and Central Asia. This work led me to a fascinating internship at the Foundation for Russion American Economic Cooperation in which I created a guide for investment funds in the Newly Independent States of the former Soviet Union. I worked exensively with investment banks and funds, including the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the idea of sustainable development was a key topic in almost all of the investment banks and funds at that time.
So, it was actually a pretty short step to call this new area of Nordstrom I was building "Sustainable Business & Development" or "SBD". I'm sure the term was used elsewhere by many other people, but it was made the most sense to me at that time for what we wanted to do with these efforts at Nordstrom. I described SBD to middle managers and executives as a way to improve and expand the company in ways that had economic, as well as social and environmental value. Fair labor in international factories was a new pressing issue at that time as well. I shared that our intentional and strategic efforts would generate sales, reduce expenses, strengthen stakeholder relationships. The idea was that if we have to do things in this area, let's do it well and do it in a way that adds value to our company. In most cases, any idea or innovation that came up could fit easily into one of those areas. On occasion, an idea would come up that actually produced results in all three areas. No surprise, those ideas were particularly popular across all leadership levels.
One thing that surprised us fairly quickly was that some other aspects of the company that were certainly needed and important but did not have a business case for how they added value to the company all of a sudden did. Human resources (HR) for example. By hiring and developing great salespeople, we generated more sales. My maintaining proacting employee relations practices, we could avoid potential lawsuits and reduce expenses. And by investing in ongoing development of our employees, we strengthened our relationship with our staff.