London’s Mayor Boris Johnson is urging the city’s businesses to save money by improving their environmental performance and has said that seeing competitors win a contest to find the capital’s most sustainable companies could inspire firms to turn ‘green with envy’. (as reported by EDIE.net).

He is quoted as saying “In lean economic times, there are real financial savings to be made for businesses by becoming more energy efficient, helping them to remain competitive [..] this can often be done in really simple and cheap ways, and it is our job in City Hall to rally, support and publicly recognise organisations that want to do so.”

So the question is “have they finally got it?”  I hope so; I firmly believe that what business needs is not a carrot or a stick approach – what we need is to get words and phrases like ‘financial savings’ and ‘energy efficient’ into the day-to-day language and common usage of those who manage the finance of all organisations (major or minor, public or private sector).

With the growth of major ERP packages over the past 20 years, we have become too deeply entrenched in the minutiae of consultant speak and lost focus through having to pay astronomical fees to consultancies to get one part of the organisation to interact (at an accounting level) with other parts of the same organisation.

As a result, we’ve lost some of our ability to apply common sense to our financial decisions (I’ve had a look, but no matter how much you are willing to pay, I can’t find a common sense module for SAP, Oracle or any of the other major packages and it’s also not part of the Six Sigma training… even at black belt level!).

Every organisation has someone who understands the benefits of reducing energy usage to effect a reduction in costs… but they are usually hidden away in the CSR department and they do not always have the access to the people that can drive change at a financial and strategic level.

To have the message delivered at a different level (I won’t yet commit to ‘higher level’ – Boris, and others, still need to prove that they are willing to do more than just hand out a plaque once a year to qualify for that accolade) can only be a good thing.

Organisations like mine, and the many others out there that make the aspiration a reality, often have difficulty in delivering benefits to the organisations that could most easily realise them precisely because the link has not  yet  been made by those at the end of the phone line. Breaking down the linguistic barriers will take more than just continuing to contact people whose main reaction is still “what’s the catch?” and “I am not employed to care about the environment”.

So we should applaud Boris for getting on the bandwagon but he should be careful that he does not remain riding the tailgate instead of making his way up front to the riding seat; otherwise, nothing will change and the applause will turn very quickly to the slow, ominous handclap that reflects the way in which most of the contributions by our country’s politicians are viewed these days.

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