After reading the front page, top story of today’s Boston Globe, we’re glad we recently finished reading this book.

The Globe story indicates that yes, some of the findings of scientists regarding climate change were wrong.  However, they were not wrong the way some climate change cynics have asserted.  Unfortunately the scientists were wrong in the other direction.  They were too conservative, especially in the area of estimating the sea rise due to climate change.  For folks along the northern part of the Eastern US coastline – especially New England, the outlook for sea water levels rising is, much more near-term than theoretical or distant. According to the Globe, “what was once a problem for our great great-grandchildren is one our children could confront.” The scary news goes on:

“Already, 65 acres of prime Massachusetts coastal real estate is swallowed by the sea every year; ocean waters have crept up about a foot here in the last century. While more land will be eaten away, storm surges — abnormal rises of water during severe weather — layered on top of higher seas could push much further inland, especially in flat coastal areas of New England, and oceanside homes in places like Scituate and Gloucester will be even more vulnerable. Some scientists say that climate change may also bring fiercer and more frequent storms.”

Sigh.

Alas, after such a pessimistic article, it was good to have some optimistic input – some hope – mixed in as well.  With chapter subtitles like “We have all the tools we need”, the book Sustainagility by Patrick Dixon and Johan Gorecki paints an empowering picture that shows how technology can slow the effects of climate change and allow the planet to do some recovering.  For example, it was nice to read that wind turbines, according to the book, “have the theoretical capacity to provide 40 times all the world’s electricity demands if storage and transmission problems could be solved in an affordable way.”

This makes us happy both because of the promise of clean power – but also for the incredibly selfish reason that if an organization wanted to:

• solve a wind turbine storage problem
• increase power transmission capacity and efficiency
• build turbines
• lay cables
• meter the grid
• and on and on and on…

..any of these would be – you guessed it – programs and projects.

The summary of the book says: “Innovation and agility will solve most of the greatest threats to our planet’s ecosystem, argue Patrick Dixon and Johan Gorecki. In “Sustainagility,” they suggest positive ways that businesses and individuals can address these threats while making a profit. “Sustainagility” covers how to encourage green innovation inside an organization, how to develop green technologies faster, and how to adapt rapidly to stay ahead of competition. It includes text boxes containing shocking statistics about the destruction of our planet, short inspiring examples of how innovation has created new profitable business and helped the world, and personal messages from global leaders about sustainable innovation. Case studies of numerous well-known, high-profile companies are featured, demonstrating that companies have successfully used innovative and agile processes to improve their businesses and fight some of the greatest threats to the world’s ecosystems.”

The book’s inviting approach is to use interviews with leaders from the year 2040 (in fact opening with an interview from the UN President from 20-May, 2040), with a retrospective of how close to the edge we were, until innovative, agile companies started solving problems (we would assert – with projects).

The book is interesting and – as we said – uplifting.  We liked two things the most, though.

1. Their use of smashing two words together to get a point across.  They combined Sustainability and Agility, to get Sustainagility.  We combined Green and Quality to get greenality.  In both cases, the authors were driven to communicate a concept by combining two well-known, existing concepts.

2. In the book’s “Afterword” there are “Ten Steps to Profitable Sustainability”.  Again, this is one of our themes – properly completed projects of any kind which are run with “Triple bottom line” thinking – will be better projects, not in spite of, but because of the life-cycle and holistic considerations involved.

Below we paraphrase the “Ten steps for your company”:

1. Make ‘sustainability’ central to your strategy
2. Look at the resources you use, directly or indirectly
3. Take steps to reduce carbon use – but also all resource use
4. Tell your own ‘sustainability story’ better than competitors
5. Link every sale to a triple bottom line benefit
6. Partner with environmental groups
7. Stay profitable -control costs and choose proper pricing
8. Work closely with experienced people
9. Small (incremental) changes do add up, and do count
10. Encourage your suppliers and customers to think with more greenality

The book goes on to provide 10 steps for governments and 12 things consumers can do.

Our point, as it has been from the start, and which we will sustain – excuse the quite intentional pun- is that project managers are at that point in most organizations which is particularly sensitive to getting things done.  The ideas above – remain ideas, until a PM grabs on to one of them and makes it real and can hand it off to the steady-state.

We hope that more and more project managers get this.  And more importantly, we hope that the leaders of the agile and innovative companies at the forefront of these efforts understand how much their project managers and through them, their project teams, matter in these efforts.