Hasta La Ideas

Michael Hopkins of th MIT Sloan Management Review in the OppGreen room

A great way to bum people out is to show them a bunch of pictures of dead animals. Bonus bummer points if you show those pictures to a room full of 500 environmentalists.

“What we need to do as Americans is grieve. Grieve what is being lost before our eyes everyday,” said photographer Chris Jordan, whose striking images of albatross killed after ingesting plastic waste from a floating gyre of garbage in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Maybe not the ideal early morning visual, but this presentation set the stage for the green business conference Opportunity Green, held November 7-8 at UCLA. Throughout the two-day event, the mood of presenters and attendees swung back and forth from doomsday depression to utopianistic confidence.

To gauge the situation, a number of presenters asked attendees for a show of hands at various times throughout the conference. How many green business owners are in the crowd? How many of you use Twitter? Do you know what the great Pacific garbage patch is?

The Business Response
Michael Hopkins, editor-in-chief of the MIT Sloan Management Review, asked the room whether they thought businesses had or had not cut down expenditures of sustainability measure due to the economic recession. The audience was just about evenly divided into three groups: those who predicted less spending, those who predicted more, and those who saw no change at all. But when Hopkins asked the same question to companies in a previous survey, fewer than 25% said that they made any reduction in their sustainability measures.

Len Sauers, vice president for global sustainability at Proctor and Gamble, shows a graph of his company’s energy footprint, articulating which products take the most energy to produce, distribute and use.

It seems counterintuitive, but now is the time that people are trying even harder to get the message out—whether it’s a new product, a green message, or even just a simple idea. A panel on using social media like Twitter and Facebook had a captivated audience, seeking ideas on how to use Twitter to build their audience and promote their brands.

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