Holly Harlan, Founder of Entrepreneurs for Sustainability

Cool Cleveland: You sport an illustrious career, including an internship at John Deere Corporation and engineering at General Electric. What was your impetus to originate Entrepreneurs for Sustainability?

Holly Harlan: I learned about sustainability in the spring of 2000, when I heard Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute present at the Cleveland Green Cleveland Building Coalition. I had what is called an "a-ha" moment listening to Amory about something he called "Natural Capitalism." When he told us how much waste was designed into the way we currently design products, services and buildings and that waste was a business opportunity, I saw a way to help the manufacturers in NEO save money and keep jobs. Since 1990 my career had been focused on economic development for manufacturers so in the beginning of my learning I saw sustainability as a way to help local manufacturers.

The summer of 2000, I interned at the Rocky Mountain Institute so that I could bring the principles of sustainability back to NEO manufacturers I was working with at WIRE-Net. When I came back and started to apply these principles, unlike today, only a few manufacturing leaders were interested. We had good success with those who applied the principles to their buildings and operations but I wanted to do more.

I thought, "who might be interested in implementing these ideas now as opposed to later?" "maybe Entrepreneurs because they're already in the throes of trying to change and grow." In November of 2000 with the support of 3 of my friends who were also entrepreneurial business leaders, I asked Sadhu Johnston if I could make an announcement at the Green Building Coalition meeting to find out if there were any entrepreneurs that wanted to work together to implement these ideas of sustainability. Twenty-five people answered my call and E4S was born in December 2000.

Today, 6 years later, we're attracting the entrepreneurs and change agents from manufacturing, service, institutional and government sectors who want to implement sustainability principles in their organizations to obtain triple bottom line benefits. The bottom line is that E4S wants to help those who want to implement Sustainability in their new or existing organizations. I started because I wanted to help the manufacturers of Northeast Ohio. But together with many collaborations, E4S has attracted change agents from all sectors of the economy.

For some people, the concept of sustainability is vague. Could you please explain its elements in a simple, enlightening way?

The most advanced implementers of sustainability struggle with explaining sustainability in a simple, enlightened way. Almost everybody struggles, because there are a lot of different perspectives of sustainability and what it means. From a 10,000 foot view, sustainability is creating products, services, buildings and communities that meet today's needs while honoring future generations rights to the same or better quality of life as we have today.

The drivers of sustainability include personal and planetary health and cost reductions. I think the most exciting element of sustainability is how it inspires new designs. Designs that have triple bottom line benefits-people, planet and profit. "Sustainability is an economic, environmental and community design strategy that starts by transforming buildings, businesses and products and ends up transforming our community."

You emphasize telling both the "story" and the "statistics" behind sustainability. Why is that important?

We learn in different ways so to communicate the value of implementing sustainability to more people, we need both statistics and stories. Some people require statistics in order to have their "a-ha" moment to see where something is valuable. They want to know the economic bottom line. They want to know how many dollars are saved by sustainability principles.

Some people want to understand the whole complexity of sustainability and the story can tell more of these aspects. So, you can find out the measurement of sustainability through the numbers but you find out the meaning of sustainability through the stories.

Sustainability is about whole systems design that engages people from all sectors to look at challenges and opportunities together to find how the integration of people, planet and profit can give us so much more than any one of those ideas by itself. Sometimes it's hard to get one measurement that will give you the answer to why this makes sense to do, because it makes sense from so many different facets. So that's another reason you need a story, so you can explain the different facets. It's not just economic, environmental or the mumber of jobs created, It's much more than that. It's about the meaning people are finding while implementing sustainability, too.

'''The motto at E4S is "Connect-Learn-Do." Could you elaborate on its meaning? "Connect-Learn-Do" is based on a process that I observed when I worked at WIRE-Net. It was a process in which leaders of manufacturing firms made decisions and implemented new technologies.'''

The number one thing for people to do if they want to learn something new, to implement in their business, to help improve their business, is to connect with those learning the same thing. You become more aware of the opportunity both directly from E4S and then also from the participants in the network-so "Connect." "Learn" is our way of going deeper into a subject. Say you come to one of our networking events and you decide that you want to work on energy efficiency within your organization. Then you want to attend an E4S workshop to learn the details about the "how-to" of energy effciency. And finally, the "Do." That's take action once you connect and you learn. You know the resources that can help you. You've learned more about the technologies. So "Connect-Learn-Do" puts sustainability to work for Northeast Ohio.

E4S also highlights the "Triple Bottom Line." What is that and why is it important?

The Triple Bottom Line is another way of talking about sustainability. You can talk about it from the 10,000 foot view which I talked about earlier, which is Personal and Planetary health. You can also talk about it as an integration between these three values: the value for people, the value for the environment, and the value for wealth or the economy, so "People, Planet and Profit."

In the past, we looked at each of those circles one at a time. Today, by looking at all three as the most important thing, you come up with innovations you would never think of by looking at them one at a time. So that's the beauty of the Triple Bottom Line-integrating the three of them so that you better understand how to innovate to help your business.

You're a nationally recognized, sought after expert on the topic of sustainable business practices and was a featured speaker at the Michigan Sustainable Business Symposium. How would you describe Northeast Ohio's Sustainability climate?

That's a tough question. Certainly there's a lot of opportunity and I think Northeast Ohio has, over the last 6 years, steadily grown in its awareness that this is an opportunity that can help the region.

I'd like to think that Northeast Ohio will get Sustainability around design and manufacturing. That we'll look at Sustainability as an opportunity to be more innovative around design. We've been working with the Cleveland Institute of Art since the beginning to try to inject these ideas of sustainability into the design process. That it's about designing new materials and new products around whole systems theories, as opposed to just doing less bad or looking at end of the pipe solutions. Starting in August of this year E4S Third Tuesday Network Events will be focused on sustainability and design.

The Third Tuesday of every month E4S convenes at the Great Lakes Brewery Tasting Room. Talk about the March event for a moment, if you would.

For the March event we're collaborating with the Green Building Coalition. Most Third Tuesday events we collaborate with our strategic partners to create impactful programming that can reach a larger audience. The March topic will be Energy Efficiency-specifically how can we inspire more leaders to implement energy efficiency technologies and practices.

This year we're encouraging people to set BHAG's (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals). We want people to grasp the idea that energy efficiency is going to save them money and make them a more competitive business. In setting a BHAG, they'll be able to inspire more innovative ways to save more energy.

Each October, E4S holds an annual event highlighting a nationally-recognized sustainability expert. Who do you have in mind for this year's presentation?

This year we're actually going to do two National Speakers events. We'll have one in May focusing on "Backing your BHAG". We've invited Paul Murray, Assistant Sustainability Director, at Herman Miller, Inc. to talk about how to set and back a BHAG. Their BHAG is to use 100% Renewable Energy in all their operations by the year 2020. We want to ask them how they're going to back that up? We hope this presentation will inspire others in our region to set energy BHAG's.

In September or October, we're planning to invite Jeanine Benyus who wrote the book about Biomimicry. Biomimicry is one of the most advanced design strategies out there today. Designing as nature designs. Learning from nature how to design without all the waste and with current solar energy. We want to involve a lot of the major institutions, the universities, the musuems and the Cleveland Institute of Art. This meeting will help bring the idea of learning from biologists how nature designs, so that we can improve the way we design our products and services.

And November heralds the annual Champions of Sustainability Awards.

The Champions of Sustainability Awards started in 2003, and the focus here is to really honor those pioneers who are implementing Sustainability. Peers nominate peers and a group of peers select the winners, so it's peer-based awards program. So once a year you can nominate in each of several categories a peer that you think is leading the way and inspiring others to follow them.

Can you showcase other programming E4S has to offer?

We have our Third Tuesday Networking Events, that's under our connect program. We've grown our network to 3500 people at a rate of about 40% a year. We're adding workshops and tours to follow up on our learn program offerings. We had our first Solar Thermal Conference where we had 43 people attend. The result is that the city of Cleveland plans to install solar thermal hot water heating at a Rec Center. Another Learning Program offering is the SI Programs (Sustainability Implementation Groups) for businesses and organizations to help them create strategic planning to implement sustainability.

Last June, we graduated our first 7 companies. Now they each have a strategic plan as to how they're going to implement sustainability in their building, operations, products and services, markets and company culture. They're now our "advanced learners" in Sustainability and we'll continue to bring them together to teach them more advanced sustainability strategies. We've also started custom workshops to teach the principles of sustainability to larger organizations.

The Do program is about implementing the principles of sustainability within an organization or coordinating larger projects. One service we plan to offer is participating on a company's green team. We'll bring the power of the E4S network, knowledge and experience to their teams.

Finally, we're leading an economic development project called Waste=Revenue Round Table. We are working with 10 businesses in the Cuyahoga Valley to help them identify ways to take one businesses waste and turn it into another business product. This is called industrial ecology. We are working on several exciting possible connections.

We're sitting at the home of E4S located at the Enterprise Center at Glenville. How did you decide on its location and could you decribe its layout?

Our fiscal sponsor between 2002-2006, was Shorebank Cleveland. They're located right next to us and manage the Glenville Enterprise Center. When we were getting ready to have our own space (we met virtually for a long time in Internet cafes, where we met George and others from Cool Cleveland), they offered to rent us this space. We were glad to be so close to SEC.

We laid out the space so that we'd have opportunities to bring groups of various sizes into the space. We're sitting in the Collaboration Room where we invite our members to come and work on their projects. Sometimes you need to get away from your business to get some fresh thinking. We hope that they'll come here to do some of that. We have a Celebration area where we celebrate our members, friends and sponsors. We have an open area for education and training. We also have a Resource Library and then we have space for our offices.

Last year, E4S began holding meetings in the Akron area. Are there plans to continually expand the E4S geography?

Right now, we do not focus on geography. We invite whoever wants to come to E4S in Cleveland. We've had people come from Michigan, Pennsylvania and Cincinnati. We'll be embarking on a strategic planning session in July to talk about how E4S will grow. We've already decided to add a networking hub in Akron, and currently are planning five events in Akron this year. Whether we expand from there will be decided at our strategic planning meeting.

How do you envision the future of E4S?

I'm really looking forward to the Strategic Planning process to find out more about how our Board, staff and community feel about the future of E4S. Personally, you know, it's changing so quickly. I'm not sure what the future is going to hold. Connect-Learn-Do is a process that works to help people implement sustainability. The SI Progams are ways to help companies, government and institutions implement sustainability. So we'll stay focused on putting Sustainability to work, taking action and creating the processes to do that.

What geography we'll cover, I'm not sure. It depends on the funds we can raise. There's been talk of E4S taking the model to other cities. That could be a future for E4S. I know for sure that the core of this really is helping people take action around Sustainability and implementing those ideas and making a difference for their company and community.

Since founding E4S in December of 2000, what is your single proudest accomplishment within the organization?

I don't really resonate with the word "Pride' so much because I really feel like E4S almost "happened," and I got to go along for the ride. So I don't feel so much like I've done it. I feel like together it's happened and it's taken a lot of people-my Board and the network to make it happen.

So it's not personal pride so much as a celebration of all we've done together. And that's to continue through these last six years of bringing this topic to the business community of Northeast Ohio. Now they're in a place to really digest it and make it happen. We're here with the resources to support them. We've developed the resources to support what is now starting to happen around the world.

Finally, what are three key takeaway points you'd like Cool Clevelanders to know about E4S, if nothing else?

One, is that sustainability is about design and innovation. Sustainability is about re-designing products and services so that future generations have the same quality of life that we do or better. It's not about doing less or conserving, It's about using Design to change the way we live and work. I want the Cool Cleveland audience to understand that this is an opportunity for everyone, especially young people embarking on their career. It's a new way of thinking about how we live and work. Whole Systems thinking is the way we will design in the future. I would want them to learn more about Whole Systems thinking and how to apply it.

Secondly, it really does take a community to make sustainability work. We can't change by ourselves, or if we do,it's very hard. If you try to quit drinking or smoking by yourself, it's hard. If you try to exercise by yourself, it's hard. So how are you going to change the way we do business? Not by ourselves. We're going to do it together, so community is really important. Sustainability is also about whole systems thinking, so you can't see all the opportunties by yourself because you only have your perspective.

Lastly, it's about taking action now. You don't necessarily have to reduce Climate Change in One- Fell- Swoop. It won't happen anyway. It's about taking the action you can now. If you're interested in climate change, you may change your lightbulbs to compact flourescent. That would be a step. You may decide to purchase more local food. You may decide to change the way you design your products. What we want is to encourage people to take steps, some small, some large but get going in this direction, depending on how much you can do today.

"Design and Innovation, Community and Taking Action."

Yep, that's it. You've got it.

From Cool Cleveland contributor and active E4S participant Tim Zaun tmzaunATyahoo.com
Photo by Victoria Avi
(:divend:)