Archive for December, 2007
I’ve been winging my way around the country attending holiday parties at some of our sites this week, and it has brought home to me what an incredible group of people work for ESS, and how important people are to the success of any company.
According to Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, the journey always starts with disciplined people — people who are ambitious for the company and the cause, rather than just for themselves. These people don’t have to be sent to “motivational” workshops; they are self-motivated. And their leaders don’t believe in overnight success or the management theory of the moment.
Collins analyzed more than 1,400 companies, and found that in each case, “a down-to-earth, pragmatic, committed-to-excellence process — a framework — kept each company, its leaders and its people on track for the long haul. In each case, it was the triumph of the Flywheel Effect over the Doom Loop, the victory of steadfast discipline over the quick fix.” The people in Collins’ great companies are hedgehogs, rather than foxes. They concentrate on the essentials and ignore everything else.
“Foxes pursue many ends at the same time and see the world in all its complexity. They are ’scattered or diffused, moving on many levels … never integrating their thinking into one overall concept or unifying vision. Hedgehogs, on the other hand, simplify a complex world into a single organizing idea, a basic principle or concept that unifies and guides everything. It doesn’t matter how complex the world, a hedgehog reduces all challenges and dilemmas to simple—indeed almost simplistic—hedgehog ideas. For a hedgehog, anything that does not somehow relate to the hedgehog idea holds no relevance.” (p.90-93)
We’ve been building a company of hedgehogs for the past fourteen years. We aren’t sexy, and we don’t seek or get lots of PR. But we try to stay on task so we move in the right direction.
People join ESS because they believe in the cause: helping the environment by providing information management tools to businesses, so they can better manage their operational risks, including GHG emissions, health and safety hazards and emergency incident management.
And this year, as we celebrate the holiday season, we are also grateful to our customers, who are also hedgehogs: they are focused on their sustainability initiatives and on making their businesses great in 2008. Happy holidays, and see you next year.
Tags: emergency incident management environment ghg emissions good to great health safety jim collins
December 21st, 2007
As we wind down to the end of a very productive year at ESS, I’ve begun to reflect on our many successes. A growing number of corporate executives now recognize that integrated technology platforms offer the most effective way to measure and mitigate risks associated with environmental, health, safety, crisis and performance management. We have been at the forefront of that trend, and we’re grateful that a significant number of those corporate executives have chosen ESS software to support those initiatives.
People think that at a company like ours, technology is our most important asset. It’s not. At ESS, our people are our greatest asset.
Long ago, we made a commitment to build a team with the industry’s best domain experience and duration of service. As a result, we have the strongest and deepest experience in the industry, with a combined 820 years EHS domain experience and 970 years developing software for EHS. We’re a veteran team and we’ve been together for many years, getting better and better at what we do. And at a time in which other companies are experiencing significant brain drain, ESS has a depth of experience that’s unmatched.
ESS has been at the forefront of strategy and innovation in the industry since our inception. We have leveraged our industry expertise and domain experience to develop a comprehensive set of best-of-breed solutions. Over the years, ESS experts have pioneered the development of landmark technology solutions to address challenges for refrigerants, air and fugitive emissions, crisis management, chemical inventory reporting and hazardous materials tracking.
Our strength and industry experience ensure that ESS information management solutions are properly aligned to address real industry needs. Our depth of experience ensures that ESS technology helps organizations to drive increased productivity and supports initiatives to reduce risks associated with EHS and Crisis Management performance.
Now we’re going to let you meet some of our difference-makers – the people on our team who are, in large part, responsible for our success. You’ll hear many interesting stories from people who are at the nexus of big changes in EHS software business.
We’re proud of our team, and it will be my pleasure to share short clips of our team members during the next few weeks, so you can see why we believe that our people make the difference at ESS.
Tags: crisis domain experience ehs environmental health safety industry expertise information management solutions
December 12th, 2007
Al Gore has received his Nobel Prize and is on his way to Bali to monitor the talks on climate change, which appear to be going well. No nation would like to be seen as the sole impediment to averting a planetary catastrophe. News of the environment is all over the media. All the focus on climate change has led to a rush of businesses to monitor greenhouse gases and lower their carbon footprint. While this is a good thing to do, in some cases organizations are taking a reactive approach that takes a narrow view of one issue while ignoring the interrelationships of GHG emissions to all other environmental issues. This has the risk of becoming a knee-jerk reaction that obscures the view of an integrated enterprise wide strategy that deals effectively with the complexity and impact of all environmental risk to the organization. GHG management is a problem that can and should be incorporated within the holistic and strategic framework of risk management that aligns the organization with their overall environmental stewardship and sustainability goals. Forward thinking businesses understand that managing these issues effectively is an integral component of their ability to achieve and maintain leadership in their given industry now and in the future.
Best of class organizations are taking an integrated organizational approach rather than taking a singular and tactical approach to GHG. An integrated systems approach will allow businesses to more effectively organize their people, processes and technology in a manner that will allow them to compete now and into the future.
We see this reflected in our own business. Our customers are not only interested in their carbon footprint, they’re interested in everything else that might impact the sustainability of their organization. Long before that set of buzzwords became popular, they have had the capability to monitor, predict and avert catastrophes that are perhaps equally as important as the emission of greenhouse gases: chemicals, hazardous wastes, fugitive emissions, waste water, industrial hygiene and regulatory compliance. These risks are more than compliance risks. They are operational risks inherent in business and they all must be monitored and managed.
Taking a holistic systems approach also requires implementing an IT technology strategy that aligns with the organizations enterprise wide strategies. As far back as 1999, we decided that enabling an organization to execute on their corporate initiatives for environmental stewardship, compliance, health & safety and sustainability is best accomplished through an integrated technology platform. The reason we believe in the integrated technology platform rather than a fragmented single application for each environmental issue is the concept of the interrelationship and common data elements between all of these issues. Every business I have talked to over the past 20 years wants to have an effective system in place to minimize all of their environmental risks. The reality is that it is very difficult to take an enterprise wide holistic approach to managing environmental risk when you have to rely on a multitude of single disparate applications that don’t talk to each other. If you do integrate them and try to roll up the information for management purposes and stakeholder reporting, it is costly to build and maintain the integration points between applications and the integrity of the data at a corporate level has and additional layer of risk. Each of these stand alone disparate applications actually becomes part of the risk. Why manage risk with a risky technology strategy and platform?
As a result, over the years we have chosen the integrated modular path over the “individual application” path. Our modular solutions are all excellent, but as a whole they are more than the sum of their parts. They enable the management and leaders of the organization to view their entire business from a sustainability perspective and to look at sustainability itself in the most complete possible way.
As I read in a recent AMR report, businesses need to take a hard look at three dimensions (business strategy, organizational processes and enterprise architecture) when assessing the right technology. They need to be intertwined so that businesses don’t just change their business strategy; they also change the technology and organization to match for maximum value. Called the Performance-Driven Business Network (PBN), this new business model is about synchronizing business strategy, organizational principles and enterprise architecture not just within a company, but up and down the greater business network with suppliers, customers and other partners to better compete—no, to compete at all—in the new global economy. They need to stop being project driven and become performance driven, in which change is a constant, and people, technology and business processes are changed in concert for the betterment of the business.
The result: Faster, predictable response to business shifts, a performance-driven collaborative culture, risk and compliance management embedded into operations, extended influence beyond traditional ecosystems and much better use of assets, including information and knowledge, technology, internal and external human capital, facilities and returns on invested capital.
In Bali, governmental representatives and NGOs are meeting. Again, this is good. But I guarantee that what will come out of those meetings has already been factored into a sustainability initiative by any enterprise that wishes to compete and survive. I see it every day because for almost two decades we have been on the front lines.
Tags: al gore bali carbon footprint climate change environmental stewardship ghg emissions greenhouse gases nobel prize
December 10th, 2007
