Reflections at Year 15 – Part II: The Search is On!

The Search for the first Clean50 Begins – and The Award Nearly Dies at Week 4!

As we celebrate our 15th Clean50 list, we’re looking back at how the awards were created, the initial stumbles and challenges we faced, and how seemingly inconsequential moments proved to be huge – and could so easily have turned out a different way. Part 1 ran last week, sharing the initial concept and how the Clean50 Award grew out of a failed high school project, and which should be read before this piece. This week talks about refining of the concept and the search for the first 50 Honourees. Next week’s conclusion will cover the first Summit, and its aftermath.

From the outset, the Clean50 wasn’t started to give away plaques. Years of working with sales people, however, had taught me that sales people would work twice as hard and could be even more motivated to win a big screen TV from their employer than they would be to take home twice the cost of that TV in commissions. Bizarre but true.

So, if we couldn’t persuade people to come and connect at the Summit on the merits of the gathering, maybe we could leverage the promise of a (then) seventy-dollar award plaque that people could stick on their office wall to inspire them to get on that plane, and, most critically, come and work together with others of the same ilk – to accelerate collaboration and drive change. And only THEN, over dinner, get that plaque. Why fight human nature? Let’s do it! That said, I think it’s fair to say that after going through a Summit, 98% of the participants truly understand that the value of the plaque is absolutely nothing, when compared to the value of the connections and the learnings they get to keep.

But first, we had to find 50 people willing to sign up to accept an unheard of award from an organization that was, at best, also unheard of, and at worst, considered to be “in this” solely to build a database we could later exploit as headhunters, or seen as carpetbaggers, only “in it” because sustainability was the flavour of the month. One respected and long term sustainability leader actually accused me of that to my face and refused her nomination that first year. (I am pleased to report she later changed her tune, after showing up as a guest in year two and then submitted in year 3. Still waiting on the apology for the rude insult though.)

We also had to start the program over the summer, when people were on vacation, and while trying to run a whole other business. Without either structure, or infrastructure, Clean50 dedicated staff, and armed only with a concept – absolutely nothing in the way of developed criteria to use to compare nominees to each other.  All of that was, in the proverbial sense, our building the plane while it was already in the air, albeit with completely untrained pilots.

But picking the right people is kind of core to our brand. Our very long track record of making those decisions so well over the then prior 18 years that one client who’d hired over 100 people from us called us “talent savants”. So, things like that gave me confidence we could do that in this new market with reasonably good results. For these awards, head to head comparisons would be impossible. We needed to have a good mix of objective and subjective – and in 16 categories including some to which we had very little exposure. We needed to figure it out fast and be able to have a benchmark we could use to explain our rationale. 

Ultimately, we picked “GHGs reduction  / avoided” as the core criteria we could apply or adapt to most situations.

The First Intern

The first step after that was finding an intern to help us. We advertised, and got precisely one candidate. A brilliant recent PhD, Jennifer Forkes blew us away on the spot.  Truthfully, that was a pretty low bar at the time, but with her knowledge of both sustainability and many of the players across Canada, her willingness to work for just the experience (the financial crisis / recession was still on) and her fabulous communications skills, plus a great sense of humour and a lot of courage… We simply couldn’t have found a better pick, even amongst 100 candidates. 

Nonetheless, as we interviewed her, we feigned having lots of candidates to pick from before calling her back two days later, to offer her our “highly sought-after job”.  And Jen was the next of the amazingly good fortune and seemingly inconsequential decisions we seemed to luck into, but that continually paid off with remarkable results. Jen killed it, finding people, helping us refine the criteria, developing a simple questionnaire document we could use to track nominee impacts, and largely calmly, managing anything else we needed.  

With Jen’s help, we defined 16 categories into which we could subdivide people, in order to ensure we had great cross-sectoral representation. It’s stood the test of time: That year we had two different consultants categories, differentiating between larger, or more generic consulting firms , including architects, lawyers etc. as separate from sustainability specific consulting firms – and we had only one category for governments across all three layers. Today we have a single consulting category, and have differentiated Cities from the other two levels of government. We’ve added clarifications (Education evolved to become “Education & Thought Leadership” and Consultants became “Consultants & Enablers”) but otherwise the categories have withstood a dramatically changed sustainability landscape.

And our initial commitment to name at least two people in each category has ensured that every Clean50 Summit introduces people to others they would never usually encounter – and also ensures that participants hear viewpoints they might otherwise never hear.  And those cross-sectoral collaborations have been a key part of the outcomes – and the Summit magic.  

The other thing we decided upon was to consider impacts over the prior two years. We felt if we took the award onwards into subsequent years, that this would disadvantage winners from the prior year from winning twice in a row, and also avoid recognizing someone for a one-off great year – there would need to be consistency to compete.

With no budget, we taught ourselves how to develop a ridiculously bad website that captured at least some of what we had in mind, and got it up.  When people asked what we were about, we at least had somewhere we could send them – even if it was terrible.

We began researching and sourcing companies doing good work, and then connected making phone calls.  And when we connected with people, we leveraged that far better-known Corporate Knights brand in every single conversation with potential nominees.

The First Really Fateful Phone Call

Our good luck continued when, at some point around week 3 of the search, Jen identified HP as a company leading on environmental sustainability, and in tracking who to credit, she discovered the legendary Frances Edmonds. Frances, always a believer that “sustainability is a team sport”, in turn nominated her boss, Lloyd Bryant, as clearly the champion we should recognize, because he enabled her and got support for everything she was ultimately able to accomplish. She made a compelling argument. 

At the time Frances was contemplating submitting Lloyd / HP as a nominee for another award from an organization called Green Living, but the Corporate Knights name brought us at least enough cred that she agreed to at least listen.  Her reference to that other award was a distant warning sign, but one  we did not yet appreciate was a cloud on our horizon. 

Jen passed me the phone at some point, and realizing how much was still unformed, Frances provided me, in no uncertain terms,  with several earfuls about what the award should look like – the types of people we ought to recognize – what was important, the criteria we should prioritize, how we should measure and compare, and critically, had me appreciate how important it was to establish the right criteria to make sure we didn’t recognize green-washers.  All incredibly great advice,

 If you’ve ever met Frances, you will know she’s not shy, has very little patience for fools, and has no trouble expressing herself or her opinions clearly.  Between her science degree and work in the UK before coming to Canada, her long tenure with HP, the unique projects she’d been able to tackle, the ENGOs with whom she’d partnered, her wide span of knowledge, and her well informed perspective on how to “do sustainability”, she rightly, then, and now, owns the title of probably the best qualified and definitely the most principled sustainability leader in corporate Canada.  So to get her input was that next remarkable stroke of good fortune the universe provided us.

I spent that call initially mostly terrified of exposing just how deep my own ignorance was, asking lots of questions, but then, when it was clear I couldn’t understand the answers, eventually owning it, and seeking her advice, while asking her to dumb it down for me, while madly taking as many notes as I could, and doing my best not to appear a complete idiot.  I was completely intimidated.  She was incredibly patient, given how stupid some of my questions were.

I was far better equipped at the conclusion of the call than I had been at the start.  I had no idea at the time just how critical to our success Frances and that phone call would later prove to be – not just for the advice, not just in year one, but thereafter, and still.   At the time. I only knew that after the call she had made the Clean50 program better, and she was now considering both awards – but also that she only had time to pursue one of the two.   And it could so easily have gone the other way.

Are we ready to go it alone? A Corporate Take Over – and It’s Just Week Four!

And then, about a week later – four weeks in – another fateful phone call – this time from Toby. 

It turned out, unbeknownst to us,  he had also agreed with Laurie Simmonds to co-sponsor the Green Living Show Awards that Frances had referred to.

Laurie had a massive budget, corporate sponsors, and multiple people on staff, as well as a process laid out, and advisors in place, and an actually pretty and functional website. We had none of those. And so naturally, her team had picked up wind of what we were doing when people were trying to decide whether to respond to a Clean50 nomination, or a Green Living nomination, and some shared that information with her. Notably Frances.

Her partnership with Toby and Corporate Knights was news to us – but we discovered through that call with Toby that HP was tilting our way (yay! A win!) – had told Laurie that – and Laurie wasn’t happy about that at all.

Toby explained and Laurie later confirmed to me: She was (understandably) annoyed that there were two awards competing for attention, although focused on considerably different criteria, and both awards with Corporate Knights as a partner, with neither of us initially knowing about the other.  And as his first partner, Laurie demanded Toby abandon us and honour what she perceived to be his exclusive relationship with her. 

Toby – also understandably – didn’t want to do so.  He felt there was room for multiple  sustainability awards: The already well established CK awards, the new Green Living awards and the new Clean50 awards all sailed on different tacks – and from his perspective, the more, the merrier.

But Laurie insisted, so Toby called and provided me with an ultimatum.  He felt he could honour his commitment to Laurie if the Clean50 was something CK ran on its own, and we walked away, or he could walk away and it would be something we ran on our own.  But net, the partnership couldn’t survive as we had originally envisioned.

I refused to walk away from either the investment already made, or what I considered “my idea”– the unique approach of recognizing individuals instead of companies, and for including people from such a broad array of organizations – so we restructured with Toby as our “media sponsor” externally – and no longer a partnership, but he would still publish the results in Corporate Knights magazine – but now at our expense, of course…  And after I objected, he agreed he wouldn’t partner with Green Living either, and would stay neutral so neither would have an advantage.

And while he did stay neutral, Toby also proved to be a great resource – not actually contacting people, but providing us with ideas about who we could nominate, and at the conclusion, added advice about who amongst our nominees we should choose.  

And so, another pivotal moment: At the conclusion of that phone conversation, when I refused to walk away, the Clean50 was now, for better or worse, solely a Delta Management Group sponsored initiative. At the time, that was very scary. In hindsight, thank you Laurie!

The Search Continues... The list grows

And we kept rolling.  While no other conversation then – or since – has been as consequential to the existence and survival of the Clean50 as that first one with Frances – and her subsequent decision to pursue a Clean50 award over the alternative – other calls that summer were huge.  Two others in particular stand out from that search.

In addition to Jen Forkes’ and our own research and outreach, our advisors came up big as fabulous sources. Celine and Velma paired on several late Friday conference calls as the list started coming together, and they added the founder of the Globe conferences, John Wiebe, clean tech venture capital pioneer Andree-Lise Methot from Cycle Capital, SDTC leader Vicky Sharpe, Nalcor’s  CEO Ed Martin, Suncor’s Gord Lambert, Bullfrog’s Tom Heintzman, and others to our Nominee lists.

Celesa found us Five Winds’ Kevin Brady, Stantec’s Marty Janowitz, Coro Strandberg, and Bob Mitchell of Conoco-Phillips, as well as a few others.

I’m not sure who referred us to Tima Bansal. We were asking all the nominees for ideas on who else should be considered, and I think there’s a chance it might have been Toby, or Chad Park, then at Natural Step.  But at a point when we desperately needed great nominees, Tima proved a Godsend equal to one of our official advisors, and proved to be the third consequential phone call of the search process – not just for who she suggested – but for her nominees’ subsequent impact on both the first Summit and for the Clean50’s later ultimate success.

Tima ran a really cool collaboration group, supporting non-competitive corporates advancing sustainability in their own organizations and sharing their best practices.  Tima had hand-picked that elite group and naturally nominated many of her group members for an award, including Karen Clarke-Whistler of TD, Frank Dottori of Domtar, Tyler Elm of Canadian Tire, and Michael Jantzi of Sustainalytics.  All, including Tima, made the first list.   Frank in turn referred us to Antony Marcil of FSC.  Karen and TD became a sponsor a couple of years later.  All of these individuals were worthy nominees and their stature in the community ultimately helped us gain credibility in later years.

But most critically, Tyler also proved incredibly crucial to our first Summit’s success, and which, without his involvement, would have been an abject failure. We’ll come back to him in the next and final article in this series.

The summer progressed – we refined the list and got increasingly frantic as we tried to fill the last remaining spots with worthwhile nominees who would also commit to participating at the Summit we had planned – or sending someone senior in their place.  This is where Velma absolute shone: She called up various of the nominees and simply told them they had to be there.  No ifs, ands, or buts.  On Velma’s say so alone, the CEO of Nalcor agreed to send senior VP level staff for the day, and then join them himself, via the corporate jet, for the award dinner.  I don’t want to think about the GHGs involved.  But at the time it meant something that the CEO of a major corporation was showing up from half-way across the country to collect that seventy-dollar plaque!

The Clean49? Not quite the same ring to it…

It’s September 26th. As we got to the last 2 days before we were to go public with the list, the CEO of Atlantic Beef Packers from PEI, who had made the list on the basis of the most sustainable beef ever, called me at some ungodly hour in the morning and told me he had to pull out.  (How could beef be so sustainable you ask? The cattle ate a diet of what would otherwise be “waste potatoes” – the defects no one would buy – and back before I went eschewed meat, this was not only the greenest beef ever, but also the very best beef I had ever tasted – and tender enough you could cut it with a dull plastic spoon.  We served it for dinner the first three Summits – and if you’re still eating beef, highly recommended.) 

But their sustainability chops (pun intended) didn’t matter – there was a provincial election going on, the provincial government had contributed funds to shore the company up, and help preserve PEI beef farmers after previously promising not to give them any more money – and it had suddenly escalated to become a controversial election issue.  His political masters didn’t want anything to raise ABP’s profile, and it was feared a Clean50 Award might do that, and he was ordered to pull out.  Clearly they over-estimated our reach. But nonetheless, we were short an honouree, and just 48 hours before the Summit! 

Scrambling, we raced to backfill with a late nomination: A group from U of T’s engineering school who had led an effort to have all their classmates sign a pledge that, for the balance of their engineering careers, they would “first, do no harm” to the environment seemed promising.  Despite the last-minute notice, they graciously accepted and showed up! Crisis averted in two provinces.  And so ended the first selection process – with frantic phone calls to U of T professors begging their team to be honouree number fifty.  Not exactly how we had expected….

But ultimately two profs and two students joined the list as a team, and had later impact as well. They showed up at the first Summit, where they strategized effectively with CEOs and entrepreneurs and senior bankers – and magic happened! And inspired by the impact of those two students, Marianne Touchie and Ekaterina Tzekova at the Summit, two years later we added an “Emerging Leaders” Category,

Next week – the first Summit and its aftermath will conclude our “origin story”