Helping Private Equity Ask the Right Questions About the Environment
October 29, 2009 | Posted by Tom Murray in Private Equity
The Corner Office Column1 of last Sunday’s New York Times (10/24/09) featured an interview with Tim Brown, the chief executive and president of IDEO, titled “He Prizes Questions More than Answers.” When asked about key leadership lessons, Brown responds by saying “It’s very easy in business to get sucked into being reactive to the problems and questions that are right in front of you. And it doesn’t matter how creative you are as a leader, it doesn’t matter how good the answers you come up with. If you’re focusing on the wrong questions, you’re not really providing the leadership you should.”
The importance of asking the right questions is a valuable and timely reminder not only for business leaders but also for environmental advocates working to promote change. It’s especially timely for me given the new collaboration that EDF just launched with IDEO and Capital C Partners to help scale up our work in the private equity (PE) sector from a few leading firms to the entire industry.
We kicked off this effort two weeks ago at IDEO’s New York office and have a great team of environmental, business, design and communications experts working together towards the goal of making environmental measurement and management a best practice for value creation across the PE sector.
As a first step, the team has already begun reaching out to leaders in the PE community, including PE firms, portfolio companies, limited partners and service providers to collect their insights. Feedback from these interviews will be used to develop a suite of communications tools, resources, and workshops designed to empower PE firms and portfolio companies to ask the right questions about how environmental management can help improve efficiency, reduce operating costs and build value for investors.
Read more about what how we’re creating business value for PE through environmental management in my colleague Kirk Hourdajian post.
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1Corner Office: Every Sunday, Adam Bryant talks with top executives about the challenges of leading and managing. Additional “Corner Office” columns can be found online (http://projects.nytimes.com/corner-office).
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November 6th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
[...] my colleague Tom Murray wrote in a post last week, we have teamed up with the human-centered design firm, IDEO, to create a suite of [...]
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