sustainable Archives - Scrappy Women in Business

(Originally posted at Sue Lebecks’s blog on www.innovatingsmart.org, March 15, 2011)

Yeah, this use of the acronym “SMART” is our own invention. You won’t yet find it in the mainstream (though we’d love to change that over time.) We came up with it to try to articulate specifically what we were learning about sustainable systems, and what it really meant to be “sustainable”.

The word “sustainable” itself is not terribly inspiring. Intuitively, it means something on the order of “continuing to exist”. In recent years this has become a central and often elusive goal for many living systems, social contracts, and businesses (but that is a blog post for another day). Still — “sustainable” is hardly a juicy word to the average innovator (is there such a thing as an average innovator? also a blog post for another day).

So why “SMART”? We began with the word “SMART” because increasingly the ways we manage infrastructures, treat social systems and conduct business have begun to appear to the forward-thinking observer to be (now don’t hate me) — STUPID. Yes — stupid. In fact, the long-term effects of the status quo were dramatized in the popularly and critically acclaimed and innovatively distributed 2009 British film The Age of Stupid. Set in 2055, it tells the story of what happens when the world refuses to change its systems and infrastructures, revealing the “reasons” for this lack of action as, well, lame and stupid.

Now, not everyone is moved by alarmist movies. But even the CEOs and EVPs of the largest corporations in the world, upon coming together to contemplate the future circa 2050, came away saying this about everything from energy and materials to people and values:

“Business-as-usual cannot get us to sustainability or secure economic and social prosperity. These can be achieved only through radical change, starting now.”

Translation: the way we have been doing business, though once thought to be smart, is no longer so. If we continue in the same way going forward — we are stupid. This, however para-phrased, comes directly from the horse’s mouth. A very SMART beginning.

OK, so remind me — what is “SMART” again? SMART is:

Systems-savvy –
designed with sensitivity to the context of the specific systems and environs involved; also, optimizing the interplay between systems.

Managed intelligently –
managed thoughtfully for best result; also, using sensors/data/analysis/control to manage systems operationally in dynamic circumstances.

Adaptive –
designed to work well in a changing world, in a manner that works with the environment and not against it.

Regenerative – applying creative system interplays, where the waste of one system becomes food to another; closed-loop cooperative systems.

Trusted – reliable, exercising good judgment; honest, authentic, transparent; without this quality, the other qualities can be applied in a misguided or misleading fashion.

These are our design principles for a sustainable world. If you ever forget, just check our SMART Design webpage. One day (and it best be soon), the ideas behind “SMART” will become mainstream, and we will have advanced to “The Age of SMART”.

I have always been interested in social causes. In college, I majored in public policy, and I interned one summer for a nonprofit that organizes done-in-a-day projects for busy people who can’t commit to long term volunteer opportunities. I also volunteered quite a bit myself – helping to build homes for low income people, pulling out non-native vegetation (aka weeding!), sorting food at a food bank.….

My senior year in college, the obvious set in. You just don’t make as much money working in nonprofit as you do in the for-profit world. I envisioned the kind of life I wanted for myself, and the type of funds that would be needed to support it. And while I never imagined a lavish lifestyle, I just didn’t want to struggle to buy a home in Silicon Valley, or worry about covering all my expenses.

So I entered the corporate world, doing a two-year stint in strategy consulting and then moving on to high tech product management, and climbing the professional ladder. By the time the kids came around, I started re-thinking how I wanted to spend my time. I wasn’t quite satisfied in my last job, and I was looking for more….

More personal fulfillment,
More flexible work situation,
More control over what I was doing….

So a co-worker and I started a company called Roonga (www.roonga.com). Its original goal was to encourage people to share things with their friends and trusted groups. In doing so, we’d encourage reuse, reduce waste, and help our communities be more sustainable. But smaller trusted circles made it harder to get rid of things you no longer need, and people didn’t always have the things that you need in these tighter networks. So recently, we’ve redirected Roonga to work with nonprofits, providing a platform for nonprofits to communicate in-kind needs and building an audience of followers specifically interested in hearing about these.

With the latest turn that Roonga has taken, I feel like I’ve come full circle back to where I started. We are working with nonprofits to improve the efficiency of their in-kind donations, and to support their causes by opening up their audience. In the process, I am learning a lot about the local causes in Silicon Valley, and I am having a great time doing this!

However, it remains to be seen whether we can build a successful for-profit company working with nonprofits. Roonga is a for-profit company – we like the potential of allowing employees to benefit from the company’s success, and we feel it is important to reward talent at competitive for-profit rates. And for me, I like the self-fulfillment of working for a nonprofit cause, while also still retaining the for-profit mindset. I’d like to think that we can take the best of both worlds and meld them into Roonga – but we are only at the beginning of our journey and still have a long way to go….. The future is ahead of us, and we’ll have to see where we end up.

In the meantime, take a look at our nonprofit beta, follow one of our local nonprofits (http://www.roonga.com/nonprofit/#california), and let me know what you think! Email me at ehorng@roonga.com with any thoughts, suggestions, or feedback.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Evelyn Horng is the co-founder of Roonga, a Silicon Valley startup. She was previously VP, Product Management, at MLSListings, Inc., and held other product management positions in various high tech companies. She has a B.A. in Public Policy from Stanford University. She spends most of her spare time trying to keep up with her two young sons.

Tag Archives: sustainable

The Age of SMART Posted by Sue Lebeck