Luminary recipient and a sought after writer, speaker, and educator, Perske specializes in helping organizations with mobility, social media, and technology in the built environment. “Change, particularly big change, only happens when sticking with the old way is more painful than moving to the new. But we cannot afford to feel how bad the way of pillaging can get before we change. We need to mindfully and individually decide to change now how we source products, build buildings, consume energy, etc. and make choices to do it differently from our ancestors. If we do not, the consequences are massive starvation, deteriorating health, environmental collapse, social unrest and eventually war,” he says.

The pendulum is swinging towards meaningful conversations in the workplace characterized by coaching and mentoring employees. Research from the global management consulting firm Hay Group shows that highly engaged employees improve business performance by up to 30% and that fully engaged employees are 2.5 times more likely to exceed performance expectations than their ‘disengaged’ colleagues.

The system breaks down when companies fail to adequately recognize what motivates and engages their employees in the first place. That is why more are embedding sustainability into their organizations. They are increasingly recognizing the key role that their employees play in making these efforts a success. Taking sustainability seriously goes beyond sustainability reports. It is about getting the whole company to move together.

Most employees want to do a good job. When employees take their roles seriously and demonstrate their drive to “Exceed Expectations”, they become key players that will drive a company in a sustainable direction. With younger employees increasingly committed to sustainability as a way of life. eBay’s employee green team has over 2,400 employees across the company working on everything from eliminating Styrofoam cups in break rooms to encouraging eBay to build large solar installations at their San Jose, California headquarters. But green teams are only the tip of the iceberg.

IBM is one of several companies that have gone further, by actually inviting its employees to help determine the company’s overall sustainability strategy. IBM’s Big Green Innovations program includes environmental initiatives. They have discovered that green is good but not enough in itself. ”Greening” the office is fine but the breakdown comes when employees begin struggling with what they themselves perceive to be poor job performance when it comes to green and that can be stressful. Beyond green, workers who feel their poor job performance could result in physical injury, damage to company’s equipment or reputation, or financial loss, they are twice as likely to experience high levels of stress. And employees working long or variable hours tend to experience more workplace stress. The system is broken and unsustainable unless employees have access to resources that address their mental health concerns. Employers should be asking, ‘What am I doing to reduce stress in my most valuable people?’”

Microsoft designed Windows Phone 7 with the mobile business user in mind. It aptly meets the needs of harried workers looking for easy, intuitive ways to handle stressful  business needs from their mobile phones. Equipping employees with smartphones that integrate company IT infrastructure makes working from mobile devices convenient rather than a headache. Cloud computing solutions has also erased the limits that used to exist when workers attempted to conduct business outside the office.

The biggest threat will arrive in the coming decades when many organizations  face operational discontinuity because they cannot transfer knowledge to a stable workforce. Companies have a choice. They can let change happen to them, or they can take a sustainable approach and manage change by designing engaging work experiences.

The best organizations will create core competencies around embracing change, anticipating it, and turning it to their competitive advantage. This brave new world of business will invest in new technologies and development. True sustainability is creating a culture that embraces change and develops creative strategies to serve customers and retain key people during the transition.

“With government regulations likely to restrict the use of less efficient lighting, LED development will continue to thrive due to compliance with ecological regulations that ban mercury and lead from the waste disposal stream,” notes Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Kasthuri Jagadeesan. “One of the major drivers for solid-state lighting research and development are the immense investments by government and corporate worlds such as the U.S.’s Next-Generation Lighting Initiative (NGLI), Europe’s Organic LEDs for ICT and Lighting Applications (OLLA), Japan’s ‘Light for the 21st Century’ project, and so on.”

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan (http://www.technicalinsights.frost.com), Advancements in Solid State Lighting, finds that for LEDs to become the mainstream option for street lighting and general illumination purposes, more development in performance enhancement is needed. Such advancements include warm white light generation, packaging improvements for improved heat and light extraction, along with the availability of more efficient green solid-state sources. These are in turn dependent on quantum leaps in internal and external quantum efficiencies, especially for warm light and better color rendering.

Technology competition among LED manufacturers fuels the growth of high-brightness LEDs segment, particularly white LED technologies for a range of applications – from backlighting for liquid-crystal display (LCD) panels in personal computers (PCs) to headlights in automobiles, as well as lighting products for outdoors, offices and homes. Cross-licensing agreements between the major LED manufacturers of Japan, United States and Europe focus toward the creation of brighter white and colored LEDs with higher efficacy. This shift is not just to avoid patent-related disputes, but to further the cause of the technology.

To enhance this technology, manufacturers should increase the efficiency of white light generation, and achieve cost breakthroughs and extended lifetimes for high brightness LEDs. In addition, manufacturers should deliver proper thermal management in solid-state lighting devices.

Since the solid-state lighting industry is application-driven, product development exhibits variability with current volumes not significant enough to decrease costs. Costs are likely to reduce as rapid innovations in organic LED (OLED) and LED technology shift focus toward factors such as new materials and production techniques.

“The trend among lighting fixture manufacturers is to study applications for which LEDs might be suitable and then work backwards to develop fixtures that can be effectively and economically maintained,” cites Jagadeesan. “However, manufacturers will first have to improve the lumen output for LED-based white lighting to successfully introduce LEDs into the general illumination market.”

In the future, LEDs would offer innovative solutions for interior and exterior lighting design. Outdoor lighting may be the first general illumination application to gain a foothold due to user concerns involving energy savings, re-lamping and other maintenance expenses.

Extensive research on phosphor forms the backbone of inorganic white light sources and is vital for the future growth and protection of intellectual property; therefore, its development will be in tandem with solid-state white lighting in the general lighting market.

Advancements in Solid State Lighting, a part of the Technical Insights Growth Partnership Services program, provides a technology overview and outlook for the market dynamics in the solid-state lighting industry between 2007 and 2015. The study covers LEDs and OLEDs. This research service includes detailed technology analysis and industry trends evaluated following extensive interviews with market participants. Interviews with the press are available.

If you are interested in an analysis, which provides manufacturers, end users, and other industry participants with an overview, summary, challenges and latest coverage of Advancements in Solid State Lighting, send an e-mail to Johanna Haynes, Corporate Communications, at jhaynes_pr@frost.com with the following information: your full name, company name, title, telephone number, e-mail address, city, state, and country. We will send you the information via e-mail upon receipt of the above information.

Technical Insights is an international technology analysis business that produces a variety of technical news alerts, newsletters and research services.

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Consulting Company, partners with clients to accelerate their growth. The company’s Growth Partnership Services, Growth Consulting and Career Best Practices empower clients to create a growth focused culture that generates, evaluates and implements effective growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan employs over 45 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses and the investment community from more than 30 offices on six continents. For more information about Frost & Sullivan’s Growth Partnerships, visit http://www.frost.com.

Sustainability is currently a big concern for businesses, but what does it actually mean, and why should your business be worried about it? To help answer this, Workplace Law, the employment law, HR and H&S experts has launched Sustainable Workplaces 2008: Special Report, which clarifies confusion over what the broad term ‘sustainability’ actually means for business, and outlines the case for it: in terms of both the environment and the financial savings it could bring.

Over the past few years ‘sustainability’ has become a buzzword, seemingly dropped into articles whenever the subject of global warming, climate change, pollution or recycling comes up. The report covers the whole spectrum of sustainability, from Corporate Social Responsibility to waste management, to give businesses all the information they need on this increasingly popular topic in one place.

Sustainable practices can improve your business’ reputation and save you money, and this is highlighted by the ‘real world’ case studies within this report on companies such as Tesco, KPMG, Wal-Mart and Marks & Spencers. This report explains the business case for sustainability alongside the environmental and social cases.

Written by a variety of big names in the sustainability business (Envirowise and Bureau Veritas to name but two), Sustainable Workplaces 2008: Special Report will help you to get to grips with the often-confusing subject of sustainability and help you to apply the concept in the workplace.

The report answers key questions such as:

* Why do I need to concern myself with sustainability?
* What can I do to make sure my business is sustainable?
* Why is sustainability to do with more than just the environment?
* How can sustainable practices save my business time and money?

The report includes an A-Z guide to sustainability-related legislation, supported by further chapters explaining how your business should comply with the law. Furthermore, the report explains how implementing sustainable practices will help your business use fewer resources, meaning lower bills, and profit from the environmental benefits of sustainability.

For more information and to get your copy of the special report, go to www.workplacelaw.net or call 0871 777 8881.

A decade ago there were some predictions that there would be less usage of paper ultimately leading to a paperless society. Contrary to those predictions, computers, printers, fax machines and other information technologies have created an increased demand for paper for printing photos, recipes, school work, Web pages – and business documents.

All this printing, copying and faxing of paper has a significant cost on a number of levels. Printers, consumables, and paper represent a sizable ongoing expense item. Then there is the environmental impact of manufacturing the printers and ink or toner cartridges, making the paper, and then transporting and ultimately disposing of the paper and the consumables. There is also the fuel consumption and associated global warming impact when physical documents are sent around the world via ground or air courier services. For instance, the U.S. pulp and paper industry is the second largest consumer of energy and uses more water to produce a ton of product than any other industry, and the EPA estimates that more than 400 million ink and 100 million toner cartridges end up in landfills each year.

Given the cost of paper, it behooves the smart business person and anyone concerned about maintaining a livable environment to think twice about hitting “print” and to aggressively pursue ways to reduce paper consumption. While modern technology has made it fast and easy to print documents, this ease of use is a double-edge sword since it causes more pages than ever to be printed. In fact, studies indicate that the average U.S. office worker prints 10,000 pages per year. Rarely do users think about the cost as pages pile up unread on the printer or in trash or recycle bins. Even worse, all this printing can represent a significant security risk – while you may enforce strong passwords on log-ins, printed documents lack any form of security and can be easily be lost, copied, stolen or manipulated using nothing more sophisticated than scissors and glue.

Over the last few years, a number of technologies have emerged that could – if widely adopted – lead to an overall decrease in the amount of paper consumed. For example, with the emergence of social media tools like blogs and wikis that encourage online interaction, people are spending time reading information electronically rather than on printed paper. More and more business activities are being done online using email and instant messaging. New devices, such as the iPhone, offer the potential to let people take maps, calendars and photos with them electronically rather than creating a printout. But even with these tools, paper consumption continues to grow at an alarming rate. Paper consumption has tripled over the past three decades and is expected to increase by half again by 2010, according to industry estimates.

This is due in part because there are many areas where paper-processes still reign supreme. One of those areas is when it comes to legally binding documents that many people still believe must be signed with wet ink signatures. The requirement for an ink signature leads to the wasteful printing of massive amounts of documents – virtually all of which were created electronically – and to courier delivery of these documents. If it weren’t for the need for an actual wet ink signature, why would anyone bother with the expense and hassle of printing a Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat document and sending it via FedEx when it could be delivered instantly using email and an online service? It simply doesn’t make sense from a business or environmental standpoint.

The Green Business Case for eSignatures

Business activities that take place online eliminate the need to print out paper, lower business costs, increase the speed of business, and are good for the environment. For businesses that are looking to increase profits, reduce costs and help the environment, shifting paper-based processes online is a great place to start. Using electronic signature technology, also known as eSignatures, eliminates the need for wet-ink signatures. Instead of printing out documents and forms for the sole purpose of obtaining signatures, all parties can simply e-sign documents online through a Web browser.

Using a web-based eSignature solution makes it easy and affordable for businesses to immediately reduce their environmental impact since there is no costly software to purchase and install. The service replicates the physical signing model with virtual yellow “sign-here” tabs and electronic representations of actual signatures. This process dramatically increases the security of the documents compared to paper-based documents by offering a full audit trail and technology such as hashing algorithms that ensure a signed document cannot be altered in any way.

The DocuSign Eco-Challenge

As announced on Earth Day 2007, DocuSign is challenging itself, customers and partners to save 10 million sheets of paper through use of the DocuSign eSignature service by Earth Day 2008. This is just the beginning and represents a small fraction of the estimated 8 million tons of office paper (3.2 billion reams) of paper used each year in the U.S. The use of online signatures is growing exponentially and this rapid adoption will lead to a significant reduction of the use of paper and fuel by corporations.
Consider the environmental impact of just 10 million pages:

- 2,500 trees
- 56,000 gallons of oil
- 450 cubic yards of landfill space
- 595,000 kilowatts of energy
- 1.04 million gallons of water

Now consider if all U.S. businesses adopted eSignature technology for documents that are currently be printed in order to obtain signatures, an endeavor that requires an estimated 10 billion sheets of paper:
- 2.5 million trees
- 56 million gallons of oil
- 450,000 cubic yards of landfill space
- 595 megawatts of energy
- 1 billion gallons of water

The Paperless Future
With technologies such as eSignatures, high-quality displays and the growth of online news outlets now becoming mainstream, businesses and individuals have the opportunity to have a tremendously positive impact on the environment by not just recycling but actually reducing or eliminating consumption of a set of products – paper, printers, copiers, toner cartridges and overnight delivery services – that have an extremely negative impact on the environment. Moreover, use of online tools will dramatically improve productivity and significantly lower the cost of doing business. The road to future no longer needs to be paved with paper.

Matthew J. Schiltz is the President and CEO of DocuSign. Matt can be reached at matts@docusign.com.