Wal-Mart's Widening Lens of Sustainability
Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 3:00AM The following Social Innovation Conversations podcast is produced by the Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
At the time of this audio Andy Ruben was the Vice-President for corporate strategy and sustainability at Wal-Mart. He is now head of Branding at Sam's. Jib Ellison is the founder of Blu Skye Sustainability Consulting which is characterized as Wal-Mart's sustainability partner. The conversation was moderated before Stanford MBA students.
The central theme of this audio is made by Ellison early in the conversation.
"The greatest untapped source of competitive advantage in our time - in [the United States] in particular - is found in ... radical adoption of sustainability principles into [for profit] business systems." (emphasis added)
What makes this all very interesting are representations - supported by anecdotes - by both Ellison and Rubin that Wal-Mart is shifting from its Every Day Low Price mindset toward a broader vision that they call the lens of sustainability.
Ruben and Ellison assert - and, in many respects, compellingly so - that Wal-Mart's sustainability vision is inexorable. And there seems to be a very good sense and understanding - especially by Ruben - that Wal-Mart's sustainability vision will rely heavily upon trusted information sharing among and between the many participants of complex, international supply chains feeding into the world's largest retailer.
If so, the work of EPCglobal and the W3C will no doubt come to feel the gravitational pull of Wal-Mart's sustainability vision. The question will then be whether these consortiums will develop nimble, architectural standards supportive of data ownership by information producers, big and small. See also Dataportability, Traceability and Data Ownership elsewhere in this blog.
These are the kinds of tools that Wal-Mart will need to overcome the social, political and economic fear factors to information sharing that seem to exponentially increase each time a new fragment of participation is added to a product supply chain.
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