Enterprise sustainability in the real world...

FICO is on its way to reduce its carbon footprint by 50% over three years with no incremental budget, only leadership and vision. This Forbes video with Quentin Hardy is a quick exploration into how it all happened!

Branding as a refocusing exercise: FICO

"March 10, 2009: In the interest of clarity and consistency, Fair Isaac Corporation today announced that it has officially adopted the brand FICO as its corporate identity." This corporate renaming qualifies both as adoption of initials, and elevation of a product brand to the corporate level.

What, or who, is a Fair Isaac? A nice guy, in the credit rating business? As a name, it scores at the top in "whimsical," if not positively cuddly. Turns out, however, that there were two guys, Bill Fair and Earl Isaac, who in 1956 founded "Fair, Isaac and Company" (whence the initials FICO). The comma got lost in 2003, when the legal name Fair Isaac Corporation was adopted. But "Simply removing the comma changed nothing," says Chief marketing Officer Laurent Pacalin; "journalists would still talk about Fair Isaac as 'the guy who did FICO'."

And what is a FICO? Fair Isaac's principal product is the "FICO Score," a credit worthiness number carried by virtually every American, and the leading measure of consumer credit risk in the U.S. It is a number thus central to both crisis and recovery.

This is what Tony Spaeth, Corporate Brand Matrix, had to say about the brand work that we did here at FICO! Read more here.

Three ways to shrink Systemic Risk

Wikipedia defines “financial systemic risk” as, “the risk of sudden collapse of an entire system or market…due to potentially catastrophic instability in that interlinked and interdependent system or market.” That’s a fine definition, but few of us need to look it up. It’s been nine months and counting since systemic risk erupted, and the global financial system is still tiptoeing around the smoking crater. As the worst recession of our lifetimes grinds on, institutions and governments are working feverishly to build strategic and regulatory protections against future systemic risk cataclysms.

In my view, government regulators and financial executives will have the greatest chance of success in managing and mitigating systemic risk if they understand and act on three related lessons that are emerging from the trauma that began in the autumn of 2008:

 First, beneath the fearsome complexity that can obscure the working of markets, the value of all financial relationships is still defined by the quality of the underwriting – defining underwriting in the broadest possible sense. The old rules still rule: Know your borrower. Know your lender. It’s a simple concept, but the market environment in recent decades has made it harder and harder to execute. We must repair the markets in a way that enables 360-degree underwriting based on clear, transparent, trustworthy data and relationships.

 Second, of all the characteristics that define economic activity, connection is the most important. Institutions considered “too big to fail” are in reality “too connected to fail.” The web of interdependencies that girdles the globe, linking the boardrooms of Wall Street to the kitchen tables of Main Street, can be the economic system’s greatest vulnerability – as Nassim Taleb argues in The Black Swan – or its greatest strength. Job No. 1 for leaders of the world’s financial institutions and market-regulating bodies is to design the architecture of systemic connection to assure strength. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un2Ve-8f3W4

 Third, despite the enormity of the task facing us, there is a good place to start where we can gain swift traction, and that is with microdecisions – the innumerable individual economic decisions financial professionals and consumers make every day on a global basis. To be clear, I’m not talking about trivial mini-decisions. Microdecisions are the fundamental building blocks of the economic system on all levels. “This [financial] crisis started one mortgage at a time,” Dr. Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law School professor who chairs the Congressional oversight panel on government bailout spending, told The New York Times on June 18.

Searching for the Triple Bottom Line

Fair Isaac owner of the FICO scores has launched a Sustainable Enterprise Initiative whose objective is to reduce the carbon footprint of the company. As the chief marketing officer I have been in an ideal position to support the CIO, Christopher Rence, in his successful efforts to green up Fair Isaac data centers through IT virtualization and leverage of cloud computing.

It is always very re-assuring to see that significant results can be achieved under the right leaderhip!

Creative Capitalism vs. Compassionate Capitalism

I thought that it'd be interesting to compare and contrast two concepts of capitalism as promoted by Bill Gates (Creative Capitalism) and by Marc Benioff (Compassionate Capitalism).

So, I read Marc Benioff book articulating his vision for Compassionate Capitalism and listened to Bill Gates'speach touting Creative Capitalism in Davos. I found both visions similar, very inspiring and necessary to unleash the "forces of good" onto our planet!

The following video will provide you with a starting point:

Salesforce's Tour de Force

On Jan. 17, I attended Salesforce’s Tour de Force at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The two keynote speakers were Marc Benioff and Marc Andreessen. The event was billed as an unprecedented meeting of the minds of the two Marcs sharing their vision for the future of on-demand platforms.

It was a very good event, well organized and high-energy as one would have expected! However, it was focused on the launched of Force.com, the platform -as-a-service, that had been announced at Dreamforce last September. This was a bit of a disappointment as I had been expecting the announcement of a partnership between Ning and Salesforce.com. As I have written before (see Ultimate Networks, Jan. 1, 2008) I believe that social networks could significantly benefits B2B processes. Instead, Marc Andreessen squarely positioned Ning as a consumer centric social network platform. I had misread the tea leaves…

But not to despair, there is a Los Angeles company that provides what seems to be quite an interesting offering to build customer communities – http://www.thinkpassenger.com/ – Passenger combines social networking, collaboration and analytics technologies in a single platform. Passenger’s vision is to change the way companies collaborate with their customers, stakeholders and peers across social, geographic and organizational boundaries.

It certainly is a tall order but most definitely transformational and worth a try!

Social Networks and Water Purification in Buenos Aires

In a previous post (Ultimate Networks, Jan. 8, 2008) I wrote about the role of social networks in B2B environments. Today I’d like to comment on a fascinating Clean Tech application developed by Rebeca Hwang, a friend and Stanford PhD student, as well as the Judging Chair for the California Clean Tech Open (Social Networks, Pizza and Clean Tech, Dec. 14, 2007).

Rebeca’s objective is to use her technical know-how in water treatment technology and her research in quantitative theory of social networks to improve water quality in the slums of Buenos Aires. The water in Buenos Aires’ sprawling slums carries birth-defect-causing nitrates and arsenic in amounts up to 10 times what is considered safe. Because of the lack of government resources, communities have formed water cooperatives to help provide clean water to their constituents. Unfortunately, many of these co-ops are small and not always well managed so water treatment and delivery services lack funding. Moreover, while it is cost-efficient to treat water for 100,000 households, these co-ops have only an average of 2,000 houses each and are therefore rarely profitable.

Rebeca Hwang believes that this considerable challenge can be addressed by applying social networks analysis to map out the relationships between decision-makers at water cooperatives. The idea is that the identification of patterns can pinpoint an organization’s strengths and weaknesses, and in turn, may help that organization to improve its efficiency and effectiveness.
The characterization of the structure of these 480 water cooperatives - servicing 700,000 households - is a massive undertaking. One that requires, through extensive surveys, the tagging of the co-ops by service type and managerial style, both formal and informal. Rebeca is using open-source software programs like Pajek and Ucinet to analyze and convert the raw data into meaningful information. Also, she anticipates that using another program like NetDraw to visualize the intensity of the relationships between the different constituents will reveal some key problem areas. Interviews will complement the study and bring qualitative color to the motivations and approaches of decision makers that may be influencing the various co-op operations but that are not formally represented in their structures.

The expected outcome of this “social network analysis” project is to formulate specific ways to improve the profitability of the cooperatives while increasing the volume of clean water produced.

I believe that innovative approaches, like this one, that leverage existing technologies and apply social network analysis theory can provide a significant boost toward improving people’s daily life while maximizing the use of natural resources. Such project does not require huge investment or new technology. It empowers local communities and enables greater sustainability. Please drop me a line if you know of other interesting clean tech social applications.