 Welcome back to Ohio Main's business how companies manage their triple bottom line people planet and profits has become critical to their survival and success. Implementing environmentally friendly business practices can also help them improve their competitive advantage. Many companies have already begun the process but it's the next generation of business leaders who will influence the future of sustainability. Joining us now with the bottom line is Neil Drobney, a junk professor at Ohio State Fisher College of Business. He's also an environmental consultant. Neil, thanks for your time, we do appreciate it. Thank you, nice to be here. You are a teacher at Fisher and as you were telling me you never thought you'd be a teacher did you? Yes, it's all sort of evolved unexpectedly through my environmental consulting. I began to figure out that companies environmental problems were really business problems and if we could solve the problem at the business end then the environmental piece kind of went away. How challenging is it to teach sustainability? Is that something that we would even think about 30 years ago? Not 30 years ago, not even 5 or 10 years ago. I began to realize that other business schools were teaching this to their MBAs and approached Fisher in 2004 and they hadn't really thought about adding this to the curriculum but they gave me a chance to develop a course. It went well fortunately and fast forward to 2011. I now have courses at both the undergrad and the graduate level at Fisher and the student interest is very high. As we sit here in 2011 I would assume that this has become something that's critical for a business to learn if not your students but then to carry it through into their businesses. Oh yeah, everybody in a business needs to have an understanding of the triple bottom line and understand how their day to day activities and their decisions can affect the ability of that company to manage its risks and opportunities and create long term shareholder value. You mentioned the triple bottom line, I like this, so it's people, planet and profits, the three P's. Yes. How has that developed, what's that mean to you, people, planet, profits? Well that's sort of a shorthand for another way we talk about it is companies need to manage not only their economic capital but their natural environmental capital and their human capital and they have to balance and pay attention to all three as they carry out their business practices. A lot of companies, big and small, we'll talk about the challenges to each in just a minute but a lot of companies do play catch up because obviously they started their companies decades ago, they have to play catch up. It's easier for a company, it's your contention, correct me if I'm wrong, to take the lead on it. Yes, small businesses and especially startups have a great opportunity to build their business on a sustainability platform from the get go. You know, it's much more difficult to start up on a business as usual basis the way we've done things for decades and then try to go through the culture change because culture change is very complex. And it's something that has to be led in these larger companies by senior management or by the CEO, companies that try to delegate that to a committee or to an individual whose only clout may be a title have much less success than the companies that really bite it. Write the bullet at the senior level. So you're catching some of these kids, I always call them kids but future business entrepreneurs, you're catching them at the infancy before they get started. Yeah, they don't want any part of doing things the old way. Right. In fact, the one thing they strive for is to avoid taking a job where they have to check their values at the door when they go to work every morning. They want sustainability to be part of their working life and their non-working life almost in a seamless fashion. We'll talk about the challenges to big and small companies. First though, how does Ohio compare? We have all kinds of companies here, Fortune 500 companies, mom and pop corner stores. How do we compare to the nation and the world I guess? Yeah, unfortunately we're a little behind both. On the one hand, we're blessed with relatively cheap energy, inexpensive ways to dispose of waste, plentiful water as we've seen in the last few days. But the flip side is we're not managing aggressively the development of new technologies and new business practices that are going to provide competitive advantage and quality of life in the resource constrained world that lies ahead. Some of our bigger companies we mentioned, we have a lot on the Fortune 500 list, a lot of biggies, Honda, P&G, Cardinal Health, Nationwide. How are some of them doing? Doing well and very innovative in many respects. Honda as you may know has a commitment to zero landfill. P&G is working hard on developing consumer products with limited environmental footprints such as their cold water detergent. But the story doesn't stop there. It gets more interesting when you think about small business. For example, in Columbus we have North Star Cafe which has developed four restaurants and very tight economic times by focusing on locally grown produce, organic ingredients and other people, planet and profit initiatives. Out of northeast Ohio we have Kurt's Brothers which has imported German technology to manufacture soil amendments, energy and other byproducts from organic waste. And we have Barnes Nursery in Huron, Ohio which now makes compost out of a wide variety of materials that used to go into a landfill. Final thought, sustainability is something that can make your company money or save a lot of money. How is it being accepted as you teach it and preach it? How do you think it's soaking in out there? Once it sinks in to somebody's realization of what's going on, they want to know how did we not do this all along? Because operating unsustainably is to have waste and pollution which is a sign of inefficiency that means unhealthy, not a healthy way of operating. The students these days have somehow figured this out and they come into class not wanting any part of the old ways of doing things and want to learn all about sustainability and who's the leader so they can find jobs with those people. Probably definitely a good thing. Neal Drobney from Fisher College, we appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you very much.