Accenturestudy

Hewlett-Packard:
Sustainability as a Competitive Advantage
By Eric M. Lowitt and Jim Grimsley
May 2009
Case Study

Hewlett-Packard: Sustainability as a Competitive Advantage
Having worked with thousands of corporate and
government clients around the world, Accenture
has long understood the special characteristics
that enable organizations to outperform their
peers—to become high-performance businesses.
for its customers to go green, and
conducts high impact research on
sustainability solutions.
Historically, HP has placed a priority
on corporate citizenship, even as the
company grew from its 1939 founding
in the iconic Palo Alto garage into a
diversified $100 billion technology
company operating in 170 countries.
HP’s first statement of corporate
objectives, “The HP Way” (a perennial
citation in management texts), was
written in 1957 by founders Bill
Hewlett and Dave Packard; by as early
as 1966, it included a provision “to
meet the obligations of good citizenship
by making contributions to the community
and to the institutions in our society
which generate the environment in
which we operate.”1 Still, HP’s approach
to corporate citizenship had always
been very much an intramural affair—
and the company consciously avoided
trading on its efforts in areas like
sustainability, preferring to quietly
advance its social agenda.
“Up until about five years ago, we had
the ‘Boy Scout and Girl Scout approach,’
as I call it,” says Mark Heintz, HP’s
stakeholder relations manager, who
works on HP’s Social and Environmental
Responsibility (SER) team, managing
relationships with nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs). “We just relied
on our reputation as sort of the ‘good
scouts’ of the industry, but we didn’t
actively publicize any of our activities
in this area to NGOs or other sustain-ability
organizations.” But as issues
like climate change and global supply-chain
responsibility became more
prominent in the mainstream press,
HP soon realized, in the face of public
questioning and competitive promotion
High-performance businesses are
those that:
• effectively balance current needs
and future opportunities,
• consistently outperform peers in
revenue growth, profitability and
total return to shareholders,
• sustain their superiority across time,
business cycles, industry disruptions
and changes in leadership.
In this case study, we investigate how
a genuine commitment to sustainability—
defined as environmental and social
responsibility—is helping HP to grow
its leadership in key markets. We look
at how HP translates its green credentials
into profitable new businesses and
better-performing existing ones, all
while advancing its long-term position
as a model corporate citizen in the
global arena.
Transforming a good-citizenship
heritage into contemporary
sustainability credibility
For HP, building a global sustainability
program—one that is held to the same
rigorous standards of accountability
and profitability as its other business
initiatives—is an ambitious and ongoing
challenge. With little precedent in the
IT sector and virtually none in organi-zations
of HP’s size and complexity,
the endeavor has required the company
to continually innovate, adjust its
strategy, and regularly re-commit to
its vision through an evolving process
that touches every level of the
321,000-employee organization.
For HP, sustainability, efficiency,
and profitability go hand in hand.
“Among HP’s values is a deep respect
for the environment, and an ingrained
commitment to reducing our impact
today and building a sustainable global
economy tomorrow,” says Bonnie
Nixon, Director of Sustainability for
the company. HP aligns its technology,
environment, and business strategies
to reduce its carbon footprint, provides
practical solutions to make it easy
1 | Accenture Institute for High Performance | Copyright © 2009 Accenture. All rights reserved.

Priority
Supply chain
HP is providing leadership to the electronics
industry’s efforts to raise labor and environmental
standards in our supply chain through collaboration,
supplier audits and capability building
Priority
Climate and energy
HP minimizes the impact of our operations and
supply chain on climate change while innovating to
develop products and solutions for an energy- and
carbon-constrained world
Priority
Product reuse and recycling
HP provides customers efficient reuse and recycling
options, and we collaborate with other leading
organizations to develop common standards
and solutions
Social investment
HP supports communities
wherever we operate, focusing
on educational achievement,
economic development and
environmental sustainability
Operations
HP uses an environmental
management system to assess
and reduce the environmental
impacts of our global operations
while enhancing the workplace
and saving HP money
Employees
HP fosters a high-performing,
diverse workforce and provides a
safe, healthy and supportive
environment that helps employees
to achieve their potential
Customers
Privacy
Using an accountability approach
to privacy, HP reviews decisions
not only for compliance with the
law and our privacy policies, but
also against our values and
potential risks
Products
HP designs products and
packaging to make the best
use of resources and has a
long track record of substituting
materials to meet customer and
legislative requirements
Society
Employees
Suppliers
Hewlett-Packard
of its various green initiatives that it
needed to raise awareness of its
decades-long commitment.
“I think a challenge for HP, honestly,
is that we have been working on
environmental and sustainability
initiatives for quite a long time, well
before such issues were really of
interest to customers,” explains
Shelley Zimmer, who is responsible
for SER policy within all of HP’s product
groups. “We’re only now beginning to
understand how to communicate the
details to customers. Now that they
are interested, it’s become a bigger
issue for companies and for consumers
across the world.
Source: HP company documents.
“But we still say a lot less than what
we are capable of. There’s always the
concern about greenwashing and not
wanting to over-promise. And so I
think our Web site still reflects that
somewhat modest approach to talking
about our environmental achievements
and goals.”
In formally incorporating sustainability
into its overall corporate citizenship
program, HP identified three overarching
priorities that every business unit is
required to embrace: raising social and
environmental standards in the supply
chain, improving the energy efficiency
of operations and products in order to
reduce carbon emissions, and promoting
product reuse and recycling. (See Figure 1.)
These priorities reflect HP’s commitment
to balancing corporate values and
business goals with the company’s
impact on society and the environment.
Figure 1: Global citizenship at HP

Figure 2: Five Elements of High Performance. Better positioning and performance relative to its peer set on the following elements:
High
Continued value creation over
industry eras and life cycles
Longevity
Spread (ROIC-WACC) performance
(5 and 7 years)
Greater-than-expected
returns on investments
Performance
Business
Consistency
Reliable and predictable
performance
Profitability
Growth
Top line revenue growth
Positioning
for the Future
Higher future value growth
Empowering and organizing a
sustainability team
The company’s global citizenship agenda
is organized into five “pillars” within
the organization, with senior managers
assigned general oversight in the
following areas:
• Ethics and compliance
• Social and environmental
responsibility (sustainability)
• Human rights and labor practices
• Privacy
• Social investment (philanthropy)
Three primary bodies have been estab-lished
to help manage and advise on
sustainability initiatives throughout
HP: the Supply Chain Council and the
Global Marketing Council, both made
up of senior HP managers; and the
Stakeholder Advisory Council, a colla-borative
group comprised of HP vice
presidents along with representatives
from supplier organizations, environ-mental
activist groups, labor-rights
groups and other NGOs.
“We partner with a number of regional
and global organizations like the World
Wildlife Foundation (WWF), CSR Asia,
even CEREAL, the labor NGO in Mexico,”
explains Bonnie Nixon. “We hold two
summits a year with the Stakeholder
Advisory Council to look at our goals,
peek around corners, look at policies
and what’s happening within the NGO
community, what’s happening within
the legislation and within customer
environments. We find out what people
care about.”
Charged with overseeing HP’s long
term vision and sustainability strategy,
Nixon reports to the corporate marketing
organization. “I’m responsible for helping
to drive HP’s sustainability strategy
across the company and for reporting
against it, but a lot of the specifics of
implementation are the responsibility
of the functions or product groups and
they, in turn, have responsibilities to
help conceive and execute. So IT has
its mission, systems groups have their
missions, everybody has their own part
to play,” Nixon says.
Total return to shareholders
(3, 5, 7 and 10 years)
Revenue growth
(5 and 7 years)
Variability in spread (ROIC-WACC)
from one year to the next
over 10 years
Percentage change in the future growth value* over
a five year period
* Future growth value equals enterprise
value (market value of debt + equty)
less current value (current profitability
in perpetuity)

Applying the high-performance
business model
While every high-performance business
travels a unique path, HP’s sustainability
effort maps very clearly to Accenture’s
proven High-Performance Business
model. As defined by Accenture, a
high-performance business shows
quantitative superiority along five key
dimensions (see Figure 2):
Growth—as measured by revenue
expansion;
Profitability—as measured by the
spread between the return on capital
and the cost of capital;
Positioning for the future—as
represented by the portion of share
price not explained by current earnings
(what we call “future value”) and by the
portion of the industry total each com-pany’s
future value represents;
Consistency—as measured by the
number of years (out of seven) the peer
set median in profitability, growth and
positioning for the future was beaten;
Longevity—as measured by the duration
of out-performance in total return
to shareholders.
The remainder of this case will examine
how HP’s sustainability initiatives have
performed along the five key high-performance
business dimensions.
Growth
HP is using its sustainability strategy
to drive real revenue growth through
four approaches: by winning new busi-ness
while retaining existing business,
by expanding the company’s distribution
in Europe, by charging a premium price
for energy-efficient products and by
entering new markets.
Winning new business while
retaining existing business
Recent requests for proposals (RFPs)
have requested details about HP’s
internal IT energy-savings plan and
HP’s own energy usage, broken down
by nuclear, coal and renewable sources.
The customers that are asking about
sustainability represent some of the
larger contracts, creating the potential
for significant sales. Indeed, one
recent customer, a mobile commu-nications
giant, made a major purchase
of personal computers after indicating
that the primary consideration for
awarding the contract was finding
the “greenest” units available.
“Our statistics show that more than
two-thirds of the RFPs contain envi-ronmental
questions. I would say
actually it’s 100 percent of the large
enterprises,” says Klaus Hieronymi, HP’s
Europe, Middle East and Africa head
for SER. “All of our major customers
have contacted us in the last 12
months on environmental questions.
For example, the German government
had an off-site meeting in November
2007 on climate change. And they
came up with 13 areas they want to
focus on. I think it was number 11
which says that in every public tender
in Germany the cost of energy should
be included in the price comparison.
So the German government now has
the rule that says, ‘For future procure-ment,
we will consider not only the
hardware price but the hardware price
plus lifetime electricity.’ I think that
will be the future. And that will then
automatically drive companies like HP
into more energy efficiency. I have
also seen one particular tender, based
on a recommendation from Gartner,
that goes as far as asking HP about
what energy-savings plans we have
internally in our IT and how much of
the energy we are buying is nuclear,
how much is coal and how much
is renewable.”
“Our sustainability efforts certainly
get us a seat at the table,” says Carl
Eckersley, the manager of Environmental
Product Stewardship for the Personal
Systems Group. “Without them, we
wouldn’t even be able to bid on these
projects.” Many HP executives agree
that the weight being given to environ-mental
issues in the tendering process
has been significant—and is growing—
in many cases, representing up to 25
percent of the scoring on a bid.
In an effort to quantify the stakes, HP
developed an internal tracking tool,
informally known as “Green Baby,” to
help value the revenue implications.
The tool tracks the value of the deals,
the value of the revenue at risk, type
of information and presentations
requested, deals won and lost, and the
justification for the outcome. “Our
sales force is giving us feedback on
which deals are successful or not.
What we’re pressing to know is, what
was the real contribution of the sustain-ability
aspects of our presentation to
the overall win?” says John Frey, who
is responsible for sustainability strategy
planning and execution across HP.
Expanding the company’s
distribution in Europe
HP’s sustainability strategy has helped
the company gain new distribution.
A European customer proposing to
resell retail HP products conducted a
very thorough evaluation of HP’s
sustainability program. “They wanted

to know who our suppliers were for
the particular products, how we evaluate
them, how we work with our suppliers
on corrective actions when needed.
And it was only after that detailed
review that they viewed us as a
qualified supplier and agreed to actually
begin selling our products,” recalls Judy
Glazer, the director of Global Operations,
Social and Environmental Responsibility.
Charging a premium price for
energy-efficient products
HP’s line of energy-efficient PCs and
notebooks command a price premium
of $10 to $20 compared with non-
Energy Star–rated products. However,
the energy savings they offer provide
an attractive 24-month payback.
According to HP, the average enterprise
customer holds onto this type of
equipment for approximately three
years. For customers looking to purchase
1,000 or more units at a time, that’s the
kind of savings that makes a difference.
Frey explains HP’s head start in this
area, as additional enterprise buyers
warm to the energy-savings message:
“Our enterprise customers generally
tend to keep their gear for two to
three years. And if you can make a 24-
month or better ROI, generally speaking
they’re willing to pay the price premiums.
And increasingly, where that used to
be a differentiation point that only
our most savvy customers would
make, it’s amazing now how whole
industries, the financial industry for
example, has come on board in the last
year or so and they have things like
that directly in their purchase criteria.”
Entering new markets and pursuing
joint ventures
HP has entered into a solar-technology
licensing agreement for a revolutionary
transparent transistor technology with
Xtreme Energetics (XE), a developer
of solar energy systems. Together, the
companies are creating an energy
system designed to generate electricity
at twice the efficiency and half the
cost of traditional solar panels.
The transparent transistor technology
was co-developed by HP and Oregon
State University and includes thin film
transparent transistors made from
low-cost, readily available materials
such as zinc and tin. The materials
raise no environmental concerns and
allow for higher mobility, better chemical
stability and easier manufacturing.
What’s more, the transparent electronics
technology allows solar panels to be
artistically patterned to mimic the
appearance of any building material or
terrain for aesthetic appeal. The energy
systems will serve both the central
utility and rooftop markets.
“Open innovation to foster collaborative
research is essential in today’s fast-paced,
innovation-fueled market,” says Joe
Beyers, the vice president of Intellectual
Property Licensing at HP. “Through our
collaborative research and by licensing
HP’s core intellectual property in
electronics, we are accelerating the
pace of technology transfer so that
it can be applied more rapidly into
creating commercial, renewable
energy solutions.”
HP encourages other organizations
worldwide to leverage its vast research
and development network and portfolio
of nearly 30,000 patents. As these
organizations bring new technologies
to market through intellectual-property
licensing agreements with HP, HP also
benefits from a return on its research
and development investments through
licensing fees and royalties.
Profitability
Within HP’s own operations, the com-pany
is leveraging its sustainability
strategy to drive profitability through
a wide range of efforts—everything from
making adjustments to shipping and
logistics and reducing the need for
virgin materials in manufacturing,
to realizing cost savings through new
efficiencies within data centers, to
replacing business travel with
virtual meetings.
Making adjustments to shipping
and logistics and reducing the
need for virgin materials
In logistics, a simple move from using
wooden shipping pallets to environ-mentally
friendlier plastic pallets (less
than a quarter of the weight of the
wooden ones) is saving 7,000 tons of
CO2 emissions per year in Asia-to-Europe
camera and notebook PC shipments.
The higher cost of the pallets themselves
is significantly outweighed by the
savings in air freight.
HP is reducing its air freight as well,
in favor of ocean freight, and moving
many truck shipments to rail—changes
that are both saving money and reducing
environmental impact. According to
Blair Chikasuye, HP’s environmental
program manager for the Global
Logistics Group, this is a clearly
emerging corollary. “We’re finding that
any time there’s a logistics cost savings,
there is typically an environmental
savings as well,” says Chikasuye. “Yes,

shipping by ocean is cheaper than flying
it on a plane, but it’s also a significant
CO2 emissions savings. Same with taking
it off the road and putting it on rail.”
According to HP, each cargo container
of notebook PCs shipped by ocean
instead of air reduces GHG emissions
by the equivalent of an average car
driving 100,000 km. However, these
environmental gains also have a price:
increased transit time and longer
time-in-inventory during shipping.
To counteract these effects, HP works
with its planning teams to adjust
their forecasting process and
optimize coordination.
The process of appropriately escalating
decision making was also identified as
a key component of HP’s success in
implementing essential changes and
overcoming organizational resistance.
Sometimes a single issue (like the
additional cost of plastic pallets) could
pose a fatal roadblock in achieving
important gains. Packaging engineer
Randy Boeller explains the benefits of
assembling all the facts and then getting
to the right level of management:
“We got the people who negotiate air
freight and some finance people in the
same room to sit down and do the math.
And then we did the math again to
double-check. We then followed the
management chain to find the people
who own the materials costs and the
people who own the air freight costs
and then followed those management
chains up to find the one person they
all reported to. Then, we made the
presentation to that person and said,
‘You want to save about $28 million
a year? We know how.’”
In reducing consumption of new
materials, HP’s 2008 Global Citizenship
Report lays out some of the company’s
overarching goals:
HP works with suppliers to identify
materials that will reduce the envi-ronmental
impact of HP’s products
and that of our customers.
We evaluate the total life cycle,
environmental impact and cost of any
new material, and we strive to identify
substitute materials that have lower
total environmental and health impacts
than the materials they replace. It can
be difficult to confirm claims for new
materials because they may not have
been researched as thoroughly as
existing materials. For example, we
cannot yet be confident about materials
to replace PVC from wires and cables.
Thermoplastic rubber/elastomer (TPR/TPE)
and polyethylene-derived hybrids are
emerging, but these materials are not
sufficiently devel oped for wide-scale
use. Long-term environmental impact
assessments and safety approval for
these materials have yet to be finalized.
HP has an extensive recycling net work
that is a potential source of recycled
plastics for use in new products. While
HP would like to take advantage of this
fact, the potential is limited for several
reasons. The greatest difficulty is
that most recycled plastics contain
substances that we have eliminated
from our current products. Also, mixed
plastics do not have the mechanical
properties necessary for use in new IT
products, and it is difficult to separate
dissimilar plastics during recycling to
produce a homogenous material.
Finally, logistical constraints limit our
ability to move large volumes of material
from the regions where recycling is
conducted to the regions where most
new products are made. Recycling is
an area in which we continue to look
for improvements.
Realizing new efficiencies within
data centers
HP recently completed a three-year
program to consolidate 85 of its data
centers into just six high-efficiency
locations in the US. This move is netting
yearly energy savings from of up to
350 million kilowatt hours and annual
energy cost savings of up to $30 million.
The project has also served to eliminate
many older technologies while reducing
HP’s overall data center footprint by
about 35 percent. The consolidation
had its roots in a long-standing
recognition on the part of HP Labs
(the exploratory and advanced
research group of the company) that
there was a significant opportunity in
this area. HP fellow and director of
the Sustainable IT Ecosystem Laboratory
at HP Labs, Chandrakant Patel, recalls
talking to colleagues about rethinking
data centers as early as the mid-1990s:
“I came up with the idea that a data
center can be thought of like a computer
and that the walls of the data center
are akin to the walls of enclosure, and
that data center needs an ‘operating
system,’” recalls Patel. “So we proposed
this work on Smart Data Centers—
looking holistically at everything from
chip systems, racks, data centers and
cooling towers, all the way to the utility
providing power to the data center.
When I went to talk to my boss, he said,
‘Chandrakant, why do you want to do
facility research?’ But our contention
was the state of the art is lacking. I
consider a data center akin to Carnegie
Hall—but with 100 to 150 people per

seat. And when you have that kind of
thing, surely state of the art needs to
be advanced. It became about sensing
and more precisely controlling the
provision of resources so that we don’t
overprovision and waste energy. One
of the comments that came back was,
‘Nobody ever gets fired for wasting
energy. But you could get fired if a
site shuts down’ [due to insufficient
power]. But, as we are a research lab,
going forward our contention was,
‘You would get fired for both.’ So we
charged ahead and continued to work
on developing products that provided
efficiencies at a data center level.
And as we developed a total cost of
ownership model, we found that the
burdened cost of power in the data
center exceeded the depreciation
of the industry standard hardware.”
Today, the company carefully examines
each data center’s design for new
efficiencies. This process—along with
the innovations it has generated—
has, in turn, created a large growth
opportunity for HP products and
services. Lessons learned from its own
optimized data centers have led to
large consulting opportunities—along
with significant competitive advantage
in positioning HP’s hosted data centers.
“Data centers are an area of increasing
interest for HP because we manage a
lot of data centers for ourselves and
for our customers,” explains Frey. “We’re
doing a lot of work around power
management software, the ability to
control those units more holistically.
Then we take it a step higher to the
work on the data center: How do you
measure the heat put out by a data
center? How do you minimize it?
Because about 50 percent of the
power consumed by the average data
center is used for cooling—it’s not
being used to process data. HP has
invented a series of technologies to
run data centers more efficiently. The
average server runs about 20 to 40
percent of its rated capacity at any
given time. Yet the power supply uses
80 percent of its total draw, even fully
loaded when it’s idling. So if you’re
using 80 percent of the energy and
yet you’re not processing any data,
that’s very inefficient as well. So there’s
a lot of work in that space,” he says.
In 2007, HP Labs built a 70,000-square-foot
data center in Bangalore, India,
concentrating the equivalent computing
power of 14 traditionally designed
facilities under one roof. The Bangalore
data center uses HP’s new Dynamic
Smart Cooling (DSC) system, which
reduces energy and costs by coordinating
cooling with the real-time needs of the
servers, using 7,500 sensors that monitor
equipment environment temperatures
and adjust the air conditioning
accordingly. HP achieved initial savings
of 20 percent of cooling costs compared
with legacy data centers, and expects
those savings to reach 40 percent once
the system is optimized. The new
center is expected to save 7,500 MWh
annually, equal to 7,500 tons of carbon
dioxide equivalent emissions. It repre-sents
the largest implementation of
DSC to date and demonstrates that the
savings achieved in smaller data centers
are possible in much larger facilities.
HP is now focused on reducing data
center energy costs. According to
Hieronymi, “Many companies have
started to show the electricity costs of
their data centers as a separate cost
item, which is then allocated to the IT
center. Where, in the past, the electricity
cost of companies was just distributed
and allocated to everybody, now, all
of a sudden, the IT center manager
has a new cost element which is quite
significant, especially if you look into
the server business. There are servers
where the cost of their energy
consumption for one year is more
than the hardware purchase prices.”
Beyond looking at energy use in data
centers, HP travels further back along
the supply chain to uncover more
opportunities for savings and reengi-neering.
“We are looking at how much
energy is used to extract material,
manufacture it, use it and reclaim it,”
explains Patel. “We look at the entire
life cycle. This way we are getting
closer to the true cost. And we are
building data centers with just enough
material so that it becomes a lower-cost,
lower-energy provider of the same or
greater level of service.”
Reducing carbon footprints
by substituting business travel
with telepresence
In other areas where HP’s operations
serve a broader audience the company’s
SER efforts are also creating new
business opportunities.
The evolution of videoconferencing
as an alternative to corporate travel
represents a “fat target” for reducing
environmental impact. Here, HP’s
state-of-the-art telepresence solution,
called Halo studios, is now being
rolled out as a distinct product for
innovative customers.
Halo studios bring meeting attendees
from around the globe into an
environment that feels as if they
are in the same room. Halo also
includes energy-saving features, such
as displays and lights that automatically
turn off when not in use.

Source: Battelle Media, http://Battellemedia.com/archives/003632.php.
HP currently has 34 Halo studios in 14
countries and plans to nearly quadruple
that number by the end of 2009. This
effort is expected to significantly
reduce HP travel and save at least
32,000 tons of CO2 emissions per year,
which translates into roughly $1.28
million in bottom-line savings (assuming
$40 for the price of carbon emissions
per ton).
“This is a good example of a solution
which itself has a fairly small footprint.
We’re talking about a few plasma
screens for a studio, which has a few
kW hours a day of consumption. But
on the other side of the equation, you
are saving a significant amount of
business travel. If each studio avoids
even a single business trip a year, that
saves about 237 tons of carbon emissions
annually. And if you add that up, that
gets to very significant savings,” says
Pierre DelForge, HP’s Environmental
Sustainability Strategies manager. “In
Europe, we believe that we will save a
minimum of 15 percent in travel costs
this year through the use of Halo. We
are also working with two major hotel
chains to create virtual presence
rooms that they can rent out like
they do conference rooms. So we
might see some of those in the future as
a standard offer where you can go in,
just rent it for half an hour and maybe
there will even be a family reunion or
something in between [these
meetings],” says DelForge.
Positioning for the future
HP’s sustainability strategy has already
established the company as a clear
thought leader in the industry—an
advantage that leads to first-mover
opportunities and first pick of top
suppliers, employees and partners. As
HP retools its infrastructure and distri-bution
strategies, it further aligns its
operations with emerging best practices,
giving it a competitive edge…and
opening new growth horizons.
According to Nixon, “The WWF reports
that the IT industry contributes to 2
percent of global warming—roughly on
par with the airline industry.” But HP
believes that, unlike the airlines, the IT
industry is unique in its ability to
help reduce carbon emissions in other
industries. Nixon says: “Through use of
technology, we can influence or
reduce that other 98 percent through
smart controls and manufacturing
processes, or in power plants or other
applications of technology to reduce
greenhouse gases, or also calculate
the impact of greenhouse gases.”
Delforge adds: “We believe there is
an opportunity for IT to be a significant
part of the solution in providing energy
efficiency, reduction of resource
conservation and substitution of high
carbon by low-carbon processes. This
is a whole area that we call the ‘low-carbon-
economy opportunity for HP.’
That means we will define what solutions
we can take to market or develop or
deploy further that have significant
benefits outside of just the energy
used by IT. We can reduce the energy
used and the carbon emissions from
other processes, for example, whether
it’s manufacturing, or transportation
or buildings, or even just behavior
change and consumption patterns.”
Hieronymi cites desktop printing as an
example where new technology can
combine with new behaviors to have a
wider impact on the environment:
“One of the trends in printing is that
companies are taking away the personal
printer from every desk, including the
desk of the CEO or the HR department
or the legal department. If you had
done that five years ago, people would
have argued with you, saying that
sensitive documents should not be able
to be read by anybody who might be
passing by a common printer. Nowadays,
you can go to a printer and the moment
the printer reads your ID badge, it
starts printing your documents. And
you can do that with every printer in
the network. So even if you are, for

example, sitting in a boardroom and
you need certain documents, your
secretary sends it to the printing
network and you just go to the nearest
printer to the boardroom, put your ID
card there and then it’s printed. These
are all technologies that enable us to
reduce paper.”
“We recognize two aspects of energy
consumption: HP’s internal operations
and the consumption of energy by HP
products,” Delforge says. “We have an
overall energy consumption reduction
goal of 25 percent, of which 16 percent
is expected to come from the operations
side. We wanted to have the most
comprehensive goal that we could,
so we included both the operational
savings and the product savings in
that goal. Products and services is the
second facet of the strategy that
includes both the energy used by our
products along with other resources
like paper for printing, for example. So
it’s the whole life cycle of our products.
And if you look at that whole scope,
our products and services footprint is
an order of magnitude of between 20
and 25 times bigger than our
operations footprint.”
HP’s expertise and innovation are
also pointing toward more service
business, such as energy assessments
of enterprise data centers for large
commercial customers.
“I remember one company in Austria
where within a two-day consulting
engagement, we identified a savings
potential of 1 million kW per year,
which was about 15 percent of the
total energy use of that client—worth
about EUR 80,000 per year,” recalls
Hieronymi. “And this is helping to
change, I think, the perception of envi-ronmental
initiatives with enterprise
customers. They are seeing, today, that
whenever they do something to
reduce their environmental footprint,
they are realizing bottom-line savings
very quickly.”
Leading the way in
the low-carbon economy
Of course, IT-related carbon output is
just a small piece of the puzzle. “Of all
the carbon emissions in the world, the
IT industry generates only 2%,” Nixon
says. ”HP wants to lower them, but it
is also working on reducing the other
98%.” An assortment of energy-saving
solutions can help companies in all
phases of their business. These range
from print management and print-on-demand
services that save energy and
paper, to solutions that let manufacturing
plants operate more efficiently.
Some of the areas in which HP is laying
the groundwork for leadership in the
transition to the low-carbon
economy include:
The “dematerialization” of data
centers, including the implementation
of a photonic interconnect to eliminate
the need for heat-producing, resource-intensive
copper cabling while improving
processing speed and lowering
bandwidth costs;
Low-carbon IT solutions to increase
resource efficiency across the enterprise;
An aggressive materials recovery pro-gram
that goes well beyond traditional
recycling; the program will create a
profit center from both refurbishment
and materials/ component sales into
secondary markets. (Through 2007, HP
has reclaimed more than one billion
pounds of used hardware and is on
target to process another billion
pounds by 2010.)
Consistency
To ensure that its sustainability and
corporate social responsibility (CSR)
efforts stay true to their aims and are
providing the kind of measurable returns
this high-performing company insists
on, HP has several processes in place
to regularly assess and revise the
company’s strategy. Some of the most
effective processes have been the
result of a radical move toward
transparency, which has helped to co-opt
the services of “watchdogs” and lever-aged
them to HP’s long-term advantage.
Building alliances and inviting
dialogue with key groups
HP’s leadership in CSR and sustain-ability
has provided a powerful platform
to work with industry peers, NGOs and
government agencies to influence the
shape of future industry and national
regulations. One of the first actions
required in the implementation of HP’s
SER strategy was to address the com-plex
issue of an extended and diverse
supply chain—a lightning rod of
attention for many NGOs.
While it has been a challenge to
coordinate everyone within HP to
share and support a unified vision of
social and environmental responsibility,
it has been even more daunting to try
and elicit that same level of passion
from the industry’s most-envied list of
global suppliers, who together represent
a workforce of nearly 400,000 people.
To begin, HP insisted that all its vendors
adopt the same supplier code of conduct.
Having played a key role in the creation
and adoption of the industry’s Electronics
Industry Citizenship Coaltion (EICC)
guidelines, HP used them to formulate
clear policies that cover everything
from sourcing environmentally respon-sible
materials to ensuring that workers
are treated with respect and dignity.2

“My ten-year vision is for consumers
to know that when you touch an HP
product, you are guaranteed it was
made in a socially and environmentally
responsible way,” says Bonnie Nixon
in her former role as HP’s lead for
Supply Chain, Social and Envi-ronmental
Responsibility.
Since 1999, Nixon has been instru-mental
in ensuring that all of HP’s
suppliers meet expectations and
adhere to the terms of the EICC. In
2004, the Catholic Agency for Overseas
Development, a human-rights watchdog
group, issued a withering report, alleging
“dire working conditions” by overseas
contractors serving the computer
industry. Nixon used the report as a
lever to ramp up HP’s efforts, not just
among its own suppliers but across the
entire electronics industry.
To ensure the code would be uniformly
embraced, the company took unprece-dented
action: In April 2008, HP
released a comprehensive list of its
top-tier vendors in a bold move that
stunned many industry veterans—inside
and outside of HP. Glazer recalls: “We
released the names despite a long-standing
operational policy in the
company that defined our supply
chain as a source of significant com-petitive
advantage. This list had never
been shared. And it was very counter-intuitive
for our senior management
when we put that forward. We spent a
lot of time talking about whether it
was the right thing to do. And we
ultimately concluded that the value
in doing it exceeded any possible
competitive loss that might go along
with exposing that information.”
The response was almost universally
positive—not only among influential
analysts, NGOs and consumer/advocacy
groups but among suppliers as well,
who viewed the move as a sign of a
long-term commitment from HP. At
the same time, this radical transparency
put significant new demands on HP’s
suppliers, including intensive audit
from the company to evaluate suppliers’
performance in areas like environmental
responsibility, energy efficiency and
labor policies. From May through
September 2007, HP engaged
Environmental Resources Management
(ERM) and Verité to conduct verification
audits of dozens of suppliers in China
and Thailand, including those suppliers
identified in NGO reports as having
poor standards.
“The audits help suppliers understand
exactly what we’re looking for,” says
Glazer. “They can read something that
says, ‘Working hours should be this.’
Then they answer six questions about
it, and they gain a much deeper level
of understanding of what we’re looking
for. After the written portion, an on-site
audit is arranged by the person who
normally manages our business with
that supplier on an ongoing basis.”
Some of HP’s suppliers bristled at the
new requirements, and others worried
that implementing them would raise
their costs; some even sought price
increases or other guarantees from HP.
Chi-Luen Lee, HP’s SER supply chain
lead for China, remembers explaining
to suppliers, “Look, this is part of the
law and you ought to be meeting
these requirements anyway. And if you
wish to continue working with HP, you
will have to comply because you are
obligated to do so under our contract.
But don’t worry—we’ll work with you
to make improvements if you are
interested and committed.” In two
Chinese factories, HP tested a new
approach to taking corrective action.
Verité conducted Management Action
Planning sessions with these suppliers,
working with their managers to identify
the root cause of the violations and
fix the issues. Both of these suppliers
have made improvements in their
systems—and understand now how
to identify issues on their own and
develop sustainable corrective actions.
Here, too, sound social and environ-mental
strategy proved to be good
business. Lee and his team found that
when a supplier had a poor result on
the EICC audit, often they also had
product quality issues. This discovery
allowed HP to either adjust its supplier
base or take quick and efficient steps
toward remediation—with a clear
focus on measurable objectives. “We
treat a supplier as a partner. It’s not
easy to become an HP-approved sup-plier,
but once you become one it is not
very easy for us to terminate the rela-tionship.
We always prefer to work with
suppliers for improvement,” Lee says.
Nixon agrees: “You have to get out
there and manage your supply chain,
engage with your suppliers and be
willing to share tools, people and
expertise to help them grow. CSR
issues need to be embedded in your
sourcing organization’s ethos, and
you have to go beyond the first tier
of suppliers.”
HP’s Stakeholder Advisory Council
(SAC) is another means of keeping the
company’s sustainability strategy current
and on course. As Mark Heintz says,
“The NGO community is a much more
trusted body than business and also
than government. So for us at HP,
partnering with WWF adds a certain
level of credibility to programs that
we’re creating. WWF has got leading
climate scientists working for them
that help advise us on being aggressive

yet realistic about our goals. And I
think the goals that we put together
as a result are perhaps more credible
than those of other companies that
develop them on their own. So my
perception of shareholders and others
is they view this as a good partnership
and as something that legitimizes
and adds credibility to HP’s
sustainability program.”
While the company has often engaged
stakeholders—inside and outside HP—
for various projects or for informal
input, the SAC has a very broad, high-visibility
mission within HP but also
with the public. From HP’s perspective,
the recruitment of key NGOs holds the
promise of ironclad credibility, along
with a fresh viewpoint. “HP has always
had a stakeholder engagement function
with extensive inputs at the regional
level,” says Heintz. “But now we bring
outside stakeholders in at the global
level, to get them in front of the SVP
community in a way that they hadn’t
been before—by bringing them into
strategy sessions and into the goal-creation
process and into development
from an operations perspective. We
kind of use them as an advisory panel.
It’s a pretty big commitment from
EVPs, SVPs, as well as from the people
we bring in.
Heintz remembers his recruiting
efforts within HP getting a mixed
reception, at least at first: “A lot of
managers said, ‘Great! No problem.
Let’s meet with these guys. I think this
is a great idea. This will help us manage
these campaigns. We’ll find some
proactive programs, we’ll get some
advice and this will be great! And we’ll
answer their questions.’ But some of
them were much more apprehensive
at the beginning. I think there are
some myths in the business community
that NGO types are running around
with protest signs behind their backs,
or shareholder resolutions in their
breast pockets ready to whip out at
any moment. And so one of the things
that has been fascinating as I’ve put
this council together is the camaraderie
and the teamwork that’s been built
and the transformation of HP. A few
people were very surprised that the
NGO folks behaved much more like
consultants and advisers than any of
these myths would have led them to
believe. So one of the benefits of this
council is the transformation of
perceptions within the HP executive
community. And I’ve heard others talk
about this as well in other companies
where they’ve had meetings and
engagements with the NGO community
saying, ‘Oh my God, this is not what I
thought.’ There really is, now, a shared
sense of mission around the transfor-mation
of HP,” Heintz says.
The proximity of the NGOs has also
helped HP monitor and redress lapses
more effectively. Heintz recalls a
particular incident that took a much
different turn than it might have, had
the company not been as engaged and
responsive in its CSR efforts: “There is
a network of NGOs called the Good
Electronics Network. Their focus is on
working conditions in the supply chain
for the IT industry. They started a
campaign in early 2007 called “High
Tech—No Rights?” and graded five IT
companies: HP, Dell, Apple, Acer and
Fujitsu Siemens. Fortunately, HP was
rated the highest. But in the evaluation
criteria we noticed that we had a red
mark in China. And we were a little
confused by that because we’ve done
a lot of work in China. So we met with
this NGO, and we discovered they
were gathering their information by
standing outside one of the factories
of our suppliers in China and inter-viewing
workers as they came out of
the plant. These were large operations
with 10,000 to 20,000 employees and
$100 million of revenue. And here the
NGO was trying to assess the situation
inside by just interviewing a few people
coming out the gate. At any rate, we
got wind of this and said, ‘OK, this
may explain why you’re giving what
we consider to be an erroneous rating.
You’re just not getting good information.’
So we actually helped the NGO people
get inside our supplier’s factory. We
introduced them to the management
team and allowed them to interview
workers on the inside rather than
standing outside the gates trying to
piece something together. So we were
able to take a situation that was kind
of negative and use our transparency
and HP’s proactive approach to turn
the situation around. It resulted in a
bit of a competitive advantage for us
as well because this group of NGOs
has influence over what is said about
our company and the perception of HP
in the industry.”
The forum has also allowed HP to
learn from leaders in other industries
that have dealt with these issues—the
WWF, for example, and its methods
for reducing greenhouse gas emissions
(WWF helped HP develop realistic but
aggressive goals) as well as Nike and
its experience in addressing the social
issues of a diverse global supply chain.
Other collaborations are blossoming
as well. HP and the WWF now make
joint presentations at universities
around the world, discussing how IT
can help reduce energy emissions
and drive change.

Introducing HP Pavilion
In September 2008, Wal-Mart named
HP the winner of its Home Entertainment
Design Challenge, singling out the
technology company for its success at
further reducing the environmental
impact of personal computers.
A radically redesigned product, the
HP Pavilion dv6929 Entertainment
Notebook is the first ecocentric
consumer product to command
premium pricing. The notebook
features an innovative design that
reduces product packaging by 97 per-cent,
conserving fuel and reducing
CO2 emissions by removing the equiv-alent
of one out of every four trucks
previously needed to deliver the
notebooks to nearly 1,700 Wal-Mart
stores and 594 Sam’s Club locations.
To package the Pavilion notebook,
HP replaced conventional protective
shipping materials and boxes with the
HP Protect Messenger Bag, made from
100 percent recycled materials. This
allows for a dramatic reduction in
overall packaging content and size
while delivering equal, if not better,
product protection compared with
conventional packaging. Customers
who purchase the HP notebook leave
the store with the computer and its
accessories cushioned safely in the
notebook bag. (See Figure 3.)
Packaging engineer Randy Boeller
discusses the mechanics of such a
radical re-conception: “We assembled
a team that included the product
marketing group, a program manager
who handles sales and marketing for
North American consumer products,
the packaging engineer from the
notebook group, and then a number of
people from the manufacturing group.
You’re talking about a pretty high-volume
product line, and anything you
do in the manufacturing operation that
causes a change and could interrupt
production and shipment, you’ve got
to be real careful not to mess with that.
“We also needed a number of production
people and ancillary support groups
like marketing communications for
some of the artwork as well as other
marketing people to make aesthetic
Figure 3: HP Pavilion Entertainment Notebook and Accessories
Source: HP

decisions about the bag. Then we
worked with the bag supplier to get
the preliminary samples, do the shock
and vibration testing to make sure
that the product was as protected as
it was in conventional packaging.”
Boeller explains that an “apples to
apples” comparison of packaging costs
(cardboard and styrofoam versus a
designer messenger bag) was not
relevant, as the new bag also repre-sented
part of the value of the product
as well—and part of the reason for the
premium pricing opportunity.
To reinforce the product’s environmen-tal
appeal, HP made the notebook an
Energy Star product that uses a high
percentage of recycled materials.
To date, it is HP’s greenest
consumer computer.
Longevity
HP has always had a competency
in long-term planning and vision.
Additional product and marketing
innovations (beyond the Pavilion/
Wal-Mart collaboration) are in place
for the long-term as well, and the
company has established ambitious
stretch goals in areas like carbon
emissions. It is clear that HP aims to
achieve and retain leadership positions
across as many dimensions as possible,
with strategies that take a very long
view. Critical to executing these visions
will be the company’s ability to maintain
a “white hat” position amid growing
public and regulatory scrutiny.
Achieving long-term gains by
investing in suppliers and partnerships
Centro de Reflexión y Acción Laboral
(CEREAL) is a labor-rights organization
that advances the rights of maquiladora
employees in Mexico, including
electronics workers in Guadalajara,
where many HP suppliers are located.
According to HP, this NGO community
of Catholic priests also operates several
universities in Mexico and is one of
the more influential communities
dedicated to improving working and
living conditions in the region. Over
the past several years, HP has taken
what was potentially a highly adver-sarial
relationship with CEREAL and
transformed it into one of mutual
trust and cooperation.
Julio Acevedo, HP’s head of
Guadalajara operations, remembers
how the collaboration began: “Our
suppliers in the electronics sector were
saying, ‘Don’t even talk to them. They’re
dangerous. They want to really damage
our image.’ So four or five years ago,
Bonnie Nixon came here to a meeting
with CEREAL in Guadalajara, and we
were pretty much the only attendees
from the industry. I think it was the
first meeting when we found out that
they were doing an analysis of the
industry. They were conducting inter-views
with workers (some of whom
were probably fired for a reason and
who were mad at the electronics
industry), and that’s what they were
writing about. So I told the CEREAL
people, ‘This is really hurting the
electronics sector because you are not
giving companies the chance to provide
the other side of the story.’ So we sat
down with CEREAL and worked out a
plan to conduct systemized audits.
Because HP was such an important
customer for many of these manufac-turers,
we had some clout. After a
couple of years, as everybody began
to understand this was a very, very
important subject, people began to see
that implementing the code of conduct
was something good for the industry,
for the workers and for the people and
to make better places to work. And
we got commitments from all the
contract manufacturers.”
After two years, most manufacturers
had adopted robust plans for commu-nication
and training for all their HR
people and hired environmental health
and safety people to implement the
code of conduct. Bimonthly meetings
with representatives from the manu-facturers
and CEREAL are now held.
CEREAL has begun serving as a
frontline resource for employees in
resolving disputes, advising employees
with problems, weeding out nuisance
cases and taking advantage of their
improved access to electronics
executives to negotiate satisfactory
solutions. Manufacturers that have
chosen to ignore the industry standards
and fair practices have been dropped
from HP contracts.
HP now has a system of 70 auditors
who regularly inspect 200 factories
owned by 150 key HP suppliers—a
greater number of auditors than any
other EICC member. HP says allegations
of labor problems contributed to its
decision to break with three suppliers
that didn’t make the grade, including
South Korea–based Trigem Computer.
Trigem says it wasn’t aware of
the problems.

HP’s suppliers have also reaped clear
business benefits from their improved
relationships with NGOs like CEREAL—
mainly, lower employee and customer
attrition rates as well as better workers
seeking employment because of
improved conditions in the electronics
sector. “Our suppliers can spend less
on training because there is lower
turnover,” says Acevedo. “People also
feel a lot more loyal to the company.
For example, one of the companies
implemented an employee suggestion
to allow pregnant women to leave five
minutes ahead of other employees so
they don’t get so stuck in the evening
rush. And the company came back not
only with that, they also provided a
different color of uniform, a pink color,
so people can see that the women are
pregnant and can put them in areas
that are less stressful to work in. And
everybody was very happy. So I believe
that the most important thing is that
we have started a culture of doing
better for both the worker and the
company. And I think that this is great
to have this kind of culture. Employees
are now more likely to ask themselves,
‘How can I be more productive? How
can I do more with less? How can they
treat me better?’”
Staying ahead of the
sustainability curve
To outperform its peers, HP is using a
threefold approach as part of its sustain-ability
strategy: It ensures that its
suppliers adhere to a stringent code of
conduct (as discussed previously); keeps
its finger on the pulse of trends in the
enterprise business and individual con-sumer
markets; and educates employees
on expected behaviors that both drive
performance and are consistent with
HP’s sustainability objectives.
Expanding the appeal of a sustainability
message from a few forward-thinking
companies in the upper echelons of
global business to full-on “ethical
consumerism” still represents a steep
educational and adoption curve. But
HP is in it for the long haul with its
SER program—and its approach allows
HP’s markets to drive the pace. “Most
people have bought into the wisdom
of energy reduction,” concludes Pierre
Delforge. “The problem we have is
figuring out how that is compatible
with our business objectives in terms
of market readiness or market
demand. What are our customers really
asking for? What are they ready to pay
for? And how much does it cost us to
deliver that?” By having a consistent,
long-view policy—and mechanisms in
place to implement and quickly modify
its strategy—HP ensures that its product
and service development processes
dovetail with the market, while
maintaining industry thought leadership.
John Frey says: “We are seeing enterprise
buyers in general getting much more
sophisticated around issues like the
environment. We published a white
paper that helps them spec greener
products, explaining the variety of
eco-labels and international standards
that exist along with questions to ask
IT vendors. It’s not HP-biased in any
way, but even when purchasers use
objective sustainability criteria, HP
tends to win a lot of business.” And
though HP’s energy-efficient, newly
eco-labeled products are commanding
a premium price with enterprise
customers due to an aggressive
24-month payback period, the
message is still slow to resonate
with retail customers.
“We’ve figured out time and time again
that you can do market surveys and
consumers will tell you, ‘Yes, absolutely,
I want to buy an environmentally
preferable product, and I’m willing to
spend extra for it,’” says Frey. “But the
reality is, at point of purchase, it’s all
about price. Our enterprise customers
have warmed up to more energy-efficient
power supplies and equipment
that uses a lot less energy—even when
it has a price premium associated with
it because those components are more
expensive—but consumer customers
are still unwilling to pay for that.”
Another danger is deliberate confusion
in the market: “It often takes a detailed
explanation to make the case for a
truly greener product,” says Frey. “
“Meanwhile, it’s easy for others to
‘greenwash’ or divert attention, talking
about things like 3-watts-lower standby
power, which is a bit disingenuous
when, really, 70 percent of the
associated energy use of a printer
is in making the paper.”
Building on a culture of responsibility
HP is ensuring its ability to sustain
itself long-term by maintaining a
corporate culture built on CSR values,
by investing in suppliers and partners
for the long-term, and by encouraging
ideas about sustainability to bubble
up from employees at all levels.
In a letter that accompanies HP’s
Global Citizenship Report for FY2007,
HP’s chairman, CEO and president,
Mark Hurd, pledges to use the company’s
“focus, resolve and ingenuity” (along
with that of its partners, suppliers and

customers) “to help address some of
the planet’s most critical challenges.”
The mission is not seen only as altruism
but also as savvy business strategy—a
message that is reinforced at all levels
within HP.
“You can’t save the environment by
losing money,” Nixon says. “That’s a
losing proposition because if you do
that, then you’re not going to be a
leader and if you’re not a leader, you’re
not influencing what is happening in
society. So I think we need to find
win-wins, where you can do well and
you can do good. And to have a
successful environmental strategy,
you need to be successful from a
business perspective.”
To make sure that employees at every
level of the company understand this
win-win view, the company hosts a
number of internal “sustainability
networks”—groups within each HP
office where employees can sign up
for different distribution lists, coffee
talks and committees. There is a
companywide program called “Live
Green,” where employees can avail
themselves of programs such as solar
panel reimbursement. Live Green also
offers access to a large database called
“Green Base,” where all of HP’s envi-ronmental
documents, customer
presentations and competitive research
are stored. One valuable business
benefit of this universal focus and
awareness is that many of the company’s
best SER ideas have come from relatively
junior employees. According to Judy
Glazer, “Almost all of our supply chain
ideas originate from more junior folks
and work their way up to the SVP
level. The three senior VPs who drive
this from a strategic standpoint are
collectively responsible for roughly
$50 billion in expenditures for product
materials and manufacturing and the
entire fulfillment for HP products.
So they’re not sitting around having
meetings with each other deciding
when we should eliminate which
material or how we should resolve
compliance issues. Many valuable
ideas come to them in the form of
proposals that have been developed
lower in the organization.”
Sharing lessons learned
As pioneers, HP’s SER executives are
very eager to share what they’re
learning with other organizations. Frey
advises aspiring sustainable companies
to “find out what is meaningful to you
and your customers. Focus on the things
where you can really make an impact.
That sounds really obvious, but you’d
be amazed at how many companies
put together a sustainability strategy
and focus on things that are incidental
to their business or in the eyes of their
customers, while ignoring opportunities
that are much bigger. Also, get a solid
baseline before you start so that you
know when you’re making an impact.
The final thing I tell companies is,
measure your progress and be trans-parent
about it. Increasingly, on today’s
world stage, you’re not credible if
you’re not transparent.”
Nixon counsels every company to take
a realistic view of the near-term: “One
of the reasons we came out with our
eco-attributes label is that we see
what’s going on in the landscape and
ultimately it’s going to be regulated.
So why not get out there and try to
influence it and harmonize it and just
be transparent with your products?
What we’re out there with now is kind
of a first step, but where we’re taking
it is really going to be pretty innovative
in terms of being just full ‘open kimono’
about what’s in our products.”
“I think HP is lucky in the sense that
its founders believed in sustainability,”
continues Nixon. “It’s something that
has had visibility and has really
withstood the test of time. It has to
be understood and endorsed from
the top down. Mark Hurd is a pretty
pragmatic guy: He’s focused on the
numbers and has the most balanced
view of sales, operations, products,
technology, etc. that you could get.
So being able to frame the dialogue
and the programs and the initiatives
in a way that makes business sense
for your customers is key. That’s HP
at our core, a company that makes
sustainability make sense.”

About the authors
Eric Lowitt is a research fellow
at the Accenture Institute for High
Performance, where his research
focuses on the connection between
sustainability and high performance.
Lowitt’s most recent sustainability
research has been published on
prominent websites such as the World
Business Council for Sustainable
Development and Forbes.com.
About the Institute
The Accenture Institute for High
Performance develops and publishes
practical insights into critical
management issues and global
economic trends. Its worldwide team
of researchers connects with Accenture’s
consulting, technology and outsourcing
leaders to demonstrate, through original,
rigorous research and analysis, how
organizations become and remain
high performers.
Jim Grimsley is the Accenture
Sustainability Practice Lead for North
America. Based in Houston, Texas,
Grimsley has significant experience
leading a number of successful reengi-neering
and transformation projects.
Prior to his current role, he was the
global managing partner for upstream
in Accenture’s energy industry group.
His consulting background encompasses
a broad range of leadership experiences,
including major merger integration
efforts in the energy industry as
well as several significant supply
chain projects.
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management
consulting, technology services and
outsourcing company. Combining
unparalleled experience, comprehensive
capabilities across all industries and
business functions, and extensive
research on the world’s most successful
companies, Accenture collaborates
with clients to help them become
high-performance businesses and
governments. With more than 186,000
people serving clients in over 120
countries, the company generated net
revenues of US$23.39 billion for the
fiscal year ended August 31, 2008.
Its home page is www.accenture.com.
Notes
1. “Company History, the Fifties,” HP Memory
Web site, http://www.hpmemory.org/
wa_pages/wall_a_page_08.htm,
accessed December 5, 2008.
2. The Electronic Industry Code of Conduct
(Version 2.0, October 2005) outlines standards
to ensure that working conditions in the
electronics industry supply chain are safe, that
workers are treated with respect and dignity
and that manufacturing processes are environ-mentally
responsible. The Code was initially
developed by a number of companies engaged
in the manufacture of electronics products
between June and October 2004] Participating
companies included Celestica, Dell, Flextronics,
HP, IBM, Jabil, Sanmina-SCI and Solectron.
Companies either adopting or endorsing the
code or joining the Implementation Group
include: Celestica, Cisco, Dell, Flextronics,
Foxconn, HP, IBM, Intel, Jabil, Lucent, Microsoft,
Sanmina-SCI, Seagate, Solectron and Sony.

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