Business process redesign vs. greening as fashion

There is a great article in the Wall Street Journal quarterly special section featuring pieces from the Sloan Management School and the Sloan Management Review, "Greener and Cheaper: The conventional wisdom is that a company's costs rise as its environmental impact falls. Think again" about the 20 year process that Suburu has been engaged in to reduce "waste" at their automobile plant in Indiana. From the article:

For years, it was the conventional wisdom: If you improved quality, costs would also rise. But then companies discovered the opposite was true. By redesigning processes -- reducing mistakes, doing things right the first time -- companies could provide better products and services and cut their costs.

They are at the point where no waste is sent to a landfill. And this is a perfect illustration of my focus on building robust processes, that with robust functioning focused "proper" processes, you are far more likely to get the right outcomes, and that the reason that development decisionmaking (and the results) are lacking so often is because the processes aren't truly designed to produce the "right" outcomes.

The article is relevant to the thread about development review, both in the previous entry in this blog, and the thread at Greater Greater Washington referenced in the previous blog entry.

I was struck by this section from the article:

Levels of Commitment
Categorizing companies based on their environmental strategies

LEVEL 1: Compliance Management's focus is on compliance with environmental rules and regulations. Green is considered a cost.

LEVEL 2: Opportunistic and Ad Hoc Some environmental awareness. Management opportunistically takes advantage of low-cost, money-saving green projects.

LEVEL 3: Analytical and Systematic Environmental impact is systematically measured, and the information used by management to select improvement projects. The company is building its understanding of the relationships between environmental impact, cost and risk in its business.

LEVEL 4: Integrated Into Daily Operations Everyone in the company is expected to be involved in improving the company's green performance, and most ideas come from the bottom up. Green becomes an integral part of what makes the company profitable.

LEVEL 5: Pioneering The organization is developing approaches on the leading edge of current environmental practice and thinking.

Source: Alan G. Robinson and Dean M. Schroeder

and its relevance to how people approach the issue of development approval. I guess I am arguing that the strict "legal" process doesn't work, isn't working, and there are points within the process (and even better points outside of it) where with additional "doses" of civic engagement, things would end up working out better, and faster overall, just as Suburu's approach to waste management is about business process redesign rather than merely being concerned with "throwing out the trash."

And my thinking about it is more than being concerned with the minimal legal requirements and ad-hoc responses.