Hi, I'm John Byrd and welcome to the Become a Sustainable Business Change Agent class. My colleague, Ken Bettenhausen and I have a pretty simple goal for this class and the ones that follow. We want to give you the tools for creating a proposal for changing your company organization. We thought it'd be helpful at the very beginning of the class to talk about what a good proposal has to do and what sort of information it needs to contain. What you're trying to do is make the business case for your proposed change. That is you want to show that making this change is a good business decision. Your proposal will probably be in the form of a memo address to your boss. Your boss will always be the first to prove over an idea. If the change is something you can do yourself with no extra resources like making some posters about recycling or how to save energy, you still want to make sure your boss knows what you're doing. Unless you have your own budget, you're going to need funds to support the change, so your boss or someone higher up in the organization will have to approve the idea. If your boss is not the person who can actually allocate money for the project, why do you need her approval? Well, in most organizations, you don't want to leapfrog or jump over the person that you report to. If you do, you're implying that they don't matter. And depending on that person's personality, it could take offense. It could become an enemy or at least not an ally. Remember, you have to work with this person, so you don't want to offend her. Once your boss is on board with your idea, she can help you advocate it the next level. This is really helpful. Because if she's been at the company longer than you have, she probably has a much better sense of the political landscape than you do. If your company has somebody doing sustainability, make sure that person knows about your idea. They can often make valuable suggestions about improving your proposal and they night offer support. Who the memo comes from is also important. I know that we like to get credit for our ideas, so the tendency is to act as an individual. That assures that we're going to get the credit or the blame, but think about what your boss needs to approve the proposal. She needs to know that it's a good idea that won't embarrass her, if she moves it further up the organization. Something that will make her confident about this is if several people she knows and trusts have helped develop the proposal, and are on the sender list. That means that you're going to have to share the credit with those people, but it also increases the likelihood of the proposal moving forward. So just in the to and the from part of the memo, you have to make some thinking. The memo needs to start with a very brief description of exactly what’s being proposed and the problem or the opportunity that it addresses. For example, you might propose changing the lighting system in your office area which would save money by reducing energy consumption. Provide better light quality and reduce the heat associated with the current lighting system. The problem you're addressing even though it hadn't been recognized as a problem until you started thinking about sustainability is energy waste. Other associated opportunities are improving the work environment. Next, you need to explain exactly what has to be done and who's going to do it. Be sure to explain how big a project this is and how long it'll take to implement. Projects like updating lighting systems can be disruptive if installation takes very long, so people need to be prepared for those interruptions. Going back to our lighting example, the specific action might be having someone from facilities management replace existing light bulbs with LED bulbs with the same lighting capacity. The installation will require a full day, but can be partially completed after standard work hours. Including an implementation and installation schedule is really valuable if the project takes very long. For large projects, explaining whether they can be done in phases is a good strategy. The first phase can be tested for effectiveness before more money is spent and this reduces the risk of the project. This section should include a budget that lists all of the costs of the project. Now there's a tendency to want to understate or underestimate budgets thinking that, that'll increase the likelihood of the project being accepted. Don't do this. Create a budget that's absolutely honest. If you underestimate, get approval and then have to ask for more money to complete the project, your credibility is going to go way down. In almost every case, it's better to be absolutely honest, so the organization and decision makers know exactly what they're getting into. Organizations can't survive on that information, so don't contribute to that problem. Next, you have to justify the change. Almost always you're going to have to do some sort of financial analysis to show economic benefits or costs, so the proposed change. This will show the cost of the project, the timing of future benefits, the net benefits, that's the benefits minus the costs to the company and how long it'll take to break even or its payback period. We'll show you how to do a financial analysis in a couple weeks. As important and sometimes more important than the financial justification are the non monetary benefits of the change. We're going to spend some time dealing with some of these benefits. They can involve reducing risks, creating revenue opportunities or enhancing the company's reputation. Finally, the proposal should explain how you're going to measure whether the change was successful. This is important as you build your credibility in the organization. You want to be able to show that your proposals do exactly what you claim they do. Demonstrating success is most easily done when there's money involved. Did the change save the company money? Or did the change increase revenues and profits? It can be much more difficult to show that the non-monetary benefits occurred as predicted. Some things are just hard to measure. However, sometimes you can do a short survey to get some indication of change. Sometimes, feedback from employees or customers or suppliers provide insight about these non-monetary changes. Writing a memo like this is a great exercise for thinking through what you need to show people to get your idea approved. Sometimes, things seem like good ideas when we're thinking about them in our heads. They don't look so good when we actually write them down. On paper, the details just don't quite fall into place. Here's one last suggestion for you. This applies not just to these proposals, but to everything that you write. If it's important, you need to give yourself enough time, so you can set it aside. Come back after a little while, even just an hour or two and reread it. That little break will be enough for you to clear your head a bit and read your proposal with fresh eyes. Very few of us write good first drafts. There's always typos or things aren't very clear. For proposals like the ones in this class, you've got one chance to get your idea approved. So, don't reduce those chances with sloppy writing. Even better than you rereading the proposal, just have a trusted colleague or friend read it and make comments. Always keep in mind that what we're doing is important. We're trying to make the world a better place, so we need to take these opportunities seriously and do the best job that we can. Thanks for being in the class. We're excited to see the great things that you're going to be doing in the future.
