Helping Companies Walk the Walk on Sustainability for 35+ Years: An Interview with Joel Makower of GreenBiz Group

Green Success Stories

6 months ago

Green Success Stories had an in-depth conversation with Joel Makower, chairman and co-founder of GreenBiz Group, a membership network and digital media event firm focused on corporate sustainability and innovation. We discussed the evolution of sustainability efforts over the years, the dynamic nature of the field, and the real good that companies and individuals do toward mitigating climate change.

Tell us about what you do.

Sure. I’m Joel Makower. I’m chairman and co-founder of a company called GreenBiz Group.

Complicating it a bit is that we’re going through a rebranding. We’re changing the name of the company in the next few weeks, but that’s okay. Everybody out there knows us as GreenBiz.

We’re a media and events company focusing at the intersection of corporate sustainability and innovation, all aimed at how business is addressing the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis and some social equity crises and other things, but it all typically rolls up to climate for us.

We do multiple things across five brands. We have digital media events and a membership network.

The five brands and the areas they address are:

GreenBiz – the profession of sustainability
Circularity – circular economy
GreenFin – sustainable finance and ESG
Verge – climate tech
Bloom – business and biodiversity

We just had our Circularity conference last week in Chicago, with about 1500 people. It’s actually one of our smaller events. GreenBiz in Phoenix every February draws about 2,500 people. Verge in San Jose draws five or 6,000 people.

Tell us about your sustainability journey.

So I’m a journalist by training. This year marks 50 years as a professional journalist, 35 in this space of sustainability, going back to 1989, when I wrote a book called The Green Consumer, looking at the green marketplace. I wrote a weekly syndicated column in 90 papers in the US around green marketing and green consumer issues.

Then I realized two things.

One, there was no green consumer movement in the US. I looked over my shoulder and realized I was kind of standing there by myself.

And two, the companies I was being asked to come in and talk to about so-called green consumers were themselves grappling with a whole bunch of issues on energy, water, waste, toxics, carbon, and other things that we know well today.

So I pivoted in that direction. In 1991, I started a monthly newsletter, a dead-tree snail mail newsletter, as we think of it now, called The Green Business Letter. And then the web came along.

I decided to create this resource, a knowledge hub on business and the environment. There was no business model in 1998 for giving away information on the internet. So I did it as a nonprofit, created this website called greenbiz.com. It flourished and eventually a B2B publishing executive called Pete May and I ended up raising some money, buying the IP from the nonprofit to commercialize the website, which launched the company, which is now about 70 people based here in Oakland, California.

We’ve got people across nine time zones these days. And so I’ll just stop there. That’s my backstory.

How has the sustainability effort changed over the years?

Well, almost any general question you’re going to ask me is going to begin with the words, it depends. And to some extent, it depends on whether you’re a glass half full or glass half empty kind of person. I mean, in 1991, there was a small handful of people working on sustainability.

We didn’t even call it that. It was EH&S, environmental health and safety inside big companies. Now every company has that profession.

And in fact, sustainability extends to supply chain, fleets, facilities, real estate, energy, marketing, communications, finance, and many other aspects of business.

Interestingly, back in the early 90s and throughout the 90s, most of the action was on compliance, just getting in compliance with a whole raft of environmental laws that have been enacted in the 70s, 80s, and 90s in the United States and some in Europe. And so it was really about compliance and all the things that go into that.

30 years later, the profession has come full circle. And with the advent of climate and carbon reporting rules and green marketing rules on both sides of the Atlantic, sustainability teams are now coming back to compliance and often having to step away from the actual work of reducing emissions and increasing circularity of their supply chains and all the other things that companies are working on. That’s still taking place, but it’s gone underground a bit.

And partly because of the political pushback that’s happened here in the United States and elsewhere, this anti-woke, anti-ESG, which hasn’t stopped companies from doing things, but it’s gone underground. They just don’t talk about it as much anymore, which is really a disservice to both the companies and their various stakeholders. I would not have been in this field if we were writing about the same thing for 35 years.

What I love about this, besides the people who are generally amazing and wonderful, is the dynamic nature of this, the issues that come and go, the issues that we didn’t really expect to be an issue that all of a sudden lit up on the scoreboard in a big way. It’s a really dynamic field and just full of interesting twists and turns.

What’s got your focus these days?

Well, it depends. I’m really interested in the role of AI. Yes, there’s a lot of dark side of artificial intelligence in terms of its ability to create autonomous self-willed actors and do deep fakes and all kinds of things.

But when you look at what needs to happen in the global economy around decarbonizing energy and buildings, transportation and mobility systems, agriculture, manufacturing and materials, and protection of ecosystems, AI is already playing a role in all of those things and is useful in being able to monitor, analyze, and optimize systems. AI plays right into what sustainability needs. Sustainability typically refers to incredibly complex systems, whether they’re ecosystems of plants and species and so on, or whether they’re supply chains and systems of commerce.

AI has the ability to look much more deeply and much more quickly into those systems to figure out where the opportunities are, where the fault lines are, how we get further faster. I’m excited about that. That’s one thing. I could go on about other things, but that’s something that’s current for me.

How about a success story? Can you tell me something that you feel good about that you were involved with that you can point to having a positive effect?

Well, I don’t have a “swing for the fences, I did A and then B happened at some scale” kind of thing. I think the success is the community that we’ve built, the hundreds of companies who really do feel like a community. This was a space that did not have a center of gravity. There were few organizations, certainly for mainstream companies to plug into, to learn, to commiserate with their peers, to just ask questions, dumb and not dumb questions, in a safe environment.

We’ve created that. We have the trust of some, I don’t know how many of the fortune 500, but hundreds certainly, and thousands of mid-sized companies, many of which are suppliers to the big companies. I think that’s a success that we’re seen as an honest broker, as an intelligent convener, as a smart communicator, and a trusted place.

Then the team behind that, the 70 or so people who work for this company. I’ve founded or co-founded three companies. I’ve never had a traditional job working for somebody else in my career.

This is the biggest company I’ve ever worked for. When we have events like we did recently in Chicago, the events are great, the community is great, the program is great, but my favorite thing is watching the team execute. They come together.

You never hear bad words. You never see people stomping out of the room in anger. Everybody does what needs to be done, working very closely in a high-pressure environment.

Then at the end of the day or the night, everyone goes out drinking and dancing with the team. It’s really close knit and it’s just a beautiful thing to watch. That, for me, is a success story.

If I gave you a billion dollars right now, how would you spend it?

Wow. I would give a lot of it away to communities, entrepreneurs that are underrepresented and are at the front lines of sustainability. For example, to Cancer Alley down in Louisiana. We have a nonprofit called GreenBiz.org that specifically works to bring emerging leaders of color into the sustainability profession. Every one of our five annual events, we gift travel, airfare, registration, and housing to a group of young professionals of color.

It’s a highly competitive program. We don’t just plop them down in a room full of 1,000 or 2,000 mostly older, mostly whiter people. We integrate them.

We bring them in. We have special programs. We have one-on-ones with elders.

Then we continue to network them. That’s a huge need. I would want to give away or invest, in some cases, money in those communities, in those professionals, in the organizations that are really doing the work on the front lines.

There are hundreds. We’ve got hundreds coming to our Verge conference in October of climate tech startups, many of which are worthy of additional funding. It’s amazing that a relatively small amount of funding can go a long way.

I’d definitely take a few million of that billion to really be catalytic capital for some of them. I do think that there are thousands and thousands of people in local communities who are on the front lines of the climate crisis who need support, whether it’s shoring up their homes and businesses, helping them afford renewable energy, electric vehicles, electrification, and insulation, and all the things that need to happen. There is need at the companies that they work for and own, in many cases, that are really going to bear the brunt of the climate crisis.

We need to be looking at that and helping.

What would you like people to take away from this?

I think most people believe that companies’ initiatives on sustainability are window dressing, that they’re doing this to look good in the eyes of consumers. Sure, they want to look good, but that’s not what’s driving them.

This is first and foremost about risk and mitigating risk. It’s about the social license to operate, which is to say that they’re addressing societal concerns and doing something about them. Actually, this is an area where companies are walking more than they’re talking.

They’re actually doing more than they’re saying, because talking about this stuff can be problematic. If you talk about what you’re doing right, it often sets you up as a target to say, well, what about this? The thing that you’re not doing right, what about these problems? I would want people to take away the fact that this is real, this is exciting, this is not just looking good, but this is actually transforming everything we do as we need to, as we address the climate crisis, need to really reinvent our world to be much more, not only climate friendly, but able to withstand the brunt of the climate problems that we’re already starting to face and will be facing increasingly in the coming years.

Businesses aren’t the only part of the solution. We need policy support, we need the consumers and employees to dig in, we need the financial markets to step up.

But business really is at the center of this really transformational revolution, whatever we want to call it, that’s taking place.