Thursday, July 29, 2010

GOING GREEN

In the words of Sesame Street’s Kermit the frog, “It’s not easy being green.” At least that is what a lot of business leaders around the world are discovering. Finding leaders who understand environmental and sustainability issues is difficult and the absence of these leadership skills is probably one of the greatest challenges facing countries wanting to make the move to a low carbon economy.

Whether you believe that going green is necessary or not you have to ask yourself; are our current business models sustainable? How long will it be until we run out of oil or the polar ice caps melt if we don’t reduce our carbon emissions? In order to implement the changes that may be necessary we need leaders with the appropriate leadership skills. There is an organization in the UK, “Business in the Community,” along with several other groups that are developing a best practices guide for sustainable leadership for a wide-range of employees including senior managers, middle managers, customer-facing staff and the general workforce. They have described these key leadership skills as “the ability to develop a long term vision of how the organization will contribute to a sustainable economy, the ability to inspire a broad range of people internally and externally and the ability to work collaboratively with different stakeholders.”

Going green is already having an impact on accounting and tax practices in the US as evidenced by the green initiatives included in some of the 2009 tax acts passed by Congress. If you would like to learn more about these green tax initiatives just click on the following link to a four hour self-study course titled “Going Green Under the New Tax Law.”

http://trainingcpe.thomson.com/CourseFinder/Tax_and_Accounting_Courses.asp?startdate=7/29/2010&enddate=&keywords=Green&category000022=on&featuredlist=&limittodates=&zipcode=&zipradius=25&detaillevel=0

Going green and being green may be just as difficult for us as it is for Kermit the Frog but it may be inevitable. What do you think?

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