Henry Kravis of Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co. And the Environmental Defense Fund — Pioneers in Business and Protecting the Planet
Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co (KKR) was established by Henry Kravis and George Roberts in the 70’s with support from the First Chicago Corporation. Recently they have assembled a unique green proposal that centers not simply on how lucrative a company is, but also on how ecologically friendly each of their companies are.
KKR’s Henry Kravis and the non-profit Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) got together last year, with the intention of making green business processes a mainstream principle. Key matters like greenhouse gas emissions and immeasurable consumption of water resources feature high on their agenda.
Eco-efficiency (a phrase first used by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development) is the methodology used to achieve these targets, through employing techniques like increasing the durability of products, improving fuel economy through vehicle fleet maintenance and reducing the waste of resources. Even though the program was an enormous success, managment simply did not realize how extensive the consequences were until Ken Mehlman, the man in charge of the project, looked at the numbers for the first 12 months.
Ken who graduated from Franklin and Marshall College in 1988, has served as director of the White House Office of Political Affairs from 2000 through 2005, was the appointed Chairman of the Republican National Committee from 2005 to 2007, is a trustee of Franklin & Marshall College and the Strong American Schools Foundation and currently serves as a member of the Senior Advisory Committee of the Harvard University Institute of Politics, the executive leadership cabinet of the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Foundation, and the board of directors at the National Endowment for Democracy, noticed that the project wasn’t simply lessening impact on the planet, but it was also saving firms a large sum of money, and so the project was almost an instant success. Almost all of the business concerns affiliated to Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co and Ken Mehlman nowadays are actively engaged in eco-efficiency. Still, when you consider that the group has a 2009 business portfolio worth 86,000,000,000 dollars, you may be sure that this was no easy achievement.
The Green Portfolio project has grown beyond its primary remit and now includes new opportunities. The Climate Corps Program set up by the Environmental Defense Fund is a great illustration of this, it advances eco-efficient business principles to interns taking a Master’s in Business Administration. KKR and Ken Mehlman have been formulating metrics and other related systems that have the ability to evaluate and manipulate resources. These systems can evaluate a company’s progress and discover any problem areas.
Today’s business community has been altered permanently by the pioneering work of these people. These developments have set a benchmark for organizations in any industry and demonstrated that running a profitable business need not entail the hefty price of damaging the environment.
