M&S: 10 steps towards a greener business

Mike Barry, head of sustainable business at Marks & Spencer and the brains behind the supermarket's Plan A sustainability policy, shared his 10 steps to embedding change across the company in an exclusive interview with BusinessGreen.

1. Vision

You must have a vision – a belief that the current system does not work and needs to be improved. Without this vision it is difficult to get people to accept the need for change.

2. Leadership

You need someone at the top of the business saying "this matters". We had Stuart Rose, but now Marc Bolland has come in and said "Having a good Christmas, having a good marketing campaign and good food products, all that matters today – but so does Plan A." He said to all the groups around M&S – employees, stakeholder, investors – "Plan A lives on with me."

3. Have a plan

We're trying to tackle 180 environmental and social issues in thousands of factories, farms and raw material sources across 35,000 product lines – we need a plan or we'll go mad. So you say: this is what we'll do by this date in this way. And, once we've achieved that, this is what we'll do next. Our series of numerical targets needs to be backed up by a report each year, which is audited so there can be no shilly-shallying around.

4. Individual accountability

You have to change the basic levers the business pulls to run itself. At M&S, part of each director's bonus is based on Plan A. In the past, people might have said "I'm glad Mike and the team are doing it, but what does it mean for me?" Now, very clearly, everybody owns it, everybody drives it because it's in their interest – they want to deliver that bonus for themselves and their teams.

5. Innovation

We've said that by 2020, every individual item we sell has to have a Plan A story and to achieve that we have created a central pot of innovation money. So when the Plan A process throws up areas where we don't have a solution and everybody is scratching their head saying, "what is a truly sustainable X,Y,Z?" you come to the innovation fund and say I need money to be invested to come up with the solution. So there's alignment of need and funding.

6. Interact differently with your customers

We know 10 per cent of our customers are passionately green and 20 per cent are not interested. But it's the two groups of 35 per cent in the middle that will make or break a truly sustainable British society. You have to work with all those groups – so for the 10 per cent we have the fair trade angle, for the 35 per cent who are light green, we're saying every product you buy will be a great product, but we're also moving in the right direction environmentally and socially. For people who want to feel part of a larger group taking small steps, we've got things like washing at 30 degrees, don't take a coat hanger, don't take a carrier bag, recycle your clothing with Oxfam. It's all about trying to make it easy.

7. Work with your supply chain

In the first year of Plan A [2007] people were watchful – will this be a passing fad? But we stuck with it, we proved there was a business case and we created the Supplier Exchange which is a series of online and live events where people come together to solve issues. And as we stuck with it, other brands were starting to ask for it. So very rapidly the leading suppliers are shifting away from the compliance mentality to "it's making money, let's have a go at it," which is where you want to be.

8. Partnerships

You cannot deliver sustainability on your own. We have very important relationships with organisations such as Oxfam, WWF on a global environmental scale, Forum for the Future for strategy... Wherever you look there are partners helping us deliver Plan A. Partly for the customer, partly so that we have a better performance and better strategy, and partly for our supply chain.

9. Compete or collaborate?

When I started this job 10 years ago I used to see my opposite numbers regularly. As we all became better at it, we would talk to each other less and less. We're now at a stage where everyone recognises that no one, however big, is going to change the world on their own – you need to collaborate. But you'll get a more nuanced position with some collaboration, some competition. So I'll collaborate in calling for stronger government policy or measuring a carbon footprint in the same way. But then I'll compete in terms of innovation – the best products, the best services brought to the market.

10. Courage

One of the key business disciplines here is courage. To say right, we're going to see this through. There will be years when it's easy and years when it's harder because people are more for it, more against it. And the details will flex. On this journey there will be moments where we push harder on certain things, new things will emerge, other things will become less relevant. But you have to maintain that the overall intent will be seen through.