Corporate citizen

Helena is an early 40’s successful department head in a large corporation. She is currently single, has no kids and lives in a funky city apartment. She’s into pilates, sailing and spends her weekends away at a beach shack. She is ambitious and smart, her work is her passion as is the welfare of her ‘troops’ and the ethos of the company. She travels widely both in Australia and overseas and is fluent in Chinese and French.

Helena works for a progressive company who are at the leading edge of green innovation and management practices. She is part of a work-team conducting long-term strategic planning for the future in the light of peak oil and climate change. Together they are exploring ways to make the company more resilient and flexible with the ability to have a local base whilst maintaining global competitiveness, whilst reviewing complexity/chaos models as new models for business. Her company have won awards for their green innovations and want to incorporate sustainable principles at every level of their operation - positioning them to be 'the business of the future'.

Having recently invested in a green office building which is state of the art and much liked by employees - sick leave is down and motivation is up as a result. The corporate environment has natural ventilation, solar wind chimney, plants, energy star appliances, neutral colours etc. They even have a green employee of the year award for the person with the lowest work footprint etc. This year they are planning an energy free day where no power is allowed to be consumed.

Helena: “Navigating the next twenty years is going to be a challenge for all businesses as we make the transition to a sustainable future. It’s the smart players who will stay ahead of the game. We intend to be on the leading edge and that means hitting the triple top line. It is risky but an exciting time to be doing business.”