Leading Sustainability at Genentech

Left to right: Roy Hardiman, Roberto Piccioni, Bill Shireman and Tom Lyon

Recently, three Genentech leaders met to discuss Genentech's sustainability focus areas: Roy Hardiman, who heads the Compliance & Sustainability Committee, Tom Lyon, Vice President of Corporate Business Services, and Roberto Piccioni, a Senior Manager in Corporate Environment, Health & Safety. They discussed the Genentech program with Bill Shireman who is President of Future 500.

Bill: What is sustainability for Genentech?

Roy: The classic definition is "providing for society's needs today without compromising society's ability to meet those needs tomorrow." Fundamentally, it means creating more value than we consume.

Bill: Does that mean sustainability equals profitability?

Roy: Many times, yes. One of the things our company struggles with is the idea that sustainability can be profitable. It feels like we're taking public credit for doing something that is really in our own economic interest.

Bill: Like if something doesn't hurt, it can't be sustainable?

Roy: Right. For example, we drove a dramatic increase in manufacturing plant resource efficiency. It's responsive to objectives of sustainability, but we didn't label it that. What drove this was the desire to produce more from our existing plants, rather than continuing to build more facilities at enormous costs.

Roberto: That speaks to the business value of sustainability.

Tom: That's a key point. We do sustainability — but sustainability is often not what we label it. The core pursuits of the company — innovation, efficiency, meeting unmet medical needs — are fundamentally aligned with concepts of sustainability.

Bill: How does innovation fit into your concept of sustainability?

Tom: By doing science well, we do sustainability well. The challenge with the term sustainability, from an operations perspective, is that it's so broad — it can include almost anything worth doing. That's why we relate it to science and innovation. In developing pharmaceuticals to meet unmet medical needs, we are driving innovations that serve both social and economic ends. However, at Genentech when the word sustainability is used, it is often targeted toward our environmental footprint of natural resources, energy, emissions, waste, etc.

Bill: But if "sustainability" is already what you do, where is the value-add, either for Genentech or for society, in having a formal sustainability program?

Tom: The point is that sustainability is one of several drivers for business decisions, to use it to help make choices about how to spend our dollars, how to direct our innovations. If we profited from sustainability in the past — without direct intent — can we profit even more, and deliver even more benefit to our stakeholders, if we approach it with direct intention? Can we target the projects that will make the most difference?

Roberto: For example, once we set our first sustainability targets for energy and water, and let our people loose, we exceeded our goals faster, and by a wider margin, than anyone anticipated. For example, in Vacaville, our managers used software to model our energy use, and identified a whole set of efficiency opportunities. All told, our corporate goal was to improve energy efficiency 10 percent by 2010. We improved it 29 percent by 2007. That suggests an enthusiasm as well as opportunity that we want to further tap.

Bill: Does something have to be profitable to be selected as a sustainability initiative at Genentech?

Roy: No, but it has to be worthwhile. For example, part of what helps drive sustainability at Genentech is that we're highly analytical — we spend every dollar with care.

Bill: Where has the pressure come from to create a sustainability program at Genentech?

Tom: Sustainability is a very current issue. The media, the communities where we live and do business, our industry all are talking about sustainability. The environment is ripe for sustainability here. Innovative ideas come from scientists, engineers and many other employees. And the commitment from senior executives means that it has support.

Roberto: Our employees are our most important sustainability stakeholders. And our employees bring knowledge and enthusiasm to work everyday. Most of our managers consider sustainability important or extremely important to our business success. And our scientists see sustainability as closely aligned with innovation.

Bill: Your sustainability report talks mostly about environmental initiatives. But a lot of what we have talked about is science, innovation, profitability and well-being. Is sustainability just environmental for Genentech?

Roy: It's something more, but we are not sure how to bound it. For example, our whole company's mission is to meet unmet medical needs. The patient is at the heart of our business. Is all that a part of our sustainability initiative? Or is it just our business?

Roberto: We've made a decision to begin our formal sustainability program with a focus on the environment. But the more we talk it through, the more people agree that it is economic, social and environmental. Sustainability is when those three overlap.

Roy: If you look at our mission — to find unmet medical needs and meet them — that's sustainability for the individual. Here we raise that to the level of society. Sustainability is about innovation, to find unmet needs for the human condition that match our skills and meet them. That's a challenge that inspires us each day at Genentech.