Presenters

Brazilian Awareness on Sustainable Development and Corporate Social Responsibility

Brazil has been going through a phase of huge increase on SD and CSR awareness. Even before the new president, who is clearly dedicated to causes, which relate directly to these concepts, and has been structuring a multidisciplinary council to talk and act about these themes, CSR has been a day-to-day talk among top executives.
Instituto Ethos, which is a kind of Brazilian BSR, has 726 partner companies, representing 28% of Brazilian GDP, supporting CSR development and debating SD practices. The major business magazine in Brazil has a CSR guide of Brazilian companies.
However, due to our catholic heritage and social issues, most of the times CSR is totally confused with philanthropy and SD with "environmental solution for small businesses". We are collecting Brazilian cases (other than Native’s) to show that CSR/SD practices are about the company themselves, their long-term strategy and day-to-day operations. We feel comfortable to give a Brazilian perspective on that

- Clean Energy: The challenges and opportunities in Brazil

Brazil has 98% of its energy based on Hydroelectric Plants. Besides that it has a huge potential in Wind in the Northeast coast, Sun all over the country, and lots of research in Biomass, and energy being generated from Sugar Cane and other materials.
We have been analyzing and working in the Energy Sector for the last 5 years in Distributors, Generators, and now helping Electrocell which is a fuel cell start up incubated at the main Brazilian University (USP). Electrocell is formed by 4 scientists with deep technological knowledge. We have been helping them to develop their business plan, look for investors, build alignment around a common strategy and design their organizational structure. We have also been in contact with a very well structured ESCO that is facing difficulties due to the lack of private financing structures in Brazil.
As former VCs, we can talk about all the opportunities in the sector and difficulties faced by both investors and entrepreneurs. The lack of management support for new companies, the early stage of the VC business in Brazil, the impact of high WACC for Brazilian business, and how it affects fund raising operations for start-ups are some of the themes to be put in perspective by us.

Biography:

ATITUDE
Atitude is a business-consulting firm created in June 2001 whose mission is to be a vehicle to shape a better world trough Sustainable Development.
Job title: Managing Partner
Since 06/2001

Our focus is to disseminate the Sustainability concept to the Brazilian business community and provide methodology and tools to help companies to implement sustainable initiatives. We are capable to provide services in provide Strategic Planning, Products & Process Redesign, Operations Management and Organizational Development.
During 2S2001 we developed partnership with national and international organizations which deal with these concepts as: SustainAbility, Rocky Mountain Institute, Sustainable Value Partners, Pact Brazil, Instituto Ethos, World Business Academy and Society for Organizational Learning. We also developed our technology on Sustainable Planning, Sustainability assessment, New Business Unit Engagement, Product Development, Process Redesign and Business Case Development.
My role as Managing Partner is to coordinate the team composed by four other senior consultants, to format strategic initiatives and methodologies, to search and manage national and international alliances, to develop new clients and actively manage current projects.

Major Projects:

- AXIALPAR: Strategic Alingment and Organizational Design and Implementation. Axialpar is a Venture Capital fund focused on Sustainable Investments. We are currently in project to align Senior Management on Strategic Investment definitions, and thorugh the whole organization we facilitated the mission, vision, values process and are now defining roles, responsibilities in a participative environment.

- WORLD BANK: Global initiative of CSR indicators for emerging markets. Our job is to define a monitoring system for a resource allocation and its impact on the country’s sustainable indicators. We are also defining new roles for the public sector on its role as facilitator of the CSR process for the country.

- ELECTROCELL (fuel cell start up): Business case development and management support including market assessment, market strategy, business viability analysis, investor relations, operations strategy, manufacturing design, organization structure design.

- VOTORANTIM ENERGIA (energy holding the controls several hydroelectric plants all over Brazil) Community engagement with a new hydroelectric plant to be constructed in Santa Catarina, Brazil. Our job is to create a dialog process between all stakeholders: energy company, constructor, government, community, environment and NGO’s.

- TEBASA: Operations Review and Implementation. My job is to review all the Operations Process proposing and implementing solutions for Logistics, Manufacturing, Quality and Product Development processes. The objective is to optimize industrial and administrative processes, reducing lead times and structuring the areas to support the new commercial strategy.

- ULTRAGAZ: CSR Presentation Workshop. Through the client’s demand, we developed a participative workshop to help educate senior management on CSR to further develop strategic thinking and action inside the organization in the subject

- WILLIS HARMAN HOUSE (NGO focused on World Consciousness) NGO’s governance design. We helped them to structure its financial sustainability and new governance model.

- Sustainable indicators assessment with a social responsible mutual fund, developing relationship between SRI in Brazil, Us and France to develop common sustainable indicators to analyze Latin American companies