Green: It's The New Green 2

A few weeks ago I posted a short piece on how "going green" was the biggest trend out there with corporations figuring out how to capitalize on the craze in order to make some "green" off of being "green." One of the industries I spotlighted was that of residential home building given I gave nearly 8 years of my life working in a number of different positions covering the gamment of operations. As such I was pretty interested to get links to these two articles in my morning updates on trends in the housing market.

The first article details how the leading home builders aren't quite up to par on green building as what they may say they are. Although KB Homes ranked the highest it still wasn't that great.

The second report deals specifically with one of my former employers - Lennar Homes, who is now the target of Julia Ro... I mean Erin Brockovich (Sorry, I mess that up all the time). Apparently, one of Lennar's communities is located near some nasty stuff that Brockovich intends to spotlight.


These stories and the Green movement, made me think of my time as the VP of Purchasing for Lennar's Houston division. At one point, the purchasing agents and myself got the idea to bring in all the sales reps for all the components affecting energy usage in the homes we built. After some coffee and donuts, we got down to business. I addressed the group telling them our purpose today was to discuss how we could make all the components they represented to work together in order to produce a truly energy efficient home. What kind of windows would work best with the size of AC units we installed? How could we best use our insulation to compliment our roofing system? I let the concept sink in for a few moments, and then asked what they thought. The room was quiet, and everyone looked around at each other with puzzled looks. For a moment I thought I was off my rocker, but finally one of the reps piped up, "Ron, that's an excellent question, but no one's ever asked it and I'm not sure it can be in done in tract housing production."

"So then how is it one of our competitors is advertising that's what they are doing?" I hoped I wasn't getting a snow job here.

The rep shot back, "Because no one can really check it out to make sure, there's no real standards to it."

The rest of the group all nodded their heads in agreement and that was the end of that meeting.


On another occasion as a division president I was required to attend an informational class put on by upper management covering Storm Water Prevention Regulations and the program the company intended to put in place. It was all pretty boring - I mean I understood the need to curb the effects of construction on wetlands, but it didn't matter because it wasn't like it would stop people from building. What did stick out to me was the statement by the speaker that we really didn't need to worry about making sure we were in physical compliance (i.e. having sandbags up, keeping debris out of drains, and dirt off the street) so much as we needed to make sure our paperwork looked good.

As division presidents, we were being charged with ensuring all the forms were filled out correctly. In fact, we could violate the actual compliance standards, but if we noted it on our paperwork, then no harm no foul. To make sure our paperwork was good, the company created positions in every market to do nothing but run around and check inspection sheets and log books for the correct signatures and so forth. "So what about protecting the environment?" I guess if our paperwork's straight, God's ok with it. Right?