Insights

Shell Netherlands CEO Frans Everts is an interesting guy.  Clearly he’s  professionally very successful – he’s the CEO of a global oil company’s Netherlands operations.  Well done Frans, genuinely impressive.  But Frans has a bone to pick with activists, and he shares his perspectives in a story in the NL Times today.  Let’s come back to that.

It seems clear that Frans is not a hockey fan.  And while I’m certainly not criticizing him for that – the Dutch are not known for their nationwide embrace of the game – if he were a hockey fan he would certainly appreciate the value of assigning uneven penalties.  Let me explain.

Hockey is of course a physical sport, and it can be particularly rough in the corners and in front of the net.  Sometimes, this can lead to some pushing and shoving; sometimes even a punch or a face wash (Google it).  And often all that stands between the resumption of play and total chaos are the referees and linespeople.  Now in the good old days, the refs would give offsetting penalties when a scrum occurred.  Each player would go to the penalty box and serve their time, and neither team would have to play shorthanded.  Then the league decided to employ some psychology to keep the game moving along – if the ref picked one player in the scrum and gave only them a penalty (letting the other combatant off), players would be less likely to get themselves involved in scrums.  Why?  Because if you’re the guy assigned the penalty, putting your team in a hole (particularly if the other team scored on their power play), your coach would have a few things to say to you when you returned to the bench.  You may even be “riding the pine” the rest of the game for your lack of discipline.

Why am I explaining all of this?  Lets go back to Frans, Shell Netherlands and the NL Times story.  The article describes the argument Frans uses to discourage activists from targeting his company with a unilateral climate campaign.  You may see where I’m heading with this.  In the article, Frans  suggests that such an approach solves nothing, and in fact will only “damage the business climate in the Netherlands.”  Unintended pun aside, Frans clearly does not appreciate the nuanced benefit of picking a player out of a scrum.  Incentives (and disincentives) matter – if you are the player the ref chooses to make an example of, your coach (or your Board, shareholders, employees, or customers) may not be too pleased.

It’s lonely in the penalty box, Frans.  But trust me, it’s much worse when you return to the bench.

I came across this interesting article discussing the numerous yet often overlooked sustainability aspects of managing both internal and outsourced corporate IT infrastructure. It is something IT managers likely don’t spend a lot of time considering, understandably focusing instead on data management & protection, cyber defense, operational redundancy, etc.  But if firms are to make real progress in achieving their net-zero objectives, this will have to move up their priority list.

Lots to chew on here, particularly given the rapidly evolving sustainability reporting landscape – recall we’re now two days into Europe’s mandatory CSRD requirements (relevant to most companies with material operations in Europe). One thing that stood out for me … the article suggests only 1/3 of IT managers currently track the “work per energy” performance metric. That will have to change.

Hurdles to progress include staff time and other costs associated with the effort to reduce overall energy consumption. Beyond that, many IT managers are reluctant to deploy power-aware workload management tools for fear of impacting the reliability of their IT operations. As with the C-Suite, the implementation of a successful sustainability strategy within the IT group will require revisions to the leaders’ performance criteria, offering incentives (and penalties?) tied to the achievement of sustainability-related objectives.