Small business today is challenged on every front with people management, cost cutting, pipline, general ledger and account recievabables. When looking for ways to build your sustainability brand experience look no further than your staff. 

In my view, people are in fact the most important asset and discovering the passion of employees may be paramount to keeping them in these turbulent times and building the sustainable brand experience. Many companies today are leveraging social networks to understand the background and interests of their employees. Take for example LinkedIn, a large and growing, although a somewhat static social network, it has many million members now. Literally thousands of employees from companies small and large have posted more information about themselves on LinkedIn than on their own company Intranets. Facebook is also expanding rapidly as a more personal friend site, but it also provides a new lense into your employees lives. 

Everyone talks about people, process and technology, but I believe that leveraging your employees interests is the first place to start, and by the way it may also help you keep your core assets in these tough times. In CK Prahalad's new book, The New Age of Innovation, he hits on a key issue in many organizations worldwide and that is bringing together IT and LOB. More importantly, he dives into the world of building sustainable business processes and the challenges that many companies have in enabling and building these processes from an IT and LOB perspective. It is a great book, but in my mind it all begins with people, they build, innovate and drive the process, IT enables process optimization, innovation and can significantly increase business velocity. 

Innovation comes from people and these days it comes from groups of people not just one person. During my twenty year technology career I have been involved in four technology startups, two market reseach companies, and two software companies. Two of the four were successful, and one of the most important lessons I learned was how to build a colloborative culture that gets the job done. Selecting, managing and empowering the right people with the right stuff is paramount in the success of the company or the project. Lynda Gratton, a prominent London Business School profession has written extensively on this in HBR and her book, Hotspots. Architecting the right team is not an easy task, however, giving them a mission and empowering them on the topic of how to make your company more sustainable may deliver some valuable dividends in the pursuit of the sustainable brand.