Implementing Proactive Environmental Management: Lessons Learned from Best Commercial Practice

Like many large organizations, the Department of Defense (DoD) faces a serious challenge as it attempts to balance its efforts to pursue core military, financial, and environmental goals. Over the last 15 years, DoD and other large, complex, global organizations have turned increasingly to proactive environmental management to balance such competing goals more successfully. By looking beyond simple compliance with environmental regulations, proactive approaches give these organizations strategic flexibility. But such approaches are difficult to implement. The authors first summarize analyses of how commercial firms have implemented proactive approaches in areas of environmental management relevant to (1) weapon system design, (2) provision of central logistics, (3) integrated base management, and (4) management of environmental cleanup, then draw implications for DoD’s environmental management efforts in these areas. The authors propose an approach to implementation based on total quality management, recommending that DoD use commercially developed TQM templates, which have been customized for application to sophisticated environmental management systems, to define and monitor the details of this implementation effort.