Recently in Voice of the Planet Category

For some time now I've been advocating ways for businesses, institutions, and individuals to heed the "Voice of the Planet."  Indeed, the future depends on it. Here's what we said a while back:

How do profit-seeking companies listen to the Voice of the Planet?  As my colleague, Sanjay Sharma and I suggest, start by drawing a clear distinction between "core" stakeholders--those visible and readily identifiable parties (like current customers and suppliers) with a stake in the firm's existing operations--and "fringe," or peripheral stakeholders.  Core stakeholders encourage us only to continuously improve what we already do.  Yet, answering the question of our time calls for disruptive, leapfrog innovation, which requires divergent thinking.  This means reversing the traditional stakeholder management model by learning to actively engage previously excluded voices from  the fringe-- the rural poor, urban slum dwellers, and advocates for nature's rights, just to name a few.

Twenty years ago, in 1992, the first Rio Earth Summit took place in Brazil.  While it was convened amid great fanfare and high expectation, the only really lasting legacy was the creation of the World Business Council of Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the christening of "eco-efficiency"--doing more with less--as a key private-sector based strategy for sustainable development.  The governmental negotiations produced a massive volume--"Agenda 21" but little concrete action.

Next week, the Rio + 20 Summit will convene, again in Brazil.  The past twenty years has produced some good news and some bad news.  First the good news: Eco-efficiency has become standard practice in large corporations everywhere and is now spreading to the world's small and medium sized enterprises as well. This is a major accomplishment and has significantly reduced the impact per unit of output in economic activity. 

Now for the bad news: we have not yet begun to actually slow or reverse the level of human impact on the planet.  Indeed, over the past twenty years, we have tripled the size of the global economy, added nearly two billion people to the world's population, and further intensified our ecological footprint on the planet.  Growth swamped eco-efficiency.  Today, the science is clear: we have overshot the carrying capacity of the planet and serious repercussions are now inevitable.

In 1997, I wrote an article that appeared in the Harvard Business Review entitled Beyond Greening: Strategies for a Sustainable World. The piece won the McKinsey Award in 1997 as the best article in HBR.   The article stressed that corporate eco-efficiency (greening) strategies aimed at incrementally reducing negative social and environmental impacts, while important, would not be nearly adequate to the challenge of global sustainability in the decades ahead.  Even then, it was clear that "beyond greening" strategies--leapfrog clean technologies, and business models that included and lifted the four plus billion poor in the developing world--would be essential if we were to fundamentally change the course of the global economy, and set it on a course to sustainability.

In the 1990s, people spoke in terms of the need for fundamental change over the next decade or two.  Indeed, the title of the WBCSD's inaugural book was "Changing Course."  Unfortunately, all we got was continuous improvement through eco-efficiency. 

As I prepare to leave for Rio next week, my hope is that this Summit can plant a new stake in the ground--the Beyond Greening Stake.  I will do everything I can to drive this agenda.

We are running out of time.

The time has come to end the ideology wars. 

For too long, discussion about environmental and social challenges has been divided into two camps:  The Neo-Malthusians (here and here) and the Cornucopians (here and here).

The former forsee gloom and doom--an imminent global train wreck driven by climate change, resource depletion, ecosystem destruction, and a combination of growing population and inequality.  The latter forsee an unprecedented boom driven by the creativity and innovation of an increasingly sophisticated and interconnected global economy with millions of new, well-educated people from the emerging markets of the world.

The Neo-Malthusians are the ultimate pessimists ("limits to growth"); the Cornucopians are unabashed optimists ("growth of limits"). The Neo-Malthusians project current trends into the future and see disaster.  The Cornucopians assume that technology will always produce the necessary substitutes and solutions when we need them (because scarcity means higher prices and higher prices signal opportunity for innovators).

It turns out both are probably right:  We face unprecedented environmental and social challenges.   Markets get distorted by perverse subsidies and incumbent resistance so that the price signals that should drive innovation are delayed or deferred.  Humans have difficulty perceiving gradual, slow-developing changes and tend to wait for crises before acting (the "boiled frog" syndrome).  So there probably will be major disruptions and unpleasant surprises in the years ahead.

That said, humans are also infinitely adaptable, resilient, and able to mobilize rapidly when a real crisis is finally perceived.  The level of creativity and inventiveness is astonishing, and we are adding millions of creative people to the stock of potential problem solvers every year.  The internet enables connectivity and exchange on a scale that we could not have previously imagined.  The engine of entrepreneurial capitalism is powerful and should not be underestimated.  So, there is every reason to believe that amazing things will happen that totally change the landscape for the better in the coming decade or two.

Just like the Democrats and Republicans in the United States need to set aside their petty ideological differences for the good of the country (and the world), it is also time for reconciliation and synthesis between the Neo-Malthusians and the Cornucopians.  

Such reconciliation means that we need to learn how to become "skeptical optimists"--optimists because of the potential for new, sustainable technologies to grow exponentially in the coming years (see, for example, Singularity University); skeptical because of the scale and scope of the challenges we face. Skeptical optimism gives us the perspective we need to solve the world's social and environmental problems through a new form of sustainable entrepreneurship and enterprise.  And the time is now.

We accept it almost without question—prognostications about the future which begin with the phrae: “if present trends continue…”  Extrapolating present trends into the future has become a stock technique for both those on the political left (e.g. “if present trends continue, the gap between rich and poor will continue to widen”) and on the right (e.g. if present trends continue, GDP will double again within the decade”).

Consider the following trend:  China consumed more energy in the past ten years than it did in its entire history, spanning thousands of years.  The vast majority of this energy was in the form of fossil fuels.  If this trend in energy consumption continues, then by 2020, China would consume virtually all of the oil currently produced for export in the world today.  And, by 2030, China’s oil consumption would exceed today’s total global production of petroleum.  What is the likelihood that this trend continues? 

Even if we set aside the obvious implications of this trend for climate change and assume that the world embarks on the all-out development of unconventional oil reserves (in the form of shale oil and tight oil), to compensate for the now declining world production of conventional oil, it is not clear that production could be ramped up at a sufficient pace to meet this exponentially rising demand.

It is important to note that similar projections of current trends into the future are commonplace in virtually every domain, including the production of food, consumption of water, and emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.  The reality, however, is this:  it is highly unlikely that any of the current trends in the world can or will continue into the future for very long.

Nor should we expect them to.  History is filled with game-changing discoveries and events that fundamentally alter the trajectory of society and civilization.  Consider for a moment how future projections for energy and food production appeared in the 1890s, just prior to the explosive growth of the oil industry, automobile industry, and the rise of mechanized agriculture.  No one could have anticipated how radically the world would change in a relatively short period of time.

So expect a very bumpy and exciting ride over the next decade or two.  Nothing will stay the same.  We are approaching a time of unprecedented turbulence, change…and opportunity. 

Schumpetarian creative destruction will reign supreme.  Many incumbents will fall, and entirely new industries will be born.  An age of entrepreneurship on a scale that we cannot yet imagine is about to be unleased.

There is only one trend that we can really count on:  Present trends will not continue.

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, economies of scale have ruled the day, with massive investments in power plants, pipelines, factories, transmission lines, dams, and highways to more efficiently serve the burgeoning consumption needs of the rising consumer classes. Industrial-era technologies (such as electricity, petrochemicals, and automobiles) were also closely associated with mass production, the assembly line, and centralized, bureaucratic organization, resulting in the rise of organized labor, worker alienation, and growing social stratification.

As we enter the second decade of the new century, however, the "dark satanic mills" of the Industrial Revolution are giving way to a new generation of technologies that promise to change dramatically the societal, economic, and environmental landscape. The information economy powered by the microchip has already begun to revolutionize society by democratizing access to information and empowering the repressed. Indeed, You-Tube, Twitter, and the rapid emergence of the "blogosphere" have spawned a bottom-up revolution in user-generated content.



Increasingly, the technologies of tomorrow will be decentralized, distributed in character and disruptive to incumbent firms and institutions. It is much cheaper and more energy efficient, for example, to treat drinking water at the point of use, rather than transporting massive quantities of clean water through pipes from treatment plants only to have much of it leak out or be re-contaminated before it reaches its final destination.

Indeed, we are witnessing a dramatic reversal of the logic of scale--the new diseconomies of scale.

Think about it: Over the past decade or so, we have witnessed the rise of: distributed generation of energy, point of use water treatment, community supported agriculture, microbreweries, point of care healthcare, microfinance, and sustainable construction, to name just a few. Indeed, the term "nano" has become de rigeur.

Because existing players in the utility, energy, transport, food, water, and material sectors have so much to lose, however, it is enormously difficult for the entrepreneurs developing such distributed solutions to gain traction in established markets. Yet given their small scale and distributed nature, such clean technologies hold the potential to creatively destroy existing hierarchies, bypass corrupt governments and regimes, and usher in an entirely new age of capitalism that brings widely distributed benefits to the entire human community.

And rather than depending on national governments or paternalistic social engineers to design the future for the aspiring masses, these disruptive new technologies may be best brought forward through the power of capitalism--not the capitalism of the Industrial Revolution, which enriched a few at the expense of many, but rather a new, more dynamic form of global capitalism that will uproot established elites and unseat incumbents by creating opportunity at the base of the economic pyramid on a previously unimagined scale.

When Thomas Newcomen pumped water out of an English Coal Mine with a makeshift steam engine for the first time in 1722, little did he know that he was giving birth to the defining characteristic of industrial capitalism for the next two centuries--the relentless quest for greater labor productivity.  By substituting coal for manpower, the English textile industry drove the industrial revolution and established the template--and "rules of the game"-- for all industrial enterprises to come.  From cars to chemicals to computer chips, the very concept of "productivity" came to mean producing more product with fewer person-hours of work.

This metric made sense in the 19th century, when coal (and other raw materials) were plentiful and people were relatively scarce.  Now, however, exactly the reverse logic applies--fossil fuels and other raw materials are increasingly scarce and people are relatively plentiful.  We now live with the paradox that increasing business productivity means fewer jobs (especially when economic growth slows), precisely at the time that we need productive employment the most.

Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the corruption crisis in India, the rural revolt in China--all of these growing social protest movements originate from the same source--a growing "opportunity crisis" driven by unemployment, underemployment, alienation, and humiliation.  The time has come, therefore, to overthrow the tyranny of labor productivity and graduate to a new definition for what it means to be "productive" in business.

In the emerging economies of the world, this revolution has already begun.  ITC in India, for example, prides itself on creating livelihoods for the poor in the rural areas as part of its strategy for wasteland reforestation and agricultural productivity improvement.  Indeed, as commodity costs rise, it may make sense to redefine productivity--from capital intensity and labor efficiency to labor intensity and capital efficiency.  In the 21st century, "sustainable" enterprise must define success by the extent to which they create productive and fulfilling employment for the people of the world. 

Is business up the challenge?