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I'm not trying to be Pollyanna about the affect
of the environment on rethinking our model of business.
There are a lot of problems and there are a lot of issues, there's
a lot of static in the system, but I think we've turned the corner.
If you take a look, at any website of a big
company today you'll see page after page about its environmental programs.
And sure, some of these are just puff and PR.
But many of them
I can tell you are real.
I've talked to thousands of managers over the past 30 years.
As the rise of public opinion about the environment has gone.
And, by the way, they're husbands and wives
and mothers and fathers and citizens as well.
If you destroy this idea that they're just greedy, muddy, money grubbing
self-interested people.
And you see them as fully human, they are worried about the environment, too.
I recently had a conversation with an environmentalist, someone
who worked for a large multinational environmental organization.
About a very large com, company, and he said
to me, you know, this company is changing the world.
They believe that they have to be greener and their
really doing it. Their putting all their processes,
etcetera, all they're management knowledge to making the world greener.
And for my money, said the environmentalist.
They're doing, they're going to accomplish more than years of regulation could.
Now,
maybe it's just in the U.S, here, where
the public policy process is really been fractured.
I know that's not, I know that's not
true, that's it's fractured in other places as well.
But it can be a real barrier.
It focuses too much on cleanup, on who did what to whom and on who pays.
Now, all these questions are important, but ultimately they're questions
that look to the past. Who did what, who has to clean up.
I want to think about business as looking to the future.
Looking to say, well, what are the kinds of
things we can do to make the world cleaner?
To make it better for our children.
So we can be sure that our children have the same kind of future,
possibilities that we do.
Environmentalism, becomes in a way a special case of a more
general question about how value, creation and trade are sustainable over time.
To think about environmental sustainability, we might also
have to think about moral or ethical sustainability.
If we don't,
environmentalism and environmental sustainability runs the
risk of politicizing the idea of valued creation and
trade. To the detriment of planet and people.
Acting on this requires, sometimes. Courage and
tenacity, and passion. The same characteristics I'm going
to argue later you need to start a business.
I want to tell you a story briefly, about a student, named Jamie.
Jamie was passionate about recycling.
She was passionate about the environment, still is.
And yet, the school she was a part of really
didn't do much with this, this was some years ago.
So Jamie
put out recycling containers, and then every Friday you could see
her with a green garbage bag going out emptying these containers.
Essentially, embarrassing the organization into doing
something that it didn't want to do.
Jamie through her own passion,
her commitment, actually made something happen.
What can you do?
You can take seriously your responsibility, you don't
leave it up to politicians or academics or companies.
This is an area where there are lots of choices.
And I believe that some action gets better results than no
action, even acknowledging that somethings that we do might be wrong.
Recycling can help us be aware of waste and whether
it's actually good for the environment in terms of energy
use etc.
We'll live in a more careful way,
we'll invent other ideas and invent other businesses.
We'll be more aware of our choices and what we teach our children.
And, as always, in thinking about new models of business in society,
[LAUGH]
we need a great big dose of humility. we're not the experts,
we don't know everything, and passion tempered with humility can be powerful.
What I'd like you to think about, and talk about in the discussion forums is, what
are some of the actions you can take
to make the world cleaner better and more efficient?
And think about, where does your responsibility end?
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