21st Century Sustainability

Sustainability is a word that vibrates with multiple meaning. There are some who insist it is code for a green company to rip away our comfortable lives and force us into granola-eating consumers. For others it means eliminating waste from the way we make and consume things, reduce toxic pollution, wear clothes made of recycled plastic and drive hybrid cars. But increasingly it means something far more valuable to a new emerging group of business leaders, economists and far-sighted consumers. For them sustainability means a whole new intention of business leadership. When leaders decide they are going to harness the imagination of all their stakeholders to create as much value as they can, the world changes. It’s about time.

The Greatest Anti-Poverty Program in History

Today the Grameen Foundation is launching $27 on the 27^th. This is to commemorate Dr. Mohammed Yunus’ first micro-loan back in 1976. He loaned $27 to a group of impoverished women in Bangladesh who were living on less than $1 a day while working their hearts out. The economic system of the rural villages was designed by middle class traders to keep their village work forces in constant debt. The women that Dr. Yunus loaned his money to were making a profit of 2 cents a day. Almost immediately their profits increased 50 times to over a dollar a day. Within a few years Yunus had founded the Grameen Bank, which means Village Bank, and thousands of poor women have become self-reliant, often doubling or increasing their net income by 10 times within months of having a legitimate source of investment capital.

Today the Grameen Foundation supports over 200 micro-finance institutions operating around the world from Asia to Africa, China to the Middle East. There are now over 150 million families benefiting from micro-investment capital. The power of this business model is that it is a business. Interest is charged to support the micro banks so that they can loan more money and keep it in an endless virtuous cycle of reinvestment. Today the Grameen Foundation is operating with the wisdom of a global social enterprise by helping create software and other technology solutions to help microfinance banks operate with high efficiency. They are also creating micro-franchises so that village entrepreneurs can establish solar-powered villages while reducing the need for diesel and kerosene. They’re helping women become village eyeglass dispensers so that people over 40 can read on their cell phones and of course they have brought cell phone technology to tens of millions of people in the developing world. For the first time in history we can actually imagine a world without poverty driven by the values of self-reliance. After doing this for 30 years we now know that women are the world’s best poverty fighters because they reinvest in their children and their communities.

Today the Grameen Foundation is seeking to establish a constant and reliable source of donor income. They are asking us to contribute $27 a month every month, a little less than a dollar a day. What they hope to do with this sustainable flow of money is build a worldwide system that provides capital, education, access to basic health care, technology and leadership development to help the poorest of the poor lift themselves to a life of dignity. Their vision is a poverty free world.

I have adopted the Grameen Foundation as my central cause because I have never seen so much sustainable good achieved by integrating the best of business practices and the highest moral vision that human beings can aspire to. So I invite you to consider becoming part of this great movement to end poverty. Go to the Grameen Foundation and join up. I already have.

Save the World and Still be Home for Dinner

• What if we could live a pace and enjoy a quality of life that constantly renewed our energy?
• What if all we really wanted in life was to make a positive impact and enjoy our lives?
• What if we understood our own gifts and developed them so we actually made a unique difference?
• What if we could do this no matter what our life circumstances in virtually any job, any time, anywhere?
• What if we didn’t need permission, power or position to do the best thing we can imagine?
• What if we could just start…now?

We can.

Five years ago I founded the American Dream Project to discover what the American Dream is for the 21st century.  I crossed the country giving speeches and hosting town hall meetings to college and alumni clubs, business leaders and community groups.  The Project interviewed and surveyed over 20,000 Americans ages ranging from 8 to 80.  What I discovered was that vast numbers of us are exhausted and drained by the way we work and how we live. What I also found was a shared persistent concern for our future.  We are awakening to the reality that the world needs saving and that it’s up to us to do something.

The bottom line; what nearly all of us really want for our lives is to matter. Our research confirms that today there is a voracious appetite for meaningful work.  At the same time we want to enjoy life, especially our relationships.  We also want to pursue our personal interests and reignite the pilot light of our inner zest.  As one hard working business founder and mother put it,

“I just want to save the world and still be home for dinner.”

What I found on my search for the modern American Dream were many, many people doing exactly that.  They hadn’t quit their jobs; they transformed them.

Of course, no one of us will save the world.  But as one inspired teacher put it,

“When we change our world, the world changes.”

My recent journey into the lives of real people ignited my energy to write a new book, Save the World and Still Be Home For Dinner (Capital Books) that’s going to be released September 30.  It has some themes and elements I developed in my first book, Dreams on Fire, which I wrote for the PBS show Reclaiming Your American Dream.   In Save the World I take those themes into the wider arena of creating a world of sustainable abundance.  Sustainable Abundance is the ideal of uniting human ingenuity and moral values to give every human being an opportunity for a decent life.

Even though this is a grand idea, it doesn’t require huge earth-shattering change to bring it about.  It doesn’t require a magic charismatic leader or even the aristocrats of the status quo to respond to a wake-up call.  Rather, I discovered, it is already happening because individuals are changing the way they think, act and communicate.  It is happening everywhere with people of all ages who are making an individual difference that is creating a “tipping point” of positive change.

What I learned from my interviews and experiences is that this positive revolution for sustainable abundance is happening because people whoever they are, wherever they are, are making it happen in their lives, their work and their communities.  Sure, resistance from the voices of the old way of seeing the world only through the lens of greed and self-interest is noisy.  But the tidal wave of change is already drowning their voices through the millions and millions of positive choices we make every day.

We live and work in a time of disruptive transformation.  The convergence of continuous technological breakthroughs, a generational values shift and worldwide entrepreneurialism is radically changing everything.

So how exactly do we participate and accelerate the new future?  That’s the question I address in my book.  There is a common formula people are using to live a life they most value and enjoy.
The book focuses on the idea that we need to “be who we are and do what we came to do.” Here’s how:

1. We all have a Promise to keep. A Promise to live both joyfully and make a difference that only we can make.
2. Do not be afraid. In times like these where we are losing our homes, our jobs or our peace-of-mind, it’s essential that we don’t abandon our Promise because we’re afraid.  Fear will keep us from both happiness and fulfillment.  If we know what our Promise is, we can keep it in any circumstance.  And yes, your Promise matters to all of us.
3. You can bring your life and your work to a higher level right now. By examining the stories of people just like you and me who are living game-changing lives and relishing their relationships we begin to see a formula for breaking through.  By understanding our Design we “see” our calling.  By becoming clear on our soul’s Desire we focus on a unique life-altering passion.  By responding to our noble Drive we bust down doors of opportunity.

This is not trivial.  Or simply inspirational.  I do my best to paint a vivid picture of people who are transforming their careers, personal relationships and individual place in the world. This book tells the stories of how dozens of ordinary people are living the most extraordinary lives.  It reveals the uncommon habits of how these people think, decide and act.  They teach us how we can transform any circumstance into a fulfilling, exciting and contented life. From these stories I lay out the essential steps and ingredients necessary to help us transform our lives by creating a sustainable abundance of all that is truly important in life, both material and spiritual.

I believes the only way to achieve personal sustainable abundance is to help invent it for everyone.  We have two choices.  The first is what happens if we do nothing.  This choice will create a future fundamentally driven by increasing scarcity and competition characterized by economic and military wars and immense suffering.  The second choice is positive adaptation driven by entrepreneurial invention that amplifies our standard of life as we increase human health, human rights and human opportunity.  The second choice is not automatic, but making the right choice during the next 10 years is maybe the most important choice in human history.

By “Save the World,” I ask you to stand up for something that really matters to you.  To make your unique contribution to a sustainable future and add value to the lives of others.  By “Still Be Home for Dinner” I mean our ability to enact these changes in our own way – a way that fulfills our heart and satisfies our soul.

As I hope you can tell, I am deeply motivated by this message.  As loyal advocates of the American Dream Project I wanted to make Save the World and Still Be Home For Dinner available to you for free before it is published.  So, if you sign up, we will email you a (short) chapter every day for the next 30 days.

I now have a favor to ask you.  As you know in today’s media circus it’s very difficult to get and sustain anyone’s attention on any message or ideal.  So if you like what you read, it would be very helpful if you would send us a review.  Also send the chapters on to friends and family who you think might benefit.  (If you don’t like what you read please send me an email with your ideas.  I don’t mind being challenged to think in broader, bigger ways.)

And finally, if you have any ideas or opportunities to better promote the book, please let us know.  Believe me when I say I am much more interested in the message than the money I might earn from royalties.  (In fact, I am donating $1 per book to the Grameen Foundation to help end poverty through micro-credit.)  So I am interested in book giveaways, using books as fundraisers for charities or a zillion other ideas you might have.  Most of all, let me know what you think.  I look forward to hearing from you!

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Can Social Responsibility Save Us?

Just One More Thing for All Our Future

Social responsibility is a hot topic these days.  But are we serious about it?  In popular thinking it vaguely refers to playing nice and supporting worthy causes whenever we can.  It’s a justified expense. Business leaders promote social responsibility as having a brand “halo” effect that produces warm and fuzzy feelings about their company. After all, it’s supposed to help corporate reputations or soften up regulators.  Social responsibility with a megaphone is called cause marketing.  That’s when companies raise money for charity when you buy their products.  Project Red supported by companies as diverse as Starbucks and Hallmark have raised $100 million for aids treatment in Africa.  Nike’s Live Strong campaign has raised $70 million selling yellow wristbands with Lance Armstrong.  That’s all good as far as it goes.

In March, I spoke at the American Marketing Association Cause Conference and I challenged non-profit and business leaders to break free of the heavy gravity of this kind of trickle-down good works.  Borrowing from Gandhi’s insight I asked them to go beyond supporting good causes to “be the cause.”  Saving our future is not going to happen by sprinkling left over marketing dollars on the less fortunate.  No.  What’s needed is a radical paradigm shift on why we get up in the morning.

The most fundamental human question is “Are we willing to embrace the responsibility of a stranger’s well being?”  Sure it’s natural for us to help our children or our closest friends.  Clans and tribes have been doing this forever.  The elevated nature of civilization is based on the ideal to transcend our DNA and extend moral empathy to all other humans.   The essential challenge of corporate social responsibility is not whether a company recycles or eliminates its carbon footprint. It’s not whether it makes or sells organic razz-a-ma-tazz; rather, it comes down to how much empathy its leaders have for their employees and their customers.  Do they treat either the way they would want to be treated?

Modern business is great at turning resources into money.  And human resources are most often reduced to bio-widgets who can be overworked or laid off whenever leaders fail.  The great failure of modern business as a social institution is that it monetizes everything. Therefore people are not assets but expenses and the human casualties of this viewpoint are staggering.  In this Great Recession up to 50 million people around the world are expected to lose their jobs by the end of the year.  The fastest growing households in the U.S. are those where no one has a job.  Why?  How?  It’s all due to massive leadership failure.  Not only dishonesty but also incompetence.  But all of that is changing.  Hopefully just in time.

According to research reported in Understanding the New Leadership Model a new generation of leaders are changing things.  It turns out that leaders under 40 have a very different central driving motivation than boomer leaders.  You see boomers tend to be driven by personal success and personal power.  That means every decision tends to be weighed on a scale that measures how the decision might magnify personal wealth or power.  A second driving boomer motive is success or goal achievement.  The payoff here is increased recognition, influence and confidence.  Money, power, and fame sound like the motives that have created today’s world.  The new emerging generation of leaders has a different top-of-mind motive.  It’s called social motivation.  It focuses on helping others, fairness, merit and eliminating conflict.  Psychologists call this a shift from self-interest to humanitarian drive.  That’s the good news.

The challenge is that most large organizations struggle with humanitarian motives.  This tends to drive off talented, high performing young leaders who seek high-purpose companies or start their own.  This is a growing problem for large enterprises that are top heavy with obsolete leaders pushing irrelevant ideas in a world dying to be reinvented.

The world is convulsing before our eyes.  The old ways will not lead to a future of sustainable abundance.  Yet that is the only world that will thrive.  Now is the time to re-invent ourselves as leaders of the future.  We need to do it right where we stand.  If we are surrounded by people who are afraid to rock the boat, it’s time for us to rock.  How?

Just do one more thing for humanity every day.  Speak up when you are afraid.  Make one more call, have one more conversation, create one more idea, send one more email…just do one more thing every single day than you would have otherwise done and see where you stand in six months.  You’ll be a leader the world needs.  Just one more thing…for all our future.

So do you think I am too idealistic?  Do you see this humanitarian trend in younger leaders?  Do you think business can be harnessed to create good?

The Power Revolution

We’re going to be investing billions in a smart energy grid.  That’s our power infrastructure that right now is grossly outdated, wasteful and vulnerable.  But what if we didn’t need a grid at all?  What if each of us has a power cell that delivered cheap electricity to our homes and ipods without being connected at all?

Well, it’s not a dream.  It’s the real science project of a rock star MIT professor, Daniel Nocera.  He begins with some sobering facts.  It takes 15 terawatts of energy to run our planet currently.  How much is a terawatt?  I don’t really know but it must be a giga-bunch.  What the real point is that it will take twice our current output of energy to operate our world in 40 years, that’s right…30 terra-whatevers.  That, he tells us, would require building a 2 billion watt nuclear plant every 3 days for the next 40 years.  Not going to happen.  Now comes the problem of sustainable abundance.  We need power to light our world and lift billions to self-reliance.  But relying on coal, gas, oil or plants just won’t get it done.

So…here comes the sun.  It sends us 800 terawatts of energy every hour!  The problem isn’t even capturing it.  New solar technology is rapidly lowering the cost of a solar watt to less than a buck.  It’s the storage and transmission of that energy that remains expensive.  So Dr. Nocera has developed a super-cheap system of electrolysis which uses a single volt of electricity and a chemical catalyst in water to recombine an H20 molecule split by sunlight to create a fuel cell that is as close to perpetual energy as humans are likely to see.  The big news is that this will make energy completely decentralized and cheap.  Seems impossible?  Well how much does it cost for us to look up something using Google?  Technology is disruptive.  Dr. Nocera has attracted lots of venture capital and notoriety.  Maybe Exxon-Mobile will become what the railroad became with the invention of airplanes.  The biggest changes are always the most unexpected.  The future will be different than the past.  Way different.

Faith in our Future with Social Responsibility

Recently I was invited to attend a faith-based meeting of social entrepreneurs. It somewhat surprised me to meet some clear-eyed battle seasoned CEOs running multi-million dollar companies that had integrated their social mission, social responsibility and their core values into their business models. Mama Mellace’s, for example, is a wildly successful nut company that is run by young Christian business owners who have been helping poor Islamic Indonesians clean and process nuts through micro-loans. They are also going to be producing “plumpy nut,” a peanut based nutrition food that is going to help millions of African children stave off malnutrition. Another CEO runs Café Halo, an on-line coffee company that has focused its coffee sourcing from an impoverished area of Honduras in order to help bring a decent life to a whole community. It was all inspiring.

Then I heard a presentation that warmed me like a warm Jacuzzi on tired muscles. It was basic, really. But sometimes the brightest light goes off when we’re reminded of something we already know. It was simply this. Our greatest fear is that we are living a meaningless life followed by non-existence. Annihilation. In fact it’s our potential non-existence that makes our human lives potentially meaningless because nothing we do and no one we love will matter if the end of our everything is the end of our lives. And if this is all there is then what does matter is how much pleasure and self-satisfaction we can drive right here, right now. After all, if the only thing that matters is the “Am I happy?” question why put up with a grumpy spouse or a relationship low point? Why put off buying anything that would give us a buzz? What’s the point of self-control when self-gratification is the only sensible strategy to a finite existence? Why in the hell would we even care about Honduran coffee growers, Islamic villagers or African children?

On the other hand, if the point of life is beyond our current line-of-sight horizon; if who we become is more important that what we do; if how we love is more important than being important….then the significance of life’s challenges take on new meaning. And today challenges are lurking on all our doorsteps. Our shared challenge is our own dignity in the storm of stress. We can make suffering noble, patience a virtue and self-sacrifice sacred. Most importantly we can strive to make tomorrow better without being undone when things beyond our control upset our plans. We can hold to our vision even when our future is foggy. And most of all we can eagerly choose a higher path even when it’s going to cost us personally.

I am acutely aware that blind faith can make us stupid, judgmental, and guilt ridden. But I can also be inspired by a mature faith that is compassionate, wise and inclusive. The kind of faith that makes us free.

Times when our plans explode and our confidence is shaken is exactly the time to free ourselves from the world’s insanity to consider deeper things. What’s the greatest thing we can do for ourselves? Ponder beauty, meditate on meaning, give thanks for love, life and our ability to choose. And most of all pay close attention to the opportunity in every challenge.

Real Leadership for Social Responsibility and Sustainable Abundance

We are living in a time of immense challenges.  It’s an era that begs for the wisdom of real leaders.  Leaders who have the moral imagination to empathize with unborn generations who will inherit our legacy.  Such leaders are always in short supply because most people pursue leadership to validate their own special importance and the social myth that power, fame and wealth matter.  Our common human fear is the illusion that we live a meaningless existence followed by the darkness of non-existence.  This fear leads us to frantically find strategic ways to magnify our self-importance.  The most dangerous manifestation of this fear is to bully and manipulate others to bend to our will because we mistake power for personal significance.

The central problem of our leadership class is that for the past forty years we have put tens of thousands of MBA students and millions of business managers through training in the arts of power.  We have reduced leadership to a set of skills and attributes.  Often when I ask an audience of business leaders what the signs of great leadership are they recite a list of attributes such as vision, risk taking, inspiration, decisiveness, intelligence, focus, and a host of “competencies” that we can fill flip charts with.  Then I show slides of Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Osama bin Laden and ask them how they would judge these leaders against their list of admired traits.

Most often the audience is stunned because all of these leaders were “great” in terms of their skill; however they used their leadership skill to torture, kill and impoverish millions.

Then I show a picture of Ken Lay, the affable former CEO of Enron who died before he went to prison for defrauding investors and manipulating energy prices that kept old widows freezing in their tiny apartments during a long dark winter of highly manipulated energy prices.  If we only consider skill, Ken Lay was a great leader too.

The point I make is that the essential attribute of a real leader is not just their leadership skill but their noble intention.  Unless the prime motive of a leader is to serve and to promote the greatest good for the greatest number that leader will construct a dark universe with a twisted moral physics that seek only to aggrandize themselves and their friends.  They will seek to remake the world in their own image.  They will create business models that require work without end because their work has no intrinsic value.  It is only work that results in money.

The real question of leadership is not what skills you possess but rather, “What are you trying to accomplish?”  The problem with our leadership education and development system is that we haven’t been asking the right questions so we have few of the right answers.  We have glorified accumulation instead of contribution, and our economy thrives on consumption instead of creation.  There is too much “me” and too little “we.”  Nobel Prize winner John Nash (of the movie A Beautiful Mind) proved that the greatest good for each of us occurs in an economic system that promotes the greatest good for all of us.  Isn’t it time to extinguish the illusion that we are not responsible for the world we have created?  Isn’t it time to elevate the avowed commitment of every leader to fulfill the mandate to create a future of sustainable abundance?  To do that we must radically reject the synthetic justifications for selfishness and embrace the practical imperative of our mutual responsibilities to each other.  In the only future we honestly desire our social responsibility to each other is the only ideal with the power to reduce human suffering and enable our pursuit of genuine happiness.  This is not a burden of leadership; rather it is its essential opportunity.

These are not new ideas.  The noble call of real leadership is as old as human society.  It is, however, a largely forgotten ideal.  Perhaps the best thing we can do as leaders of our own lives is to carefully consider “What are we trying to accomplish?” in our careers, our relationships and in our lives.  We all need to be the leaders we wish we had.

Questions:  Considering what’s going on with our banks, businesses and government, do you agree we have an epidemic of leadership failure?  What’s the cause?  What can we do?

Sustainable Abundance and Our New Economy

Winston Churchill was always big on planning for the worst.  He advised something like,

“Imagine the thing you most don’t want to happen and plan for that.”

Good advice.  Most of the voices we hear talking about our economy are polarized.  Doom-sayers talk in words of deep depression and total collapse.  While others see a “bottom” to our economic downturn in mid 2009 and then steady progress ahead.  Well, fine and dandy.  The fact is no one knows.  The vast interconnected global economy is relatively new and the scale on which assets have evaporated is huge.  So everyone is guessing.  Perhaps the most important thing to do is to take the economy personally.  That is, make personal plans to “prosper” no matter what.  More on that in a second.

Consumer Economy is Unsustainable

First I, although like everyone doesn’t really know what’s going to happen, will tell you how I am planning on things being and what I am doing about it.  The core problem we face is that we built our prosperity on a consumer economy built on a scale that it is unsustainable.  For instance, in Italy there is 1 square foot of retail store space for every citizen.  In Britain there is 2.5 feet of retail shop space per person.  In the U.S. there is 20!  Maybe, just maybe we have too many stores.  Surveys show most Americans only wear 20% of the clothes and shoes we own.  We have more TV sets in a typical home than we have people living in the house.  The picture is clear.  Americans spend 40% more per person on consumption than the number two consuming nation.  That’s just not the way to build our future.

Now here’s the economic pie in our face.  We financed all this consumption with debt.  Even though American workers capitalized on technology to become far more productive since 1995, nearly all these gains showed up as increased business profits rather than increased wages.  So to keep the consumption machine rolling Mr. Greenspan lowered the cost of borrowing, deregulated credit rules and inflated real estates and said buy, baby buy.

That’s our old economy.  That’s over.  I don’t see how it will be revived.  Now as economist Jeffrey Sachs points out,

“Every major part of our economy—health care, energy, transportation, food and finance—is deeply troubled.”

And we’ve got another problem.  The largest group of consumers, baby boomers, is going to be increasing their savings and reducing their consumption.  We should.  We have no other choice. But the result will be an anemic consumer economy with lots of closed down stores.

Economic Crisis

Now our government is going to do everything it can to keep our boat afloat by spending and investing.  We are going to spend money on unemployment insurance and lots of other emergency safety nets to keep the out-of-work going.  We also are going to rebuild our roads, bridges, sewers, and grids.  And I think we should.  Heaven knows our infrastructure is blown-out, old, and creaky and millions of paychecks will keep otherwise unemployed families doing productive work.

But after a few months of Obama optimism, I think we’ll all get a big dose of the deeper reality.  I believe we’ll see we’ve got a long road ahead.  Years of work to re-invent our economy to be a primary producer of value instead of a consumer of stuff.  During that phase it’s quite likely most real estate will be finally valued at 50-60% of its price in 2006.  It seems inevitable because fewer people will qualify for loans and incomes will not be sufficient to pay bloated mortgages.  This will be hard, but the sooner we get “real” with real estate the sooner we can recover.

But the real economic engine of the future will come down to developing the technologies of sustainability.  Everything human beings use has to be re-invented to use less raw materials, less energy, and be recyclable or reusable or the earth will simply run out of minerals, water, and clean air.  Not to mention trees, oil, and fish.  If we focus on developing the processes, the products and the technical education for workers to invent and maintain and repair the technologies of sustainability, then the U.S. can be the world leader in creating a future of sustainable abundance.  If we do this right we may be able to get beyond grasping to increase our standard of living and truly increase our standard of life.  I believe this is our best shot at our best future.  If we fail we have to face a future of competing for scarcity that inevitably leads to mass suffering and eventually war.

So what’s the best thing you can do? Become engaged in the economy of sustainability.  Advocate it at work.  Learn about it, become an expert in it.  Re-train yourself.  It’s an opportunity for all of us.  It is a new way of looking at every profession, every industry, every job.  From accountants to actors, waiters to welders, all of us can up level our work to create sustainable strategies that save money, save resources, and create value.  That’s the mindset we need.

As for my personal quest, it’s to change the objectives of business leadership from personal wealth to create the greatest sustainable value for all.  Don’t be cynical.  It can happen.

How do you see the future?  What are you doing?