One article
I read an article titled Mid-Course correction - toward a sustainable enterprise the other night. It was written by Ray Anderson, the founder of a Interface which is a company that many regard as the pioneer of environmentally sustainable enterprise. No surprise that the main premise of the article was how and why companies should go green.
But as I read it, widely applicable truths and adages seemed to pop up everywhere even though the article was written for a completely different purpose.
As I read, I noticed how many times the same lessons I was reading now were repeated in history, across industries, in my personal life.
Some clips:
Doesn’t the market govern?
Yes, but does the market’s price cover the cost? Well, let’s see. Who has
paid for the military power that has been projected into the Middle East to
protect the oil at its source? Why, you have, in your taxes. And who is paying
for the damage done by storms, tornadoes, and hurricanes that result from
global warming? Why you are, of course, in your insurance premiums. And
who will pay for the losses in Florida and the cost of the flooded, abandoned
streets of Boston, New York, New Orleans and London someday in
the distant future? Future generations, your progeny, that’s who. (Bill
McDonough, former Dean of the School of Architecture at the University
of Virginia, and a leading proponent of ‘green’ architectural design for
many years, calls this ‘intergenerational tyranny’, the worst form of remote
tyranny, a kind of taxation without representation across the generations,
levied by us on those yet unborn.) And who pays for the diseases caused by
the toxic emissions all around us? Guess! Do you see how the revered
market system of the first industrial revolution allows companies like
mine to shift those costs to others, to externalize those costs, even to future
generations?
Positive, negative, whatever it is. Things always come back full circle and that is beyond our control. Whether we see it or not, our actions will affect us, people elsewhere, or the conditions of the future. A proactive stance needs to be taken now because the repercussions of our actions will not disappear into thin air.
Someone has said, ‘A computer, now that’s mundane; but a tree, that’s
technology!’.
People will always have different interpretations of the same thing. A dissenting view is not wrong. During a talk the other night, Ken Lyotier, founder of United We Can said “The key is not to change people, but your perspective on them.” I think that’s something a lot of us can work towards.
To complement and reinforce these new technologies, we will continue to
sensitize and engage all 5000 of our people in a common purpose, right
down to the factory floor and right out there face to face with our customers,
to do the thousands and thousands of little things – the environmentally
sensitive things, energy saved here, pollution avoided there – that
collectively are just as important as the five big technologies of the future:
solar energy, closed loop recycling, zero waste, harmless emissions, and
resource-efficient transportation.
Tax, the environment, unread Facebook notifications, my messy room…They were all created through the collective power of many many little actions just adding up or building up over time. By that I mean the culmination of incidents that were actively carried out or the culmination of neglected actions. If we can harness this power in a good way, anything is possible.
If anything, this one artice just shows that advice, guidance, and direction can be found everywhere if we open our eyes to it.