Seven Steps to Doing Good Business
Devising a system of commerce and production in which each and every act is sustainable and restorative.
Beyond social responsiblity
Ideas can originate in strange moments and places. This one began for one of its authors at a podium in the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom and for the other at a rooftop meeting with a German chemist in New York City.
One of us represented a company that had been nominated for the Environmental Stewardship Award of the Council on Economic Priorities (CEP). Although there are many environmental awards, the CEP's tough stance on social and environmental responsibility gave the honor some teeth and veracity. The list of environmental initiatives the company had taken was long, and it was not surprising that it had at least made the list of nominees. But when he was announced the winner by George Plimpton in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, the author walked to the podium, looked out at the sea of pearls and black ties, and became mute. He was supposed to thank everyone. Instead, he realized two things: first, his company did not deserve the award, and second, no one else did, either.
The other of us represents an architectural firm that won an international competition with the design of a "low-entropy" building for the City of Frankfurt. During the competition the firm consulted with Michael Braungart and his group of ecological chemists in Hamburg to find the "best" German products to incorporate into the design. Braungart's chemists were apparently the first group to have focused on product and material toxicity, and developed ecological criteria for deep life-cycle analysis. The news was not good. It was as if there weren't a single industrially produced product or material that did not harm some form of life at the point of manufacture, in the building, when recycled, and after it was thrown away. Not until those conversations did the author understand the extent to which toxins are embedded in our products and processes. He also realized two things: first, he was not able to design an environmentally sound building; and second, no one else could, either.
Let us explain.
What both companies had done was scratch the surface of a problem, take some risks, and put a fair amount of time and money where their mouths were, but in the end their impact on the environment was only marginally better than if they had done nothing at all. The wood harvested from sustained-yield forests, the energy-efficient systems, the soy-based inks, the recycled toner cartridges, and the contributions to conservation groups were well and good, but basically, the companies could not change the fact that doing business in the latter part of the 20th century is a resource-intensive endeavor that gulps energy and creates dangerous waste.
Industry is being told that if it puts its hamburgers in coated-paper wrappers, eliminates emissions, and plants two trees for every car sold, we will be on the way to an environmentally sound world. Nothing could be further from the truth. The danger lies not in the half measures but in the illusions they foster -- the belief that subtle course corrections can guide us to a good life that will include a "conserved" natural world and cozy shopping malls.
The problems to be addressed, although vast and unremittingly complex, come to this: Five and a half billion people are breeding exponentially. The process of fulfilling their wants and needs is stripping the earth of its capacity to produce life; a climactic burst of consumption by a single species is overwhelming the skies, earth, waters, and fauna. As Lester Brown patiently explains in his annual survey, "State of the World," every living system on earth is in decline. To make matters worse, we are having a once-in-a-billion-year blowout sale of hydrocarbons, which are being combusted into the atmosphere, effectively double-glazing the planet with unknown climatic results. The cornucopia of resources that is being extracted, mined, and harvested is so poorly distributed that 20% of the earth's people are chronically hungry or starving, while the top quintile of the population, largely in the North, controls and consumes 80% of the world's wealth. Since business in its myriad forms is primarily responsible for this "taking," it is appropriate that companies ask the question, How does one honorably conduct business in the latter days of industrialism and the beginning of an ecological age?
There are some 80 million to 100 million enterprises worldwide, and of those enterprises a small but growing number are attempting to redefine their social and ethical responsibilities because they no longer accept the notion that the business of business is business. Because of our ability to communicate information widely and quickly, many companies are beginning to recognize their responsibility to the world around them. Their premise is simple: corporations, because they are the dominant institution of the planet, must squarely face and address the social and environmental problems that afflict humankind.
Despite the dedicated good work being carried out by many companies, we're faced with this sobering irony: if every company on the planet were to adopt the practices of the most environmentally enlightened companies, the world would still move relentlessly toward environmental degradation and collapse. What's more, while proponents of socially responsible business are making an outstanding effort at reforming the "tired old ethics" of commerce, they're unintentionally creating a new rationale for companies to produce, advertise, expand, and thus use up resources: the rationale that they're doing good. Flying a jet across the country, renting a car at an airport, trucking goods cross-country -- those acts cause the same amount of environmental degradation whether the person performing them works for the Body Shop, the Sierra Club, or Exxon.
If a tiny fraction of the world's most intelligent companies cannot model a sustainable world, that may tell us that the environmentalism currently practiced by business, laudable as it may be, is only part of the overall solution, and that rather than having a human or management problem, what we may have is a design problem that is intrinsic to all business.
