R. Meima, Jan. 23, 2008

= To the First Marlboro MBA Cohort =

= Intro =

Nicola Machiavelli considered human character to be quite varied, but saw each individual as fairly constant in character: some people were imbued with virtue, and others were evil. A successful Prince, however virtuous, could act evilly as needed, to enhance the position of a state.

What is human character? After all, management is about people in the many contexts we inhabit and roles we play. One traditional view of human character and the place of humans in larger Nature might be expressed as:

“Humans are lazy and selfish; some are destined to rule others; and nature is so vast it dwarfs our puny efforts – indeed, we have to fight and fight to tame it and survive.”

I’ve heard that attitude expressed many times, especially by people much older than me - my grandfather, for example, who lived through two world wars, the polio epidemic, several influenza epidemics, the Great Depression, the Red Scare, the Cold War, Vietnam, Watergate, the Oil Crises of the ‘70s, the boom of the 1980s, the rise of Neoconservatism, the Clinton “Peace Dividend,” and the early years of the IT boom in the 1990s.

He was born in 1899, and died in 1995. His life was America’s 20th Century. He was born only 9 years after the massacre of Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee, and the closing of the western frontier. He was 4 when the Wright Brothers first flew their plane. He passed away two years after CERN opened up public access to the World Wide Web. Three years after the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro brought sustainable development into the world’s political agenda, Agenda 21…

Centuries seem to actually start and end some years off from their ‘00’ dates. When the frontier closed, the 20th Century could begin. When humans could fly, it could begin. The 20th Century’s ending was punctuated by such developments as the WWW and sustainability…

Listen again:

“Humans are lazy and selfish; some are destined to rule others; and nature is so vast it dwarfs our puny efforts.”

How many of you agree with those statements? Are they passé, of the last century?

Are these more accurate: “Humans are industrious and generous; leaders emerge through merit and service to others; and nature is fragile and increasingly threatened by human activity”?

Which statements do you want to agree with? Perhaps a combination of the former and the latter?

My middle child, Joseph, was born in 2000, 101 years and one month after his great-grandfather’s birth. I wonder what “big” statements he’ll agree with. I wonder if his life will span this century, living as long or longer than my grandfather. And, looking back from his last days, perhaps in 2098, what sort of century will he see?

A century that opened with 9-11, with the Afghan and Iraq Wars, with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, with the Kashmir earthquake, with the Indian Ocean tsunami, with Darfur…. But also with the advance of democracy in the world, with the globalization of everything bad AND good, with fair trade, with the economic and political rise of India and China and countries near them…. With falling cancer rates, extraordinary human mobility, EU harmonization, remarkable technological changes, increasingly ambitious space exploration…. And the uncertain prospects of Peak Oil, climate change, water scarcity, swelling populations…

What will this century hold in store?

We know that sustainability will remain a central concept of our times. We know that “sustainability” really means “survival” for our organizations and communities, that “the show must go on”.

Hence, the Marlboro MBA in Managing for Sustainability: an extended learning experience and a tool for working professionals from many different backgrounds who know the 20th Century is over. And that the management curricula created for that era no longer make sense, regardless of the remaining hold that 20th Century attitudes and institutions still have on many of us – so strong were they, fueled with oil and gas and coal and uranium, borne on the bow wave of unprecedented global expansion and integration, lifted in spirit by a vast middle class that emerged into literacy and security and comfort where none had existed before…

Our MBA is being born – right here, today - for a different time.

= What are we here for? =

The Marlboro MBA in Managing for Sustainability….

What are we here to do now? What are we here for?

Well, there will be lots of content….

Since the 1960s, lots of concepts, public policy instruments, management tools, and organizational practices have emerged in conjunction with quality, environmental, energy, health & safety, and CSR management: continuous improvement, quality circles, statistical process control, lean manufacturing, environmental impact analysis, life-cycle analysis, environmental management systems, eco-audits, social audits, ecological footprints, ecoefficiency, tradable emissions permits, renewable energy credits, many new standards and codes of practice, new performance indicators (metrics), industrial ecology, natural capitalism, livable wages,

Economist Milton Friedman suggested it was actually immoral, and certainly economically irrational, for businesses to attempt to act socially responsibly beyond what the law requires.

Are we here to make more money, with all that involves, for ourselves and/or others?

Is it to encourage businesses to become better corporate citizens, and executives to act more ethically?

Is it to learn, better than anyone else, exactly why businesses become green?

Is it to find new ways to cater to the green consumer, and expand their numbers?

Is it to explore how “sustainable” businesses can consistently outperform stock market indices? (Jeffrey Hollander, founder of Seventh Generation, remarked at a recent conference that if you had invested in the 100 Best Companies to Work For, a distinction determined by the Great Place to Work Institute, you would have obtained double the stock performance of the index.)

Is it to learn how to expand businesses – including non-profit “civil society” organizations – into areas of human services and social welfare abandoned by shrinking governments – with profit-promised relish or with a sense of duty?

Is it to find out how to extend Western material standards of living to all the world’s people – through business enterprise – and in such a fashion that the Earth’s mineral and biological resources are not rapidly depleted in the process?

Is it to come up with flexible, nimble new economic engines and lifeboats that can sustain families and communities that must adapt to wrenching changes brought on by climate change, higher energy prices?

Is this program about driving or preparing people for incremental change, or is it about the skills, knowledge, attitudes, and connections for adaptation to catastrophic change?

= What do we know? =

What do we know?

Some of us enjoy the highest material standard that humans have ever experienced.

Nearly 80% of us don’t.

But with the rich one-fifth living as we do, and the other four-fifths concentrated into many overpopulated areas, we are currently consuming resources at unsustainable rates. Water, energy, and biodiversity are among the resources that are severely strained in many places. Easily accessible fossil fuels are being depleted, including coal. It appears that we are increasing the Earth’s temperatures – yes, humanity is now driving change in the climate of an entire planet.

Among the fifth of us who are rich, 3/4 live in modern societies with relatively high social welfare, social mobility, and social equality. The quarter of us who live in America live in a society where social and financial inequality is perhaps the most extreme it has ever been and is accelerating toward greater inequality:
o where nearly 1/6 of the population has no health insurance
o where in 2006 the wealthiest hedge fund manager made more in one year than all 51,000 New York City teachers combined will make in two years
o where Henry Kravis, private equity take-over whiz, personally controls companies generating nearly $150 billion in sales, and employing 800,000 people world-wide
o where 1% of the population took home around 80% of 2006 capital gains

That’s America.

Meanwhile, a third of the global human population – over 2 billion people just like you and me - lives in conditions of acute food and water insecurity, illiteracy, ill health, and violence.

Such is the condition of our species.

And our own condition as a species is not the only issue. Together, our impact on the biosphere is staggering:

According to Vitousek, Ehrlich, Ehrlich and Matson (1986), human activity appropriates 40% of terrestrial NPP (net primary production), and 25% of the whole including aquatic NPP.

Grazing of human-owned livestock occupies for ¼ of total land surfaces.

According to Wackernagel et al. (2002), humanity’s load corresponded to 70% of the capacity of the global biosphere in 1961, and grew to 120% in 1999.

According to a 2004 New Statesman article by Mark Lynas, the biomass of human bodies now exceeds by a hundred times that of any large animal species that ever existed on land. More humans are born every day than the combined global population of all other great apes.

Ants account for about 10% of total animal biomass. Termites account for another 10%. The remaining 80% is nearly completely accounted for by humans and our livestock, draft animals, and pets.

Added to all the problems of responsibility and justice that we humans have always created for ourselves, and the local resource and environmental exhaustion our history is filled with, we are now routinely operating on such a scale that we are literally consuming the biosphere of the planet. And the numbers are staggering – the scale, the scope, the speed, the acceleration, the totality.

We now know a lot of extraordinary and very worrisome things about our world.

What don’t we know?

What we do not know is what the consequences of all this will be for ourselves and our descendants. Will they unfold gradually, allowing our laws, institutions, and practices to evolve to consider this new reality – a reality they were not created for?

Or will resource scarcity and ecological turbulence throw all of our life-support systems into disarray, all of our complex, intricate cultures and technologies, until we either recover or vanish?

Who knows?

What do you think?

What can we realistically hope to achieve?

These are the sorts of considerations behind the development of this MBA. They simply reflect the idea that managers and entrepreneurs need to understand the world they work in, in order to work better, and to serve the ecological and social good as they do so. The first purpose is non-controversial, and the second purpose is the human historical norm, despite quite recent ideology suggesting that corporate social responsibility is immoral, and that unmoderated greed is paradoxically good for total welfare.

What’s still controversial, or at least disjointed and uneven and the victim of ignorance and skepticism, is the modern, scientific, fact-based understanding of our world that this MBA program embodies. The notion of Spaceship Earth, of the limits to growth – an understanding that has taken many decades of research and awareness-raising to acquire.

Once you understand it, even vaguely, how can you forget it?

= Dedication =

The launch of this program is dedicated to everyone, still with us or passed away, who looked around in the midst of busy enterprise, thrilled by the excitement and satisfaction of accomplishing things with other people, with progress, with personal advancement, and realized that other people and other living things were paying for it.

And who decided that was neither fair nor wise.

= Exhortation =

Do good work.