I was reading a long article in the Sunday NYTimes of January 22 about why the iPhone ended up being manufactured in China. The gist of the article is that China simply has developed a factory system we cannot match. If you are interested in this important topic, go to the article, but that is not what I want to comment on. About the middle of the article, I spotted this quote from ‘a current executive,’ “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

It is a bit unfair to take this exactly as it stands because it was obviously taken out of a longer conversation, but it surprised me all the same. The reporter was querying Apple about the role in supporting domestic employment. I would agree with the speaker about the obligation to solve America’s [unemployment] problems, but the next sentence is a stunner. No other obligation than making “the best product possible?”

What is the best possible? For some time Apple was a laggard in its environmental design practices. It took a considerable amount of negative publicity to convince Apple to consider environmental performance as well as technical features. What about concern for the working conditions in the technically wonderful Chinese factories? I am sure there are other concerns that you would add to the singular one mentioned as additional obligations for Apple .

No single firm of Apple’s magnitude (the largest market value of all US companies) can be responsible for the economic ills or well-being of the Nation. One firm is just a node in a highly interconnected system. When the system is out of kilter, no one node can bring it back to an acceptable operational level. This feature applies also to our tendency to blame our financial woes on a single party or even a handful of causal agents.

Companies are obliged, by law, to meet all sorts of standards that pertain to product safety or the well-being of their employees. Given the anti-regulatory climate being expressed in the political talk these days, I hear business (not Apple specifically) wanting to relax the constraints on their operations. The argument is that they should be allowed to operate freely in the so-called free market. The argument might go something like this. Our sole responsibility is to our stockholders. This, in turn, means we should be the most competitive firm in our sector. And this means we have to make the best possible goods.

I don’t say the Apple spokesperson was making this case, but it is easy to move from his or her words to the implications I make above. If Adam Smith were right and the desired outcome of an economy was maximized by allowing the self-interest of all the actors to govern their action, this competitive strategy would benefit all of us. But Smith’s world is not the same as ours. The side effects of his model of the invisible hand are all too visible. The actions of one party are embedded and affect the whole system. “Too big to fail” is evidence of the systemic nature of today’s world.

I haven’t an easy answer to use to start into a conversation with Apple or any other company that makes a similar statement. One of Henry Ford’s great innovations was not the Model T; it was the realization that workers had to be paid enough so that they could afford his cars. I suspect that few if any of the Chinese workers making iPhones or anything else can afford to buy the goods they produce by their labor. The main difference today from the times of Ford is that the supply chain has become a world-wide network. If Ford’s notion still applies, can Apple or any other firm focus solely on the technical content of the product? Ford’s idea may have been motivated by the vision of more cars sold and more money in the corporate till, but, at least, it recognized the need to pay “living wages” based on the place of the goods in the society. Having the best possible product may and should be value #1, but never the only one.

Politics is a good place to observe the values underlying the US culture. Politics is more than a set of values, but politicians convey their own and pander to their bases values. Politics is also about power and privilege. Power to allocate the wealth of the nation to whoever paid their way to victory in this current money-driven electoral system. Privilege to surround themselves in a cloak that shields them from the realities that would put the lie to their promises and claims.

Ross Douthat, writing in this week’s New York Times Magazine, chastises those who are using Romney’s ties to Bain Capital and its business of creating wealth through the mechanism of leveraged buyouts. His argument is that this new financial instrument was a necessary development in our capitalistic system to counter the emerging competition from other economies once the global economy began to recover fully from the devastation of WWII.

Compared to these “tigers”

Our heavily unionized industries seemed sclerotic, our regulatory system stifling, our tax rates punitive. And so American policy makers, C.E.O.’s and investors responded by changing their priorities — privileging growth over security, efficiency over equality, and embracing creative destruction on a scale that would have been unthinkable in the America of 1955.

He refers to Joseph Schumpeter’s famous phrase, but which has lost its original meaning. It is ironic that Schumpeter was drawing on Karl Marx’s concept that political economies go through transformations created by the dialectical destruction of the current institutions, brought down by forces immanent in the current system. Capitalism came out of destruction of Feudalism and, according to Marx, would in turn create its own destruction, becoming socialistic. The phrase referred to macroeconomics and the entire political economy.

Schumpeter applied the same notion to the disappearance and appearance of enterprises that delivered innovative products and services that overwhelmed the efforts of the “dinosaurs” to compete. The new species prospered while the old disappeared. The process has been likened to a kind of social Darwinism. Each new entity survived by finding ways to do business more efficiently and thus attracting capital and outgrowing its sedentary competitors. Alternatively, competitors that brought radically innovative goods and services left their competitors helplessly stuck in the mud. The stories of how the automobile killed the buggy whip industry are legend. Where has the great company, Eastman Kodak gone?Today, stories like this are happening with great rapidity as digital innovations come forth everyday.

The first of these two processes is relevant to the story woven by Douthat. Romney was one of a cadre of financially trained businessmen who bought companies that were operating inefficiently far from their potential. Inefficient here does not apply to the manufacturing processes, but to the economic sense of the future value to the current market value. Attractive companies were those whose stock prices were seen to be far from what they could be if only the companies were made more efficient, producing more dollars for each dollar of capital underpinning the firm. A key to this practice, considered revolutionary at the time, was the use of borrowed money, rather than new capital, to finance the purchase of the target company. The potential for gains on the small amount of private capital needed to obtain the loans is very large as the denominator—capital—is very small compared to the numerator—the market value when the business was sold. The latest financial collapse was due in large part to the virtual disappearance of the denominator in the extraordinarily highly leveraged securities. The promise of great wealth was built on a house of cards with no foundation.

Getting back to Romney and today’s politics, Douthat says,

In the private sector, this revolution was driven by men like Mitt Romney. As Ben Wallace-Wells put it in a New York magazine profile last October, Romney has spent his entire career seeking to “perfect” the American corporation, stripping “its inefficiencies until it might function as a perfectly frictionless economic unit.”

Let’s do a small thought experiment here. Imagine that “a perfectly frictionless economic unit” was one that eliminated the major cost for most businesses: labor. We would live in a world where everybody would have to be a capitalist, owning human-free businesses that produced everything we needed or wanted. Not far what someone already rich might think. For the US, the Occupy movement has noted that only about 1 percent might be able to live this way, and on a global scale, the proportion of the very wealthy is vanishingly small. This, however, is not strange when you consider that modern economics in general, and capitalism, in particular, portrays the world as a machine and the well-being of people in terms of numbers. Douthat, then, adds fuel to the fire.

Still, just because the private equity revolution was necessary doesn’t mean that it was an unmitigated good. And for Mitt Romney to frame criticisms of Bain as just “the bitter politics of envy,” as he did last week, displays a tone-deafness that could cost him the presidency. No one — and certainly no politician — who has profited so immensely from an age of insecurity should ever appear to be lecturing the people who’ve lost out.

Douthat believes that the new form of capitalism was “necessary,” although he doesn’t fully explain why. Given his general perspective as a conservative, I surmise it comes from a belief that the US must stay ahead of all comers in the global economy. Given that this economy is predicated on growth, it follows that we must outgrow all others and that the “revolution” was hence necessary.

I do not think it was necessary except according to the demands of the underlying capitalistic political ideology, Douthat takes for granted. It may have been politically expedient. It may have happened as some unintended consequence of something else. It may have been the greedy actions of the wealthy, the Gordon Geckos, Douthat mentions in the column. I have my own choice among these, but not one that say it was necessary.

I find Douthat’s use of necessity is unecessarily cruel and heartless. Perhaps this is why Romney’s opponents are using his record to discredit his claims of creating prosperity in the forms of jobs. Certainly prosperity followed for those at Bain who profited by these deals even when they failed to survive after the surgery that always comes with leveraged buyouts.

Instead, Romney needs to prove to anxious voters that he and his party have more to offer them than just Bain capitalism alone. To win the White House, he’ll need to promise not only competition that leads to growth, but growth that leads to broadly shared prosperity. To defend his revolution, he’ll need to show that he’s reckoned with its costs.

He is not the only one who needs to wake up and get real. His party is living in an ideological stupor. More efficiency and wealth generation is not always a bad idea by itself. Growth has its limits. Economists and social psychologists (even cognitive scientists) are uncovering data that demonstrate that well-being is not correlated with income or wealth after a threshold has been reached. For those billions of people with little or nothing, income is important for subsistence. Ironically, the efficiencies of Romney’s form of capitalism, in a global context, tend to make these same poor people worse off.

For Romney to do as Douthat counsels, he will have to abandon his identity a quick-change artist, equipped with an arsenal of smoke and mirrors. There simply is no ground truth in what he (and others) did, what he (and others) used as an argument for what was done, and in the consequent human damages. Our economy is much more efficient than it was when the corporate raiders rode into Wall Street. These capitalists arguably have contributed to those improved efficiency numbers. But those numbers are not so important in human terms. It is time for all the Romney’s who seek political power to talk about other numbers that would come with their ideological economic remedies: inequality, indignity, obesity, poverty, broken families, loss of community, anomie, alienation and many more social and individual indicators of “illth,” as Herman Daly calls these characteristics. There’s no flourishing to be found here and no possibility for sustainability.

I have been posting to this blog two or three times a week and occasionally more or less. For the time being, I will be posting only once a week unless something calls for immediate attention. The main reason is the demands of a new project. I will be writing a book with my former student and present colleague, Andy Hoffman. The book, which will take the shape of an extended conversation with Andy asking the questions and commenting on the answers I will provide. It’s not to be as formal as this seems. We tried this format at a conference earlier this year with considerable success. Stanford University Press will be the publisher. We aim to see the book in print in early 2013. The advantage in a book form is that we get to edit the responses. No Twitter to deal with.

The second reason is also load related. I am going to do more teaching and academic stuff this year, especially at the Marlboro College Graduate School MBA in Managing for Sustainability Program. A few other mentally demanding gigs also. I do most of my thinking and learning through my writing, so you may, even with this apology, see my stuff appear more often. As I my recent writing might indicate, the political conversation offers numerous opportunities for sustainability punditry. Conversation may be the wrong word; most of what is being said is monologic and bombastic. I keep asking myself why any of these folks wants to be President, and find little or nothing that would forward the cause of sustainability.

Everyone promises to undo something that came to be because the community of the United States was being torn apart. Growthism will do that every time as it demands more and more commoditization of both the goods we consume and the channels through the goods are delivered. The strident campaigning for what I would call (others have also) radical individualism is another theme that runs opposite to any appreciation for others whether they are. Another nail in the coffin of community.

I reread, The Spirit Level, by Wilkinson and Pickett recently in preparation of a short course I will be giving on “Leading Corporate Sustainability.” Graph after graph show a correlation between income inequality and some form of human or societal bad. The US is almost always at the extreme, and above the trend line. Here is a composite graph for a list of common health and social problems plotted against income inequality. The Occupy protests and encampments raised consciousness of the great schism between the masses of our population and a small plutocratic minority, but didn’t provide information on the serious consequences that these data and others in the book do.

Sustainability-as-flourishing is what I am fundamentally concerned about. Nothing good is likely to come of all the political and economic talk and change ahead because none of it accounts for the complex, interconnected world we inhabit. Simplistic remedies do not work for solving systemic problems. Bombing the nuclear facilities in Iran will not bring peace to the world; it is likely to drive us in the opposite direction. Neither is going back on the gold standard going to prevent a future financial meltdown. And so on.

OK. That’s all she wrote. I’ll be here again next week.

My favorite op-ed columnist, James Carroll, has hit the spot again. Memorializing the death of Vaclav Havel, Carroll writes about Havel’s signature accomplishment, pointing out that people have to live in truth or lose their freedom (my words about his work). I thought for a moment that he must have been eavesdropping on my conversation with my wife during and after the previous Saturday night “debate” in New Hampshire. I was expressing my concerns and consternation at the virtually complete absence of truth from the proceedings. Not only was the truth gone, but the participants appeared almost gleeful about speaking freed from the constraints that truth-telling creates. Carroll noted that Havel, “[t]he anti-Soviet dissident, who went from prison to the presidential palace, made truth his theme. He boldly condemned Moscow’s tyranny as ‘a system of ritual signs that replace reality with pseudo-reality … Human beings are compelled to live within a lie.’”

Earlier in the campaign, I recall an interview with Eric Fehrnstrom, Mitt Romney’s campaign manager, who said, in response to a question about the untruths being uttered by Romney, that this was none of his concern; it was up to the media to provide the facts. This is not a direct quote but my recollection of what he said. I remember it, even as my memory is getting worse, because it just leaped out of the TV screen.

Much of the political dialog revolves about what Havel called “ritual signs.” These are utterances that are ties to the underlying ideology of the speaker. Carroll writes further:

The citizen was forced to accept falsehood as the ground of existence. And beyond denouncing the regime, Havel showed, without being judgmental, how the inertia of citizens was essential to Soviet dominance… Grave social dysfunction follows when “ritual signs’’ take on more importance than hard facts, and “pseudo-reality’’ begins to rule. It’s an intriguing coincidence that the Czech truth-teller’s funeral occurred on the day Republicans voted in Iowa. Lies are at issue as the GOP contest moves to New Hampshire tomorrow, with Newt Gingrich openly calling Mitt Romney a liar. But the entire Republican campaign gyres around ritual signs that are at odds with reality. Marginal extremists have forced the Republican mainstream to live within lies (blatant climate denial, the baseless assertions that the budget can be balanced without taxes, blind hatred of government, and so on). This represents a new low standard for political pseudo-reality. If Newt Gingrich is the guardian of truth, the nation is in real trouble.

Reading his column and watching as much of the campaigning as I can stomach, I find myself full of sadness and a sense of loss. We have found our way in this country for more than 300 years bouncing back and forth between the ends of the political spectrum, recovering from the dumps of one or the other as we stagger along. This will be the 59th or 60th election I will have voted in. That’s lots listening to political rhetoric, better political bullshit, but this time is palpably the most unreal and scary.

Truth, as Havel, says is essential to our existence as a free people at all times, but perhaps even more now as we become ever more aware of the complexity of the world we live in. Ideologies are the epitome of denial of the interconnectedness of this world, where ties grow more in number and strength everyday. Actions here have effect in places and times we do not expect or ignore. Are we really going to bomb away the so-called threat of Iranian nuclear weapons with no other consequences? Will freeing the market from all government oversight and restraints create wealth for everybody when the results of the last few decades show us the exact opposite? Ideologies, either from the left or right, are all dangerous, but our two-party system and the means their leaders communicate with us pushes themes into ideological positions frequently compressed into tiny sound bites or political ads. Carroll mentions a few of such positions above.

There are many, many truths out there that are getting clobbered. If any of these men (no women left) are elected, they will be expected to act in accordance to these statements, ignoring what they find. Obama was faced with a financial crisis and its fallout on the economy as he moved in. He certainly was not the creator of these problems. It is interesting and ironic that the name Bush, on whose watch these problems started to arise, has been barely mentioned during this campaign, and not at all during these recent “debates.” I continue to put quotes around this word as real debates require some depth in discussing issues and solutions. Truthfulness would require putting the current messes into context, a least attempting to do so. I admit that would be difficult because the big messes are all a result of our failures to recognize complexity and act accordingly. And so Carroll ends with this:

American politics seems newly energized by such judgmentalism, and, yes, the Republicans have that high-horse saddle to themselves this week. The memory of Vaclav Havel points us in a different direction, however — toward the recognition that in the human condition lies and truth are always intermingled. To be moral is to acknowledge that complexity and struggle with it. Our elections put our imperfections on full display because, finally, that is what it means to live within the truth.

Welcome to 2012. I hope we will be able to say something more about the health of the world at the end of 2012 beyond noting that the extra day in February added 2.7 percent (1/366) to the economy. I have the same hope every year, year after year, and I expect little will be different in the rest of my lifetime. It seems to me that things will be getting worse for a while, given the blindness and denial of the state of the world in the movers and shakers of business and government—the two dominating institutions in the US and most everywhere else these days.

Some of the denial comes in simply being unwilling to open one’s eyes to the real world out there. Some comes from powerful individuals who do know what is happening but prefer to hold on to the status quo because it disproportionately benefits them. Some comes from people who uncritically accept what is told to them by these others because they prefer to accept the word of people who they believe share some values rather than think for themselves. Unfortunately, the values that drive their beliefs have little or nothing to do with the state of the world.

Some, much too much, comes from people who do accept the existence and seriousness of the natural resources and societal problems that threaten to upset our relatively stable world, but are trying to cope using the wrong tools and models. There’s little chance that the first group with selfish and ideological reasons behind their blindness will wake up, at least not until the water comes lapping at their doorsill and gasoline hits $5.00 or more. Hope lies in getting those working on the problems to begin to see the true nature of the issues and shift to strategies that can and do more than temporarily slow down the pace of unsustainability.

In the spirit of hope, here are a few actions that I believe might have lasting impacts. Consumers are a relatively untapped source of power for change. Before this source can be effectively mobilized and aligned with sustainability, several key changes must be made. The first is to shift the basic model of economic behavior. The primary model is that of a rational or partially rational machine that decides on what transaction to enter into according to some preference order or utility. The more information possessed by the economic actor, the more rational will be the decisions to purchase this or that. This is the theory behind the many labeling and scoring systems now in play. There is increasing evidence that this model is seriously flawed. Actions in the marketplace, like all others, are driven primarily by habit, not by some rational computation. Further, the machinery of the current consumption-driven economy has been fine tuned to embed the particular habits that serve the major producers. Consumer sovereignty, if it ever did exist, is moribund if not dead.

Changes brought about by creating a better informed and educated consumer will move things in the direction of sustainability, but only slowly and at the margins. The now addictive consumption habits that drive the US economy have to be treated by much more than access to good information. I don’t know how to do this, but do know that habits, certainly when they reach the level of addiction, are extremely hard to change. Some sort of intervention is usually required. Acknowledgement of the addiction and appreciation of the harm it is causing are essential first steps. Occupy Wall Street was spawned by Adbusters, a Canadian NGO with a mission to reduce consumption. Their campaigns have had some success, perhaps from their cleverness, but there is little evidence of major and continuing change. The weight of those corporations and financial institutions protecting and increasing the size of the economy overwhelms the efforts to wake up consumers and cure their addiction. Consumption is an essential activity for any living being; this plea is not a call for the end of consumption, but rather for practices that reflect and cohere with the realities of the natural and social systems in which we are all interconnected.

A second path is to bring relationships back into the marketplace. The incessant drive toward bigger scale and scope, on the ground of improved efficiency, has turned the market into a virtually completely lifeless, commoditized institution. Efficiency is arguably good in producing wealth, but not without understanding that it has limits and a negative side. The loss of local economic actors, both producers and merchants, has contributed to the frittering away of community cohesion. The loss in terms of the important part that interrelationships play in sustainability has reached a point where it can be argued the benefits of more efficient means are more than offset by the deleterious impact on the humans beings involved by the economy.

There are limited experiments in creating local economic systems going on in the US, the UK and a few other countries. Some regions have even created their own currencies; Berkshares are an alternate to US currency for the purchase of locally produced goods and services in the Berkshires area in Massachusetts. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become the measure of business’s care about people beyond the usual economic factors. Much of goes for CSR is oxymoronic or hypocritical or downright misleading. The CSR programs at companies like Walmart that have a strategy to grow, in the name of efficiency, at the expense of local merchants and suppliers are inconsistent with these strategies. Here is a sample taken from a CSR reporting website:

In addition to its commitment to the Children’s Miracle Network and job creation initiatives the company engages in activities covering topics such as education, children or volunteering. Through its community giving scheme the company supports literacy programs and community scholarships and makes contributions to many national and international organizations and networks such as the American Cancer Society, the American Red Cross, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation or the United Way and Special Olympics.

Too many CSR programs merely balance the harms done in one place with lesser beneficence elsewhere. The stirring of efforts to replace decision-driving measures like GDP with human-centered measures offers some hope for improvement.

The last possibility I will discuss today is a shift in the fundamental way we understand the world. Our public decisions are guided by rules coming out of an understanding of the world stretching back to Descartes. Stated in the simplest terms, the dominant belief system from which the rules come is that the world is a vast machine, governed by analytically describable relationships that we can come to know through science. Armed with this knowledge, we can design institutions and technologies that should move the world in a progressive direction and keep it there. This model has, indeed, produced much progress in the human condition since the days of Descartes, but the machine no longer behaves by these rules and is beginning to break down.

The world is not reducible to such a mechanical metaphor. It is complex and incapable of being described by such nicely formed rules. It behaves in nonlinear and unpredictable ways. Great systems suddenly fail and produce, for example, financial meltdowns. Complexity does not rule out the finding of truths about the world that can be used to design and govern it, but the scientific method cannot be counted upon to generate the knowledge needed. The “rational” deterministic rules and procedures that form the base for almost all public decisions need to be replaced by pragmatic inquiries that find truth as successful coping with the vagaries of live on an ever-changing planet. Pragmatic truths emerge from the convergence of experience. We must replace the apparent certainty of technocratic designs with adaptive systems build on understanding gained by experience.

To make such a change would require an immense replacement of the bases for many key institutions: particularly education and government. The privileged role for theoria, the Greek word for scientific knowledge would be replaced with phronesis, another Greek word, which might best be translated as wisdom. The virtually complete lack of trust visible in domestic and global politics would have to be reversed. Technocrats, called on to solve the economic problems, would be relegated to the roles for which they were designed to play. Mistakes will be made, as they are today using the best models and biggest computers, but we will be prepared to adapt and correct. We will recognize the failures and marks missed as normal and not seek to punish those whose wisdom we called upon.

I have been writing about complexity for the last year or so. Even if we work with systems that we believe are simple enough to be described by nice closed rules, it is helpful to operate in a pragmatic mode. It means more human observing and interactions with the systems involved. I find the gardening metaphor useful here. If we ran our activities like successful gardeners work their plots, we would eventually approach the ends we seek. The failures along the way would be looked at as opportunities for learning and understanding instead of opportunities to find fault. Simply pinning the fault on some singular causal agent or factor when a whole, highly interconnected, complex system hiccups makes little sense.

I am not at all sure about how or where to begin the change toward complexity as the basic model for both non-human and human behavior. One place to start might be at the universities where the Cartesian view and subsequent disciplinary methods embed this system of thinking. The forces that would oppose this shift are deeply rooted and would fight vigorously in opposition. But even this opposition is usually committed to finding truths. Perhaps then, some would be open to acknowledging another way to the truth.

I hope the readers of this blog will find in these ramblings a few of the sources of my own hope that 2012 will end with the world a little closer to sustainability than on January 1.

So long to 2011. The year departs with little progress toward sustainability. The political system in the US is frozen and can’t cope with today’s burning issues much less those that are smoldering and will burst into flames in the years to come. The continuing unemployment situation has dulled any serious talk about reforming work and changing our addictive consumption habit. We are still fighting a war and threatening to begin others.This year we even invented a new shopping holiday, the first day after Christmas, Monday this year. I tune into several blogs and listserves that focus on opposite themes: exchanging work for leisure hours, satisfying one’s cares without the need for short-lived material goods, finding peace, and creating an economy that does not need to grow forever. If I pay attention to the mainstream media, those that echo the feeble public conversations, I hear little if anything significant about these critical issues.

The negativity that increasingly characterizes our culture is fed by the tenor of public talk. A year from the next election cycle has begun with some of the most dreadful attack ads I can remember. No apologies for lying and taking things so far from their original context that they become fictions. Those with more money than they could possibly spend are working hard to get even more and keep the growing inequality of our society on the same path. Neither private largesse or smaller government can reverse this immoral, unkind and ultimately destabilizing trend. The simplistic calls for the “end of big government” would throw out the baby with the bath water. I am no fan of government that fails to do an effective job and I would join many of the opposite political stripes in seeking change. But not the kind of mindless change being called for by so many.

The last thing we need is excess simplification in dealing with the complex worlds we inhabit. There is really only one such world out there where everything and everyone are interconnected, but this world is too big to be understood in simple terms. For practical purpose, we have to break that big world into smaller chunks, but that does not change these chunks into simplistic systems. They remain complex and cannot be governed by simplistic means. They take care and caring if we are to get them to behave in a friendly, beneficent way. I find both missing. We need to care about these systems and subsystems as they provide the context for our lives and the health of the big worlds out there. This means we have to better appreciate and respect our interconnectedness within that world. We need to care for these systems in the sense of acting in ways that will maintain their resiliency and keep them producing the material goods we require for running our lives and also allow the emergent, intangible and emergent properties that make life worth living to come forth.

Our language and culture are rooted in past eras where the Earth was less stressed and more resilient. The wonder of language is that it can be used in an infinite number of combinations and permutations. The wonder of metaphor is that we can take language from these no longer existing and relevant times and apply it to solve our problems within the present times. To do this, we must, however, learn to reflect and be critical, that is, to understand that the old, reified, and fixed notions don’t apply any longer. Sometimes it helps to uncover the original meanings of words in attempting to reveal the circumstances in which they first appeared, but it is useless to seek the absolute truths of sentences from the past without cloaking them in the worlds in which they appeared. Some of the truths revealed in language survive today, but many do not. We are not likely to see much improvement in our understanding of the present without applying the essential reflective skills on an individual or collective basis. Their absence is stark.

Climate change denial is a symptom of the disappearance of reflection from our culture, but it is only a symptom. The way we communicate exacerbates the loss of reflective skills. Reflection and critical skills always involve patient time-consuming processes. One has to think about something over and over until the current reality becomes present with sufficient grounding that we can act confidently toward perfecting whatever was our intent. Communicating with 140 characters as in using Twitter cannot give anyone enough information to judge the reality of the situation and act accordingly. Political debates are a travesty with complete lack of honesty and critical analysis. The remedies offered for all of our ills are constructed on purely political grounds with no connection again to current reality. Ads are manipulative, designed explicitly to disguise the world the goods they tout will create.

If I sound negative at year end, I am, but not without a positive counterweight. The small voices of Occupy, the larger voices of the Arab Springs, the increasing numbers of people around the world who have tired of hearing the same old untruths used to dominate them—all of these are signs that change is in the air. Vaclav Havel (pictured above), one of my heroes, just passed away. He showed us that a society can change its spots quickly and without bloodshed. His clarion call to the people of Czechoslovakia was simple, but extraordinarily powerful. People must live in truth, he wrote. Let me end with one of his quotes, “When a truth is not given complete freedom, freedom is not complete.” The barriers to living in truth are always high, but they are never insurmountable. That’s my basis for ending on a positive note.

I apologize for my absence. I have been taking care of my wife who has just had some back surgery. It was very successful but she has to take it easy for a bit. So I have been cook, bottle-washer, chauffeur, bedmaker and more for a couple of weeks. We are taking long walks everyday—the recommended therapy for her surgery, and not too bad for my health as well. I will be posting irregularly until after the New Year, but then plan to resume a sort of regular schedule.

The holiday season is at heart a celebration of miracles. For me, Hanukkah is based on the miracle of the light that burned for 8 days while the Jewish warriors, who had just retaken the Temple, went in search for oil to replace the profaned supply. The single day’s supply of sacred oil they initially found and used for the lamp miraculously burned for the 8 days it took to press new olive oil. For Christians, it is a celebration of the birth of Jesus.

Even as the world slows down for just an instance to celebrate these miracles, it is hard for me to find their presence. The miracle of Christmas, a solemn time, has become a miracle of our economy. Merchants and manufacturers derive the bulk of their profits from sales focused on the season. As the season approaches and passes, I can sense a collective holding of breath in anticipation of the coming of each year’s miraculous sales—hardly an appropriate incarnation of the Christ child.

The Christian celebration of the birth of their savior is heralded with the shibboleth, “Peace on Earth and Goodwill to men.” While this phrase echoes forth from the churches of the world and is heard over and over again on the airwaves, it is difficult to find it on the same Earth it calls out. The Earth is hardly peaceful. One war has just “officially” ended just as it was “officially begun without the Constitutional requisite of a declaration, but peace remains fleeting in the Middle East, Africa, Korea, and elsewhere.

And for goodwill, one just can listen to the political talk of the moment and notice its nearly complete absence. To listen to the speeches, ads and phony debates, you would think all the candidates are liars, rogues and worse. The name calling and slander are hardly signs of goodwill. Political talk should exemplify the moral stature of a nation. The contrast between the idea of the miracle of Christmas and the miracle of the birth of this nation could hardly be starker. It is even more ironic because much of the current talk carries “Christian” themes. The Occupy events have called attention to the historic levels of inequality that now characterize our society in America. I can’t think of a better indicator of the absence of goodwill than this one.

Somehow, we have to find a better way to cure our economic woes besides profaning the spirit of Christmas and Hanukkah. I think it would be better to declare a national Shopping Day (if we really must for the economy’s sake) sometime in the middle of the year or maybe around the time people return from their summer vacations. The right answer for sustainability is, of course, stop all this hyper-consumption. We could require that everyone’s fiscal years begin on July 1. Then we might be able to celebrate these winter holidays with respect for their foundations of miracles, love, peace, and goodwill.

I am going to teach a weekend class in a few months in a new Ph.D. program in “Values-Driven Leadership” at Benedictine College near Chicago. My class is named “Leading Corporate Sustainability.” In preparing for the class, I have had to visit the concepts named in the syllabus I share with a few other instructors. The following come from the topmost level in the description of the course: value-driven, leadership, and corporate sustainability. I suspect I start with a different view of these than do the rest of my colleagues.

Let’s start with “corporate sustainability.” If you look at the semantics of the phrase, it means a condition in which the corporation prospers for a long time. I don’t think this is what it was meant to refer to, but there it is. It’s important to get this straight because so many firms are adopting a program of “corporate sustainability,” complete with a Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) and a well-equipped PR department. It is great to see firms show that they are thinking about sustainability, but they have it mostly or completely wrong. Sustainability is a property of the whole system in which the firm is situated and is interconnected to many other nodes: other firms, customers, the natural environment, regulators, banks and so on and on. What matters is the health of that worldly system, not the health of any particular enterprise. Sorry to break the bad news, but that’s the way it is, like the three musketeers motto: “All for one, one for all.”

Sustainability, the word alone, refers to the ability of a system to create some desired output continuously. It means absolutely nothing in practice without naming the end being sought. That is why I struggled for some time to come up with an end to sustain that would capture the bundle of ends I identified in my own work on the subject over some years. I settled on flourishing as a workable metaphor for the bundle of things that make life worth living and produce well-being. Further, the concept appears universally in all cultures, and applies to both individual organisms and collectives: cultures (human) and ecosystems (non-human).

Now a small diversion before continuing. The world is in such bad shape because our dominant social paradigm no longer fits the world. As long as we operate according to its structure, we will continue to produce unintended consequences that threaten and even overwhelm the desired outcomes. We need a new story to guide us. In the jargon of change theory, one might say, “We need a new paradigm, but, here, new story will do for the time being.” The job of “leaders-toward-sustainability” (note carefully that I have changed the connection and relationship between the words “leader” and “sustainability”) is to embody the new story and impart it to those with whom they coordinate their actions, whether at home, in enterprises, on the ball field, the halls of legislatures—everywhere.

So this kind of leadership is not values-driven; it’s vision-driven. People leading the way toward sustainability-as-flourishing must begin with a vision of the world they hope to create, enlisting the help of others. Values is another piece of jargon. What does it really mean? When we see the phrase, values-driven, we are supposed to imagine someone acting from a base of internalized lofty ideals, all of which are “good” in the philosopher’s sense of good. Even using this model of action, we know that some “leaders” act out of a set of values that many would deem as “bad.” They, however, are just as value-driven as the good guys.

Values do not reside in the practical consciousness—the embedded cognitive structure that guides action. They are only ascriptions as to the cause of the actions that are made by an observer (who may be the actor). They relate to the ordering of actions in the context in which they are seen. By observing actions carefully over time, one can tease out the ends (intentions) of the actions and order them according the frequency and effort involved. The array of actions, so ordered, can be translated into a scale of values, a word used to predict how actors act over time and according to the situational context. The actor can also assert, if asked, what his or her values are, but these belong to the disconnected realm of discursive consciousness, and may or may not line up with the observations. We know that people often say one thing about their values and act in a contradictory manner. I tend to leave “values” out of my vocabulary and encourage others to do the same unless we are clear how we are using the term.

In place of values, I use the word, care. Humans care about the world they inhabit. Their actions arise out of that caring. This simple statement is a fundamental part of the new story that a leader-toward-sustainability(-as-flourishing) must embody. We are not creatures with insatiable wants/desires although that is what the current political economy wants us to believe. When we rediscover who we are, we will live out our lives taking care of a world composed of our own selves, other humans and all the rest of that world out there. Flourishing is a state when all our cares are being addressed satisfactorily.

We are not Cartesian beings with a mind separate from the body, taking in and representing the world. We learn through experiencing the world via the actions we engage in. Humberto Maturana, the Chilean biologist I often quote, writes, “Learning is doing; doing is learning.” Pragmatism, an important element of leadership for sustainability-as-flourishing works in essentially the same way. We find the truth in practice, and express it as statements that underpin and explain our successful actions. And if the cares that drive actors are persistent and important, we seek this kind of truth by continually experimenting and acting until we arrive at the end we envisioned: flourishing in this case. Flourishing is nothing more than a state recognized when one says, “My cares are being satisfied, at least for the moment.” Not just the narcissistic set of cares directed inwardly, but all of one’s cares, including other people (the social world) and the external world (nature or the environment in conventional terms).

It would be all right, in the name of expediency, to drop the word flourishing from the definition of sustainability if we were all in agreement that this is end we are talking about and seeking. Unfortunately, there is no such agreement out there yet and so talk about sustainability without any end in sight is largely impotent, confusing, and, worse, produces mischief by those who see the drive toward flourishing as threatening. I will. however, drop the word in this post because by now you should know I always append “-as-flourishing” to sustainability in my mind.

The next part of the new story that leaders-toward-sustainability must learn is a different model of how the world works; maybe learning it first through some didactic method, but ultimately by doing. The world is not the (complicated) machine that Descartes and his followers thought it was. It is a complex system, different from the machine-like Cartesian model in important and fundamental ways; so different that we can say that complexity is part of another paradigm. The complex Earth system cannot be reduced to a set of analytic rules that both explain and predict its behavior. Future behavior cannot be related to the present and past states of the system with any certainty that the predicted outcome will occur. Further, the future states may be disconnected from the present and be located in an entirely different region where behavioral patterns are nothing like those of the past.

The behavior of complex systems requires a different kind of decision-making process than we have become accustomed to. Leaders and ordinary managers of all sorts should understand that all organizations involving humans are complex, but perhaps not quite as challenging as is sustainability. What I have said for sustainability goes for managing or, better, governing in general. In the past we have used analytic knowledge about the system at hand, gleaned from scientific studies and logically related to those studies. We call on experts to construct the best way to move ahead, in essence predicting the future. But they cannot tell us the unintended consequences that come along as hitchhikers and have become so large that they have produced today’s unsustainable world.

The requisite understanding to guide the world toward flourishing is best found in those who have observed the behavior of the system and have acquired local, rather than positive, knowledge. The leader’s frame must be pragmatic, as above, where no one is particularly privileged with the learning needed to guide the system effectively. The Greeks knew this. They called the kind of knowledge to use used in governing, phronesis, close to what we call wisdom. They saw this body of knowledge as distinct from theoria, the kind of knowledge that Cartesian methodology, which has evolved into the scientific method, produces. Our paradigm today collapses the two, and tends to devalue wisdom.

This feature of the world, the new story we need to follow, requires leaders to enlist many others with the same understanding and interest in a flourishing future, that is, those who share the leader’s vision. Charisma doesn’t help; neither does a type A personality or a Myers-Briggs ENTJ Type. Listening skills become paramount. I’ve written more than usual, but this exercise was designed to help me prepare for my forthcoming class in developing leaders-toward-sustainability. Having a vision of where you want to get to is essential, operationally more important and relevant than whatever values one holds. For a while, it’s critical to join flourishing explicitly with sustainability and sustainability to leadership (why the dashes appear), and soft pedal the values label.

I usually wait a few more weeks to write my annual “Bah Humbug” post, but I haven’t the patience to wait this year. My first shout-out goes to the myriad of firms that claim to be doing “sustainability.” The purported recipient of their corporate largesse, Mother Earth, has not noticed the “gifts.” Maybe it is because their efforts to lessen the impact of the goods and services that flood the market can’t keep up with their drive to sell evermore of the same goods and services.

My second “Bah Humbug” goes to the advertising agencies and public relations firms that come up with the empty and misleading rhetoric these firms use in getting out their self-serving messages.

Third, I point to the scorers that claim to be able to distill the “attractive” features of products, companies, schools … into a single number that captures the essence of their performance. I notice that GoodGuide, one of my targets in the past, has “improved” its methodology by generating ratings on an absolute scale. Transparency, the ease which the data Good Guide uses in calculating the scores, is now an important factor. I would be less inclined to single them out if their own process used to calculate the rating were itself more transparent. I found the amount and intricacy of the information provided on their webpages opaque and very difficult to understand, even for someone with the technical training I have. They are more up front in talking about the subjectiveness of the ultimate ratings.

In order to provide our users with actionable, easy-to-understand guidance, GoodGuide provides a single summary rating for a product, derived by giving equal weight to Health, Environment and Society sub-scores (emphasis in the original). Rational people can disagree over the relative weight to give health vs. environment vs. social impacts and there is no objective, correct solution to the problem of how to aggregate such disparate concerns.  GoodGuide opted for equal weighting because we believe Health, Environment and Social considerations should be integrated into all consumer product decision-making. Users with different preferences can select products based only on the sub-score they care most about. 

The weighting issue is not as simple as the above paragraph appears to indicate. The equal weighting is essentially a cop-out. The real choices fundamentally involve trade-offs, balancing the “score” in one category against others. Goodguide offers a filter to set your own weightings, but I wonder how many understand that and use it? The three choices—omit, critical or important—are much too general to provide the measure of precision that reporting the scores to two significant figures, e. g. 7.5, implies.

Another factor that went into my admittedly completely subjective and arbitrary (at least I admit it) scoring system was the main headline on the home page, “ Find safe, healthy, green & ethical products based on scientific ratings.” The four categories used—safe, healthy, green, and ethical—are never absolute. I do not believe one can make ethical judgments based on a scientific evaluation. The reification of qualities, like green, and the subsequent quantification simplify and mystify the real issues involved with health, environment, and society, the three categories making up the score. I also noticed that the website shows off sponsored ads, highlighting some of the products they rate. Without suggesting any connection between the ads and the ratings, the situation is very much like that where medical school professors are paid to test the drugs of a particular firm. At least the sponsors are transparently visible, but I found the presence of the ads jarring.

The next Bah Humbug goes to Walmart for the duplicity I wrote about in my last blog post. Walmart’s PR says how much it cares about people and the planet, but the company’s lobbying activities shows that it cares more about profit. The triple bottom line is like the GoodGuide system; its meaning depends entirely on the weights given to each of the three categories. Walmart is an easy target, but only one of many companies that do the same thing. Shame on you all.

I’m just warming up, but maybe only a couple more today. A Bah Humbug award to all the climate deniers, especially those we have entrusted to govern this country and to those who are usurping the roles that our elected officials are supposed to play. These are the tycoons and plutocrats that sit behind a curtain, like the Wizard of Oz, and pour so much money into the political coffers that those who we entrust become know-nothings so that they can claim that there is no need to do anything. Unfortunately, the deniers of climate change have gotten so good at operating with their heads in the sand or other dark places that they cannot see the how badly the ship of state is listing and leaking from stem to stern.

Finally today, an award to folks that should be on my list of positive contributors but are fooling themselves and the rest of us in the process by holding on to the belief that the market can work if only we could undo all the various generic market failures. Giving everybody perfect information is the goal of every reporting initiative and every scoring system. Bah Humbug. True, this might work if the Smithian ideal of consumer sovereignty held true in today’s lopsided market place. My colleague and friend, Ron Nahser gave a lecture at Marlboro a week ago and pointed to a few classic statements that were simply restatements of consumer sovereignty. Adam Smith, J. M. Keynes, and Peter Drucker all said that consumer/customer satisfaction is the purpose of production and the overall economy. Maybe so, in theory, but customers are misled and seduced by advertising. Satisfaction, thanks largely to Walmart, has become equivalent to finding the lowest price at the expense of all other qualities. Walmart, by driving out local merchants, limits the choice available to buyers. Market purists would say that is how the system is supposed to work, creating economies of scale so all can benefit by lower costs. Bah Humbug.

If you have other candidates for this annual award, please send then to me by commenting on this post. I will publish them after the end of the year.

Grist just published a story about Walmart’s political contributions that raises my skeptical (more like cynical) eyebrows. The same story is commonplace these days. Walmart, which stayed out of political giving during its founder’s years, has become one of the largest corporate political contributors in recent years. Here is the Grist story in a paragraph.

Walmart talks big about sustainability, but doesn’t put its campaign money anywhere near where its mouth is. Whatever the company may say about the importance of legislative action on climate change or other environmental issues, its money is signaling the opposite, telling lawmakers that it’s perfectly fine to vote against environmental protection.

I have used Walmart as a target of my barbs in the past, but not for this reason. My usual screed aims at the improper use of the word “sustainability” in their programs and public statements. Like virtually all corporations, Walmart fails to grasp the systems nature of sustainability. They join many others in believing that they can measure the positive contribution they are making to sustainability and can, then, convey that message to their customers. Tree-huggers, no way!

Of course, they can do nothing of the sort. Sustainability is not remotely tied to any single source of perturbations to the natural or human sphere; it emerges from the world when all the relationships that interconnect the myriad of environmental and social processes are working in harmony. At best, I could attribute their behavior to ignorance and at worst to a deliberate effort to disguise the reality of their business by painting a rosy picture for their customers.

Everything and anything they do in the name of sustainability falls into the category of eco-efficiency, providing equal or greater value to the customer with less environmental impact. This is, again of course, a good move unless they engage in misleading advertising and product labeling. The twin objectives of growth (very strong at Walmart) and reduced negative impact (not so important, it seems) are antagonistic if not downright contradictory. It may be, as in many large corporations, that one hand (the Washington lobbying office) doesn’t know what the other (home base) is doing. If a company cannot even operate effectively within the complex system that big firms like Walmart comprise, it cannot begin to understand and interact effectively with the much larger and more complex system called Earth. And it is Earth from whence sustainability comes, not Walmart or any single node in the socio-economic systems of the globe.

I doubt that this organizational imperfection is at the root of their behavior. Their hegemonic dreams of being the only show in “town” has harmed communities world-wide. Efficiency (low-cost) cannot substitute for the relationships on which sustainability rests. Similarly, their well-known opposition to unionization—perhaps a strong motivator of the political giving—runs counter to human flourishing, the quality that sustainability wants to sustain.

There is no particular difference between Walmart and any other large corporation concerning sustainability. They are larger than most and are narrowly focused on consumption. They are perhaps the most recognized symbol of growth of any other enterprise, save a few in the technology sector. I don’t believe that they are overtly anti-environmental as the way they distribute their money to legislators would indicate:

Its dollars skew heavily in favor of candidates who routinely vote against the environment. Since the company launched its sustainability campaign in 2005, 40 percent of the $3.9 million it has given to members of Congress went to those who have lifetime scores of 20 or less on the League of Conservation Voters’ National Environmental Scorecard — meaning they vote against the environment 80-100 percent of the time. Another 19 percent went to those who vote against the environment 50-79 percent of the time.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, trumps cost cutting at Walmart. Using standard accounting rules, environmental protection usually shows up as a short-term cost no matter how beneficial it might be in the long run. That’s why regulation is essential and why climate change deniers are favorites of companies like Walmart. I do not expect Walmart voluntarily to do any better or act differently although they occasionally make claims about doing good. They are merely following the rules, which they work hard to influence in their favor, seeking special treatment through the contributions. Quite a vicious circle. Make the rules more favorable; offer cheaper prices; add to unsustainability; repeat the cycle over and over. I often end my Walmart posts with this line. I will know that they are serious about sustainability when the greeter who stands in the entrance corridor stops every incoming customer ask asks them, “Do you really need to buy anything today?” I won’t (nor will my children) live long enough for this to happen.