I’m still away from home at the kick-off meeting of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS). The meeting venue is in the brand new, Leeds-certified quarters of the Ross School of Business at UMich. The pleasure of seeing my former students emerge as leaders in this emergent community is hard to describe. I guess the most important sign of success for a teacher is to see one’s students excel. As I wrote a couple of days ago, the ARCS group is striving to establish sustainability ever more deeply in the curricula and research activities in schools of business.… Read More
Continue ReadingThe American Dream
The NYTimes published the results of a poll it recently ran, asking people how they felt about the “American Dream” in these bad times. The answers were paradoxical. 72 percent of the respondents expressed confidence that it was still possible to wake up to find the American Dream of becoming rich realized, but only 44 percent thought that they were already there. A similar poll taken four years ago found that only 31 percent thought they had made it. But the future outlook was down. > Compared [to an identical] poll taken four years ago, fewer people now say they… Read More
Continue ReadingPaying for Nature
Most of the times I read something about the environment by Tom Friedman, my hopes go up a little and then usually come back down. His op-ed piece on Costa Rica evoked the same feelings. Friedman was extolling the effectiveness of Costa Rican policy in preserving biodiversity. > These days, visitors can still see amazing biodiversity all over Costa Rica — more than 25 percent of the country is protected area — thanks to a unique system it set up to preserve its cornucopia of plants and animals. Many countries could learn a lot from this system. He calls this… Read More
Continue ReadingSatisfaction in Work
Maybe the positive side of the financial collapse is beginning to show itself. I haven’t seen much in the blogosphere that does not talk about the need to get the consumption machine going. Frank Rich writing his Sunday column in the NYTimes changes this tune a bit–only a bit, but that is still a good turn. Using Harvard as his source, Rich criticizes Larry Summers for his accepting large sums from financial institutions while serving as President of the University. Perhaps by osmosis, but certainly by example, students ran to the finacial sector. > The Harvard Crimson reported that in… Read More
Continue ReadingLessons from a Roofer
I am often taken to task over my assertion that technology tends to push our humanness into the background, and interfere, as well, with our relationships with others. I rarely see this in action in specific cases, unlike my more academic analyses. Goerge Packer, [telling a story](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2009/04/the-view-from-a.html) about the travails of a roofer in this current crunch, has a perfect example of what I labor to describe. > “It’s the technology,” the roofer said. “They [his customers] don’t know how to deal with a human being. They stand there with that text shrug”—he hunched his shoulders, bent his head down,… Read More
Continue ReadingDesign for Depression
Several of my posts discuss the question whether the recession/depression will change fundamental consumption patterns, now designers themselves are asking the same question. Allison Arieff [writes](http://arieff.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/designing-through-a-depression/) in the NYTimes: > The impact of the economy on design has generated a lively round of journalistic debate. In “[Design Loves a Depression](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/weekinreview/04cannell.html?scp=1&sq=michael%20cannell&st=cse),” a piece in The Times in January, design writer Michael Cannell argued that designers need to be taken down a notch and shift gears from creating luxury high rises and limited-edition Nymphenburg porcelain cows and “actually find a new sense of relevance in the process” . . . Looking positively… Read More
Continue ReadingIs There No Place on Earth Without Ads? (ctd.)
One of the factors behind the rampant hyper-consumerism that so characterizes our culture is the ever-increasing presence of marketeers and the corporations that employ them. Ads appear everywhere — even as tattoos on shaved or bald heads, as I pointed out recently. Now Gail Collins, writing her regular op-ed column in the NYTimes, discusses the increasing use of product placement and mentions on television shows. We have long since gotten used to the idea that movies are awash with product placements, that the basketball game we’re watching is part of, say, the Doritos Home Classic at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center.… Read More
Continue ReadingWater, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.
Here’s the skinny on a both widely debated and widely ignored topic. > Talk about an energy drink. The first comprehensive and peer-reviewed energy analysis of a bottle of water confirms what many environmentalists have charged. From start to finish, bottled water consumes between 1100 and 2000 times more energy on average than does tap water. [ScienceNow](http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/), the news magazine of the AAAS reports on a new study by Peter Gleick, President of the [Pacific Institute](http://www.pacinst.org/), and a colleague, Heather Cooley. Not only does this report confirm the outrageous disregard for the fundamental wasteful practice of drinking bottled water in… Read More
Continue ReadingA Friend, Indeed?
This story is from today’s New York Times. I encourage you to read the whole article. But here is the part that woke me up today. Facebook, the very popular social networking program, has spawned some new language–defriending or unfriending. It has become so easy to accumulate a very long list of facebook friends that paring down that list has become a social puzzle. Burger King saw an opportunity to attract business by offering a free Whopper™ to anyone that got rid of 10 friends by deleting them from the list. If Esau sold his birthright for a mess of… Read More
Continue ReadingSustainability MBAs
I’m away from home for a few days visiting one of the very few business schools committed entirely to creating MBA’s with sustainability as their core learning. Bainbridge Graduate Institute is now in its fifth year. I’ve been working with them from their start with a few years off. But I am back here during one of their weekend intensives. The program is based largely on distance learning plus a set of face-to-face weekends. I am here to talk about sustainability in general and pair with my colleague, Tom Johnson, to teach a couple sessions of their sustainable operations course.… Read More
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