Is our personal insecurity as businesspeople destroying the planet? Jody Gold thinks this might just be the case.
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Capitalism is kind of awesome.
It directs resources, energy, and ingenuity toward more productive uses than any other economic system we’ve practiced on earth.This is too short a piece to sing the praises of a system that has elevated over a billion people out of the choicelessness of poverty since 1980 alone.
But there is this little flaw in capitalism. It threatens our existence on the planet.
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Inescapable Logic
The logic that companies must grow or die seems inescapable.
Stock markets reward companies whose earnings exceed expectations. Executives have stock and stock options that incentivize performance in order to build maximum shareholder value. Only by growing can companies return the multiples on investments that markets demand.
A friend of mine innovated a new way to produce photovoltaic solar cells that nearly doubles power output, cuts production costs by a third, and makes them more durable than anything on the market. He’s growing a company whose mission is to eliminate energy poverty all over the world.
If his company achieves its promise, farmers in South Africa will be able use cell phones to determine which nearby markets will pay them the most for their crops. Kids who lack electricity now in India and China will be have the light and power they need to study at night. Futures will be brighter.
My friend has a real chance to do well (i.e.—earn a pile of cash) by doing a lot of good. That’s capitalism at it’s best.
The Imposter Syndrome
Google returns 129,000 hits for ‘imposter syndrome’—the fear many high-achievers have that they are frauds and will be found out soon.
I’ve forgotten almost all of the Chinese I learned at Yale, but I remember this little guy holding up one of the columns in Sterling Library. “You’re not that smart,” his presence seemed to suggest. “Perhaps you shouldn’t take yourself so seriously. Oh, and you’re not alone in your self-doubt.”
I wondered then how much achievement has been driven by smart people working hard to overcome the sense that they are the admissions mistake? I wonder now how much value creation, consumption, and the carbon emissions associated with them are driven by the same thing?
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Capitalism Vs. Climate
We’ve got to emit a lot less carbon soon if we’re going to have any chance of solving the other big challenges we face, like income inequality, racial tensions, the rights of women and indigenous people, and education to name an interconnected few.
Emitting less carbon means consuming fewer resources and less energy. The idea that, “we are the first generation to feel the effects of climate change and the last that will be able to do anything about it,” strikes a chord of mission in me. I spend more and more of my time as a consultant serving organizations working on parts of this challenge.
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I Fly First Class and I Make Big Deals
That’s how the CEO of that solar company I mentioned earlier described his job to me. We were in the midst of deciding if I might come to work for him full time. For all the good his company may do, and all the alignment I feel with their mission, I just couldn’t stop thinking that if I flew around making big deals, then I would be a big deal.
I daydreamed about driving a Tesla, about making more money than my dad, about feeling taller and more important. About how the money I earned would confer value on me that I finally wouldn’t question.
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Working It Out On The World
I know the carbon impact of a round trip flight between Denver and South Africa (sitting in coach) is about the same as driving a car that gets 30 miles a gallon 12,000 miles. The impact of emitting carbon is as abstract as it is immoral. The more carbon I emit, the more I’m hurting people less fortunate than me right now. The more carbon I emit, the more I’m stealing from your kids’ futures.
Of course, had I been offered or taken that job, I’d have justified it by telling myself that what I’m doing is really important. I’m producing much more value than I’m consuming. I wasn’t surprised to see, when I thought I had my first shot at making real money, how badly I wanted to succeed according to what our culture values most.
On the other hand, it’s a central value of mine to think and act like we’re all in it together, and to help others do the same. There exists in me a great tension between acting like a part of an interconnected whole and being driven by the belief that often feels even more true; that I’ve somehow got to make it all work on my own.
Resolving this tension in ourselves, in our organizations, and in our politics will help determine the kind of world we build together going forward.
How are we going to start acting like responsible stewards of this planet together when so many of us keep acting our internal psychodramas out on the world?
Photo credit 1: Flickr/Saravanan Dhandapani
Photo credit 2: ETB at Adventuresofacouchsurfer.com
Part of the problem is the short term thinking that drives capitalistic endeavors. These people, ceo’s and investors alike want to see immediate results and part of that is because each of our lives is relatively short. We need to build our retirement portfolios or i’ll only be a ceo for 20 years at best or get to finally drive the rolls for a short time. Whatever. It’s also partly because we see ourselves in smaller terms of ourselves as individuals or the nuclear family and maybe including our very close friends in that at best. We as a whole… Read more »
Thanks for your thoughts Mark. I completely agree that our sense, that my sense, of who’s in the inner circle, of who really matters, is too small. That has big consequences. And, opportunities hide in every crisis. Climate change is the first challenge we’ve faced that we must address as a species. From tribes, to city-states, to nations, humans have organized ourselves in response to the size of the external challenges that confront us. The ways we organize our lives and culture inform our sense of morality and what it means to live a good life. I imagine a future… Read more »
What bothers me about grow or die, is that many businesses want to grow but constantly refuse to hire, promote and/or offer their goods of services to people of different racial, social, economic, political, and religious backgrounds and then they complain about why they are not growing. Furthermore, even if they hire the people, they refuse to pay them good wages and benefits and then get upset when the people want to unionizes or leave the company.
The ultimate tragedy of the commons. We need to grow internally, grow up I think perhaps. Otherwise we’re no more than a virus.