How do we redesign a new economic theory framed by ecological systems? | Guardian Sustainable Business | Guardian Professional. Economics as we know it today is broken. Unable to explain, to predict or to protect, it is need of root-and-branch replacement. Or, to borrow from Alan Greenspan, it is fundamentally "flawed". But where do we look for inspiration in facilitating what is the mother of all paradigm shifts? Interestingly, the most insightful and strikingly innovative ideas are coming from all directions other than the economics profession. Ecology offers the insight that the economy is best understood as a complex adaptive system, more a garden to be lovingly observed and tended than a machine to be regulated by mathematically calculable formulae. From anthropology we learn that economy and society are inseparable and that markets and money are relatively recent arrivals, a thin veneer layered onto a much older history of co-operation, gift and reciprocity.
At our college, the core hypothesis we work with is that nature is mentor. This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Finding a sustainable model of economic growth fit for the future | Guardian Sustainable Business | Guardian Professional. Riots, storms, oil spills, rising divorce rates. Most of us would say that these do not make our lives better. But, perversely, they might lead to higher economic growth measured in terms of GDP; people are employed in cleanup operations and rebuilding and lawyers to pick up the pieces. We tend to measure success through economic growth, primarily because it brings new jobs. And jobs are, of course, desperately need at a time when youth unemployment in the UK is at one million and nearly 60% of young people in Greece are out of work. Jobs can create a virtuous circle of buying power, demand for goods, further jobs, more tax revenues, higher welfare payments and higher standards of living for all.
But economic growth – and even employment – is an incomplete indicator of wellbeing. It does not value other important things like community, security, or the quality of our environment. But the model of economic growth we have seen in the past is not fit for the future. Belief Box : building a sacred brand | Studio Spark. Death To Core Competency: Lessons From Nike, Apple, Netflix. Known for decades as a shoe company, Nike is undergoing a digital revolution. In recent years, it's launched everything from apps that are standard issue on the iPhone to wearable devices to web services. But why? Nike CEO Mark Parker laughs at the questions and interrupts: "I think I know where you're going with this.
" He grins and shoots back a quick answer to why Nike's so willing to transition so far from the thing it's known for—shoes—to software. Parker's thinking goes like this: In a world of rapid disruption, having a core competency—that is, an intrinsic set of skills required to thrive in certain markets—is an outmoded principle of business. Lead Nike engineer Aaron Weast chalks up Nike's success in the space to the company's willingness to disrupt itself (a core tenet of a group of innovators we've dubbed Generation Flux). Nike has arguably been trying to break through its core competency since it first began work on Nike+, its digital platform, in the early aughts. Conscious Capitalism: Can Empathy Change The World? | Thinktopia® In the late 19th century, a concept called the Progressive Movement crept through the vineworks of American business thinking.
While there were many aspects of Progressivism–including cleaning up local government, one of the more high-minded Progressive theories worked like this: A working factory would be drop-shipped onto an agrarian community and provide prosperity for a local populace surrounded by the natural wonders of clean air and water. This was a utopian ideal that contrasted with the smudgy skies and open sewage of the contemporary 1800s urbanscape. To superimpose Industrial progress over Agrarian rural communities seemed fantastical, yet businessmen like Henry Ford latched onto the ideals of the Progressive Movement, and moved his fledgling automobile company to Dearborn. Similar Progressive communities sprouted in the pastoral area of Kohler, Wisconsin, where brick manufacturing evolved into today’s Kohler plumbing products. This in itself, of course, is not a new idea. When is growth damaging?
Why Environmentalists Are More Committed to Business Than Most Businessmen. Rachel Botsman: Purpose with Profits. Can happiness be a good business strategy? | Guardian Sustainable Business. How happy are you at work? Maybe you're reading this at work right now? Which could indicate that you work in a friendly workplace culture where you're empowered to do as you see fit and read whatever you want online. Or it could mean that you're bored out of your brain, whiling away the hours until the clock clunks to home time. The former suggests that you're a happy and productive worker; the latter, quite the opposite. Nic Marks, of the New Economics Foundation (Nef), has spent the last 10 years of his life working in this field. "People who are happier at work are more productive – they are more engaged, more creative, have better concentration", says Marks. The current poster boy for happiness in business circles is Tony Hsieh.
By 2005, Hsieh decided that a happy company culture was Zappos's number one business priority, from which everything else would grow. By removing the cynics, says Hsieh, the remaining 90% "became super-engaged". Barry Schwartz over de paradox van keuzes. The single bottom line of sustainability | Brazilian Coffee. Em português abaixo “Business’ business is business” – Milton Friedman Mr. Friedman’s Quote [1] gives a cold in the spine of today’s corporate social responsibility (also called by some “sustainability”) movement. The mainstream corporate sustainability ideas spoken in lectures and taught in MBAs are based on a non-systemic understanding of the world and the economy, and hold some incomplete concepts on its core.
A more careful study of the systems may turn hardcore capitalists such as Friedman, from devils to efficient agents towards sustainability, just need to learn how to pull the right strings. The triple-bottom-line concept considers that an organization should balance Economic performance with Social fairness and the Environmental soundness. No one really draws the line of “what is socially fair” or “what is environmentally sound”. The system understanding for business, a Back to the single bottom line. The triple bottom line has a credit though: it is great for communicating. Ps. Part of Nature cartoon by Stuart McMillen - Recombinant Records. This cartoon is heavily influenced by the books Natural Capitalism - Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins (1999) and Mid-Course Correction - Ray Anderson (1998).
It is also in the same vein as the flash animation "The Story of Stuff" by Annie Leonard, which I watched when I was about 90% of the way through the drawing process. Back to post / website. View/add comments for this article.Part of Nature by Stuart McMillen. September 2009. We Are What We Do | The not-for-profit behaviour change company.
Measuring what matters: the Happy Planet Index 2012. June 14, 2012 // By: Nic Marks We live in challenging times. Our financial markets are under huge stress, global poverties and inequalities stubbornly persist and the threat of climate change looms over all of our futures. A growing number of governments, politicians and ordinary people around the world are recognising the interconnectedness of these issues and the need for thinking about what “progress” really is in the 21st century. They are realising that indicators of economic activity simply don’t tell us enough about societies’ goals of enabling good lives for their citizens. That is why a number of national governments are pursuing initiatives to create new measures of progress, why April saw the UN host a High-Level Meeting on Happiness and Well-being, and why next week’s Rio +20 international sustainability conference includes negotiations on indicators that go ‘beyond GDP’.
It is also why we nef (the new economics foundation) created the Happy Planet Index. Issues Close. Users.skynet.be/de.wrikker/LV_docs/lietaer_hetgeldvandetoekomst.pdf. De crisis van het kapitalisme: een andere economie is noodzakelijk én mogelijk. In een lezing op 28 april 2011, tijdens een conferentie te Rome, georganiseerd door de ‘Rosa Luxemburg Stichting Brussel’* schetst Marc Vandepitte de contouren van een ander economisch model. Het kapitalisme wordt geconfronteerd met een ernstige crisis op verschillende fronten.i De wereld heeft daarom dringend behoefte aan een andere economische orde.
Vertrekkend vanuit de meest fundamentele tegenstelling van het kapitalisme maken we eerst een diagnose van wat er fout gaat. Daarna formuleren we enkele krachtlijnen voor een mogelijk alternatief. Omwille van het belang ervan gaan we dieper in op de kwestie van economische groei versus ontwikkeling. We concluderen met enkele praktische en concrete voorstellen voor een alternatief economisch programma. Inleiding: gebruikswaarde en ruilwaarde Om die winst en ook de accumulatie te maximaliseren, reduceert elke economische speler de goederen en diensten tot hun ruilwaarde en probeert hij zoveel mogelijk ruilwaarde te genereren.
Arbeid De markt. Blue Economy: Economic Paradigm for a Sustainable Future. Today we are leading a life which our planet can only sustain for a limited amount of time. Today we are leading a life which our planet can only sustain for a limited amount of time. Yet more than half of the people living on our planet cannot even fulfil their basic needs and must have a right to growth. Our society's future and economy's sustainability are only conceivable if we learn to create more livelihood for an increasing number of people using less natural resources. For twenty years now, realisation is growing that the greatest physical threat to ecological subsistence is the huge and unnecessary waste of natural resources. Roughly 30kg of nature are used on average to create 1kg of technology, not including water. Without this technology, modern services cannot be delivered.
When the heads of governments and nations meet in Brazil in June this year to discuss about a globally sustainable development, the question about defining a sustainable economy will also come up. Insatiable. Long-lasting systems can't survive if they remain insatiable. An insatiable thirst for food, power, energy, reassurance, clicks, funding or other raw material will eventually lead to failure. That's because there's never enough to satisfy someone or something that's insatiable. The organization amps up because its need is unmet. It gets out of balance, changing what had previously worked to get more of what it craves. Sooner or later, a crash. More fame! An insatiable appetite is a symptom: There's a hole in the bucket.
If your organization demands ever more attention or effort or cash to produce the same output, it makes more sense to focus on the leak than it does to work ever harder to feed the beast.