By Dr. Anton G. Camarota
One of the most important aspects of any successful business is the capacity to measure progress towards meaningful goals. Without this ability, managers would not know if they had been successful. For the majority of companies, the traditional progress measures are the financial statements. From a sustainability perspective, these statements do not provide meaningful data on social responsibility or ecological integrity, and they can provide a somewhat distorted picture of how successful a business actually is at building a sustainable world.
Sustainability has caught the attention of senior managers worldwide. In a recent study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, almost 60 percent of the companies surveyed indicated they were increasing their investments in sustainability-related operations, focusing mainly on waste reduction and resource efficiencies. However, less than 24 percent of the responders indicated that they were taking proactive approaches to shifting their business models to compete on the basis of sustainability. These “embracers” are placing sustainability permanently on their management agendas and building a strong business case for their strategies. Many of these companies are linking sustainability efforts with financial results and producing integrated reports.
Globally, there are also some positive signs. Some of the encouraging changes include rising public awareness of climate change, rainforest loss, and declining biological diversity. Many national governments are taking actions to reduce their countries’ greenhouse gas emissions. Also, renewable energy is growing more rapidly than that supplied by fossil fuels.
Not all of the indicators are positive, however. While businesses are becoming more efficient and their per-person ecological impacts are declining overall, their increased numbers mean more resource extraction and waste production. According to the WorldWatch Institute, human-caused climate change shows no signs of slowing. The effects of climate change include warmer temperatures, higher ocean levels, and ever-more-intense downpours and droughts as global emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb. Changing ecological conditions include the shrinking of aquifers around the world, the global declines of fisheries and of all biodiversity, and the accelerating emergence of new infectious diseases.
Why has it proved so difficult for humans, and many business managers in particular, to conform to a life-sustaining model of existence? One reason is that meeting the needs of 7 billion people simply requires vast resources, regardless of how efficiently those resources are consumed. To meet the needs of this large and growing population, we are converting the ecosystems on which we depend for life support to other uses. A second reason is that societies and businesses remain tied firmly to fossil fuel- based energy with its concomitant carbon emissions. There is no other equivalent source of energy that would support all of the human activities on which our companies and societies are currently based.
But the most important barrier to sustainable progress may be a worldview that places the pursuit of material wealth and comfort as the highest goal for human existence. People adopting this worldview are known as Cornucopians. These individuals assume that the Earth’s bounty should be adapted for our use by human inventiveness, and that we should have an unending growth of goods and services. Cornucopians deny the social and ecological limits with which we are confronted and see the world as a sea of unlimited resources that should be converted for human use. At its core this worldview embraces a confidence that technological innovation will solve all economic, social, and ecological problems. As leaders of technologically- and economically-oriented organizations, it is very natural that most business managers have adopted this worldview.
In order to move forward and adopt a more life-sustaining worldview, we must become aware of the psychological biases that anchor a Cornucopian worldview in our minds. The first step for a manager interested in building a sustainable business is to understand the biases and beliefs that affect their decision making. With such awareness business leaders can make better decisions that support the creation of a sustainable planet.
Dr. Anton G. Camarota is Founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Business Longevity, an Arizona organization dedicated to helping business leaders build sustainable companies. You can reach him at anton@the-ibl.org or through the-ibl.org.
Illustration by Ryan Cody
