How Can We Build a Culture of Disruptive, Heretical Innovation?
Managing sustainability challenges will require deeply disruptive innovation. How do we get there?
April 21, 2011
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Managing sustainability challenges will require deeply disruptive innovation. How do we get there?
2010 was the hottest year ever, tying 2005. Will that convince any skeptics?
Here’s my attempt to capture the most important stories that affected the greening of business in 2010…
In parallel to what must have been incredibly frustrating policy meetings in Cancun, the business community gathered at the same time. I believe that business may be succeeding where policy is failing.
The world is meeting in Cancun this week to talk climate change. Is there any hope of a large-scale agreement on capping emissions around the world? Most pundits would say no. Why can’t we agree to do something? The answers are varied and all contain some truth.
Right before the big election last week, I found myself thinking about beliefs and what people are absolutely sure they know, regardless of the facts. Two stories that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on the same day, demonstrated Americans’ remarkable ability to kid ourselves. But a program in Kansas is showing how you can get people to tackle climate change even if they don’t believe in it.
The New York Times reported today that the U.S. Military is aggressively pursuing “Less Dependence on Fossil Fuels.” Why does the military care about going green? Because the cost in money, resources, and lives to bring fuel to Afghanistan and Iraq is just too great. A few of the mind-blowing statistics in this article…
The world faces some big shocks in the realms of sustainability and climate change, and the ways of thinking about the future described in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, The Black Swan, will come in handy. But two competing black swans — climate change itself or worldwide action to pursue sustainability — both of which seem unlikely, are competing. Let’s hope the second one wins.
The New York Times’ Ross Douthat relies on a set of arguments against the pursuit of a clean economy that have little basis in fact and mainly defend the untenable status quo. The overall pitch has two main parts: (a) promoting a clean economy through the use of market mechanisms like cap-and-trade is a perversion of free markets…(b) going green will cost jobs and hurt the economy. Let’s look at both ideas.
I know it’s difficult for the average person to believe, but how we use energy and what we drive actually connects directly to the price of bread. And it doesn’t really take that many “degrees of Kevin Bacon” to connect the dots.