Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q followed closely to get a read on how corporate sustainability is playing out. He's the chairman and co-founder of the Green Biz Group, and I caught up with him at Green Biz's Verge conference recently. I wanted to get his read on what all this activity adds up to, because it certainly feels different, but Is it actually different? Joel doesn't think we're at a stage of radical transformation yet.
A Well, I think it is important, but I also think it's still relatively few and far between that, you know, yes, Microsoft, yes, Amazon, yes, Walmart, you know, yes, uh, you know, a handful of other companies, mostly in the tech field, but it's the same old company, Stephen. It's the same ones we talk about, but in the rest of the corporate world, it's still radical incrementalism. You know, just a lot of small ball kinds of things that companies are doing that, that You know, are necessary, but highly insufficient, and do not roll up to the, to the magnitude of the moment, and that's the challenge, is that, yes, there, you know, and, and, and look, I've been in this field for over 30 years, and, and every, every year, certainly every few years, you can say there's, there's, there's some new things, you know, circular economy, ESG, and sustainability, carbon removal, just on and on and on, and, and yet, so many of these events, and so many of these conversations, is February second, it Groundhog Day all over again. And so, that's the challenge, that's the frustrating part. Um, most days a glass half old kind of guy, but frankly, I think the glass is just way too small.
AI assessment note: “in the rest of the corporate world, it's still radical incrementalism”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 3 4.15
Q Why is that? What are the forces inside companies that are contributing to that incrementalism?
A In a word, change. You know, change, you know, we all love the noun, but hate the verb. You know, we like the idea of change, we need to change, you know, things need to change, we need to change the system, we need to change the way the system. Changing itself, the verb, is actually hard to do, really hard to do, and there's a lot of resistance to that. And inside companies, you've, you know, it used to be back, you know, in the day, it was like, get CEO buy-in, you know, and well, CEOs say, I'm in. I, this, we need to do this stuff. And, and the young recruits, they want this stuff. It's that big, fat, impenetrable wad of, of resistance called middle management that's often thwarted. They're really adept at thwarting change. And so, You know, and some of that's, you know, C-suite led to, they're, they're, they're making these commitments, but they're not really equipping, you know, the people to, to, and supporting them to make the kinds of changes they need to know, to need to make. But I think an even bigger issue is that it's still, when it all even happens, it's still not enough. And, you know, we really, uh, need to transform our economy. We need to transform how we make and do things. We need to transform the business model. We need to transform the consumption habits. You know, we need to change everything, and that's an extraordinarily exciting opportunity, but it mea…
AI assessment note: “impenetrable wad of, of resistance called middle management that's often thwarted.”
