Roissy Charles de Gaulle. On our way to Tuscany. We were warned, leave for the airport early, today is a Red Alert day for traffic, as Parisians are leaving the city en masse for the beginning of their summer vacations. We ended up instead, three hours early for our flight, with plenty of time to read “Le Monde“, French intellectuals’ favorite newspaper. I learned that ‘Air France is thinking of TGV venture with Veolia‘. Makes perfect sense to me. In the face of skyrocketing fuel costs, the French airline is redefining its business as mass transportation for citizens, not just air transportation.
How about oil companies reinventing themselves as sustainable energy companies? Not just greenwashing, like Exxon Mobil, or paying lip service to renewable energies as is the case with BP or Shell. No, I mean for them to take the high road instead, and reinvest a substantial part of their colossal profits into renewable energies and energy efficiency technologies. Of course, the oil companies lack the short term profit incentives of Air France. The already there carbon economy demands a complete overhaul of big business. That they relinquish short term profit driven strategies, and become instead corporate citizens in the true sense of the word.
My Dear Ms. Marguerite,
I trust you’re enjoying your vacation.
The kinds of radical changes you’re pondering here = from fossil-fuels to substantively sustainable energy systems AND from short-term profit orientation to true corporate citizenship = will happen OR they won’t.
At the risk of losing touch with current reality, let’s consider a rigorous imaginary exercise and assume such changes WILL ACTUALLY HAPPEN in the not-too-distant future (let’s say in the next 3 to 7 years).
Now, let’s project ourselves into such a future.
I’m not kidding! What would such a future set of circumstances look like, sound like, feel like, etc.? Let’s flesh it out as much as our unbounded imaginations, integrated with our common sense, can allow.
After gaining an actual sense/understanding of how that future differs from today, let’s look back at current reality and produce a detailed map that clearly depicts how we got there from here.
If such radical changes are to occur then I believe our imaginations combined with hard work, smart work and heart-felt work can only boost the odds.
Have we got anything better to do? If we do, then what have we got to lose (aside from the time involved) by
enjoying such an imaginary exercise?
Perhaps we may even generate a few valuable insights that Jeff, presenting himself as a strategic-management consultant, could sell to Exxon/Mobil.
Ciao for now,
paul
P. S. – Jeff, I loved your Dot Earth vid-clip and gotta let ya know that you’ve inspired me to finish mine, sooner rather than later.
I think some companies are suited for such transitions, and others don’t. Some depend on assets, but most of it depends on the people I think.
I personally don’t think that every company should reinvent itself to be a sustainable company, simply because some companies (I’m thinking of Exxon here) are just so good in executing “unsustainable” strategy. Let them do just that, until costs run too high. They’ll get forced to size down their operations gradually. Meanwhile, their profits can be reinvested in sustainable enterprises.
We’ll be pumping and refining oil for a long time, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a company focused solely on that. Shareholders know the company’s revenues will dry up eventually. They’ll value the company accordingly.
Now a company like Air France might have so much “traveler-service”-assets that they really could move into any space in travel. Then a gradual shift of activities makes perfect sense.
I think some companies with unsustainable strategies will gradually change their ways, others will just fade into the background (but with their heads up). It depends on the starting point.
BTW: Harvard Business has an excellent blog on this called “Leading Green”:
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/leadinggreen/
“the French airline is redefining its business as mass transportation for citizens, not just air transportation. ”
I do like moves like that. People buy the convenience, not the product. Even better would be to think up ways to give people the same value they get from traveling, while reducing actual travel. There lies a problem of assets though. Air France is probably not well-positioned to market – say – VR-presence technology.
I’m personally bearish about the whole (western) travel industry. My expectation is that people on average will travel much less in the future. This may be compensated with increased travel in non-western countries, but I don’t know if this will make up for it. I think long-distance travel per capita could well go down 90% (from a western baseline).
Interesting post. Why not move toward more sustainable areas? Renewable energy is the future. Why cling to old ways of doing things, outdated ideals? Many companies will be pushed into this, I think. This brings to mind the American car companies that dragged their tires for years and suddenly are forced (by consumer demand triggered by rising gas prices) to scale down trucks and SUVs and focus on more fuel efficient vehicles. I assume that the changing economy will necessitate “corporate citizenship.”
> Meryn : I agree with you, we will travel less in the future, and most important of all in a slower way.
For example in Europe, instead of taking the plane to go to London, Stuttgart or say Tuscany, we will take the train and the time to get there.
Trains are fantastic, I love them.
They enable me to make deep cuts in my CO2 emissions (800 kilograms so far this year, see http://www.elrst.com/2008/07/04/how-i-avoided-200-kgs-of-co2-emissions-in-ten-days/ ) and to just live, read a good book, write a bit and arrive rested and ready for anything.
Of course, to go to another continent, planes will remain the best way. But it won’t be available for everybody and every time they fancy.
Enjoy !
My Dear Mr. Meryn,
I look forward to checking out the HarvBus link you offered and appreciate the kinds of transitions you envisage commercial activity systems evolving through. Good fluidity, Dude!
BTW – Thank you for the book suggestion months ago: “Made to Stick” by the Heath Bros. = I enjoyed reading it and gained a few insights. I like their take on Maslow’s work almost as much as I like that of Nordhaus & Schellenberger’s.
I viewed your blog and your li’l book-shelf and would love to bounce around with you some ideas on the “evolution of management theory/practice”, etc.
Isn’t Irshad a breath-of-fresh-air, kick-in-the-pants free-speech advocate? I totally love her sense of humor, corny jokes and all. I caught some of Lewis Black’s “Red, White and Screwed” on T.V. last night and realized that his bold approach to public discourse may have some parallels in common with Irshad’s.
Later,
paul
Hello all: This week, I’m not in my normal place and my time to read/reply is nearly nil. These posts from Europe look great, and I hope everyone is well. Thanks for the comments. Cheers for now. Back soon.
Perhaps we not discussing real issues, but rather tip-toeing around them.
From a historical perspective, it appears that humankind is the only organism on Earth that produces food, amasses more food than is needed for survival and made food into a commodity. Farmers have not been primarily motivate by an altruistic desire to grow food because they have wanted to feed a growing population, nor have they been selling food to increase human population numbers. The more food farmers grew, the more wealth they accumulated. Our (agri-)culture has evidently devised a spectacularly successful economic system that continuously expands the food supply for human human beings worldwide. What I am trying to suggest is simply this: An economic system that requires ever increasing food production, supposedly to feed a rapidly growing human population, appears to be inadvertently and unexpectedly enlarging the size of the human population on Earth.
That is to say, the predominant culture and its global economy appears to produce many wonders as well as potentially deleterious impacts. Would you agree that if our culture chooses to keep growing the global economy as we are doing now, then we will likely keep getting what we are getting now… for better and worse?
For a long time, the leaders of the predominant culture have chosen to continuously expand production capabilities, ones that give rise to the rampant economic globalization we see today. Unfortunately, an ever expanding, leviathan-like global economy appears to give rise to something recognizably unsatisfactory because it could become unsustainable.
If you will, please consider how the relentless hoarding of wealth and the conspicuous over-consumption of resources by millions of people leave billions of people in the family of humanity hungry.
For fortunate millions of people with riches to recklessly consume limited resources, while billions of less forunate people go without adequate food to eat, seems somehow not quite right.
Inequity is sad enough; grotesque inequity will one day be considered intolerable, I suppose.
If leaders of our predominant culture choose to modify the way the unbridled global economy continuously grows and the way it inequitably distributes resources, then perhaps they and we will find more reasonable, sensible, fair and, equally important, sustainable ways of performing these practices better.
Perhaps it is a mistake for me to do so; but, nevertheless, I am assuming most of us can agree that the unbridled expansion of the global economy, given its huge scale and rapid growth, will result in this manmade economic colossus eventually reaching a point in human history when it becomes patently unsustainable in a finite world with make-up and size of Earth.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, est. 2001
At Paris airport, saw Exxon billboard ad, touting their all around energy approach, ‘solar, wind, natural gas, liquid coal, . . . .’ they don’t forget a single one. Or how to make everybody happy. Or even better, how to brain(green)wash us all.