So what’s the conclusion? I think that if you really want to help the poor, prepare to develop some technology that will benefit the rich (so that they will pay for the development). That prescription is as paradoxical as the admonition that if you want peace, you should prepare for war. The Zen of Development.

- Atanu Dey

Charlie Munger provides this quote from the book, “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth” by Benjamin Friedman.

“Where there is no bread, there is no law; where there is no law, there is no bread”

- Rabbi Elizar Ben Azariah

Warren Buffett once said: “I think you can learn a lot from other people. In fact, I think if you learn basically from other people, you don’t have to get too many ideas on your own. You can just apply the best of what you see.”

Value Investing World: Interview with Peter Bevelin, author of Seeking Wisdom – from Darwin to Munger

“Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.”  –Laurence J. Peter

DailyLit is an interesting experiement. They send you bit sized chuncks of book everyday by email. I have started reading Henry Ford’s My Life and Work.

Some excerpts from the first installment (1 of 102).

When one speaks of increasing power, machinery, and industry there comes up a picture of a cold, metallic sort of world in which great factories will drive away the trees, the flowers, the birds, and the green fields. And that then we shall have a world composed of metal machines and human machines. With all of that I do not agree. I think that unless we know more about machines and their use, unless we better understand the mechanical portion of life, we cannot have the time to enjoy the trees, and the birds, and the flowers, and the green fields.

[...]
Power and machinery, money and goods, are useful only as they set us free to live. They are but means to an end. For instance, I do not consider the machines which bear my name simply as machines. If that was all there was to it I would do something else. I take them as concrete evidence of the working out of a theory of business, which I hope is something more than a theory of business–a theory that looks toward making this world a better place in which to live…

[...]

The natural thing to do is to work–to recognize that prosperity and happiness can be obtained only through honest effort. Human ills flow largely from attempting to escape from this natural course. I have no suggestion which goes beyond accepting in its fullest this principle of nature. I take it for granted that we must work. All that we have done comes as the result of a certain insistence that since we must work it is better to work intelligently and forehandedly; that the better we do our work the better off we shall be. All of which I conceive to be merely elemental common sense.

Logic+Emotion: Whispers

Life’s whispers are often soft and subtle. They come without warning. The whispers are always there—but we’re not always listening. The noise we surround ourselves with often keeps the whispers at bay. We become incapable of hearing them, until we choose to. At this point we see through fresh eyes.

I’m choosing to listen. But first I had to slow down and stop in order to do so. I had to be willing to miss the train if it meant learning something, even if just for the day. The whispers are there, waiting for us to notice them. But only if we’re open to turn our own volume down, even if only for a brief moment in time. For me, this moment just happened to be the right one.

From Tom Peters

Simple & crystal clear (to me): To give a high-impact, well-regarded, occasionally life-changing speech “to customers” I first & second & third have to focus all my restless energy on “satisfying” … myself. I must be … physically & emotionally & intellectually agitated & excited & desperate beyond measure … to communicate & connect & compel & grab by the collar & say my piece about a small number of things, often contentious and not “crowd-pleasers,” that, at the moment, are literally a matter of personal … life and death.

I crave great “customer feedback”—but in no way, shape, or form am I trying to “satisfy my customer.” I am, I repeat, trying instead to satisfy me, my own deep neediness to reach out and grab my customer & connect with my customer over ideas that consume & devour me.

Hence … my “Job One” is purely selfish & internally focused, to be completely captivated by the subject matter at hand. That is, to repeat in slightly different words, Job One is … self-motivation.

Warren Bennis, my primo mentor, in On Becoming a Leader, said, “No leader sets out to be a leader per se, but rather to express him- or herself freely and fully. That is, leaders have no interest in proving themselves, but an abiding interest in expressing themselves.”

DD’s Eco Notes

# There are no effect-free solutions. We need to guesstimate the effects of all potential solutions, measure their real effects if we put them into practice, and compare alternatives to the best of our collective ability.
# We cannot afford to paint things black or white. We need to be able to differentiate a wide range of shades of green, and be willing to give new technologies some extra slack.

But all this does serve to flag up one classic dilemma of sustainable development: namely, what happens when an initiative aimed at meeting people’s aspirations and improving their quality of life runs slap bang into environmental limits? When the social and economic pillars of sustainability, in other words, come crashing down onto the environmental one?

Source: Green Futures Blog

The basic idea: Boosting the cost of anything containing carbon – the main greenhouse gas – would compel industries and consumers to seek cheaper alternatives. They’d switch to cleaner fuels or consume less – either by adopting more efficient technologies or simply reducing their activity. Presumably, the alternatives would be better for the environment.

The problem: No government appears willing to impose a cost high enough to actually change behaviour. And while several industry groups argue pricing carbon is a good idea, their enthusiasm is less than it seems.

For more, The Oil Drum.

“I think the trick with clean energy is not to be able to charge more. Because you can’t see global warming, I don’t think people are willing to pay more for it. It’s got to be a viable investment if it’s going to be successful.”

- WSJ

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at a college — that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?” –Howard Ikemoto

Source: Daily Good Newsletter

“All this emphasis on statistics and calculations…,” he went on, rapping his silver-handled cane on the table for emphasis, “without a proper theory, it is all nonsense. And your economists seem to have no theory at all…they just think they can manipulate the system in order to get whatever outcome they want. They think economic growth comes from consumer spending and that they can control consumer spending by adjusting lending rates. It is unbelievable that anyone takes this seriously. It is capital formation that really matters. A rich society is one with a great stock of capital…one that builds capital and puts it to work to create more capital. A rich society is not one where people consume. Just the opposite. It is not what is consumed that creates wealth; it is what is NOT consumed. Yet, all the Anglo-Saxons focus on motivating consumers to consume. And now they are consuming more than they make. I tell you, in 70 years of studying economics, I have never seen such nonsense.

“I have always thought it was the duty of each generation to leave the next one a little better off. That means, each generation has to consume less than it produces. It has to leave a little something extra. The problem, you see, is not an economic one…what we are doing to our children with this use of credit and debt is deeply immoral. It is wrong. It is wrong to burden the future with our mistakes, our conceits, our ambitions. This is what we are doing, and it is shameful.”

Source: The Daily Reckoning. Newsletter on Sep 13th 2007.

You build a hotel and it’s going to be there for the next 50 years. In that time you are going to have economic cycles that go up and down, you are going to have trauma that the world experiences. You have to have to put your business model in place, where you can get through the good, the bad and the ugly. So, your whole purpose of developing a longterm business plan is to under stand, that is what you’re facing. The people that we have partnered with, these are professionals who know the real estate business really well.

Source: The Mint 

Can you prepare for a Black Swan? In one sense, no, at least not specifically; that’s the whole point. But you can, at a minimum, consider the degree to which your actions and procedures concerning damn near everything, and likewise those of your organizations, rest on assumptions of continuity. (Hint: They do.) Of course China is a “shock to the system”—but, in fact, it has taken and will take decades for its impact to unfold. I’m talking about the events of a day or a week that could unravel a life’s work—or make you president of the U.S.A.

Your life most probably will be made or unmade by the arrival by one, two, or three Black Swans.

- Tom Peters

One such Black Swan moment for me was the short time I spent with Atanu Dey and Rajesh Jain at Deeshaa.

Anyone developing new products and new technology needs one characteristic above all else: hope. This comes down to a few elements: -having high expectations that you will succeed – despite any setbacks or frustrations -having the sense to break down an imposing task into smaller, manageable ones -believing that you are able to achieve your goals, whatever they may be. Be dogged and determined – and don’t be afraid to be different.

Source: Fast Company Fast 50 ‘04.

“We lowered our carbon footprint,” Kennedy said, pausing, “before we even knew what a carbon footprint was.”

Source: Green, if only by accident.

EcoGeek: In many of your books, you tackle the subjects of sustainability and the environment, but from a perspective that may seem odd to many environmentalists. It seems you are not the typical “tree hugger”…

Daniel Quinn: I don’t consider myself an environmentalist. I feel that the category itself is badly conceived, dividing the world into people who are “for the environment” and people who are “for people,” which is nonsense. Thus it came to be seen that “environmentalists” were “for” the spotted owl, while non-environmentalists were seen to be “for” forestry jobs that would be lost by saving the spotted owl. The term “environmentalism” emphasizes a false division between “us” and “it” — “it” being the environment. There is no “it” out there. We are all in this together. There are no two sides. We cannot survive as a species somehow separate from the rest of the living community.

Source: EcoGeek of the Week: Daniel Quinn

But it simply isn’t working, and there is one principal reason: fossil fuel energy is extraordinarily cheap, both in historical terms and when measured against average salaries. Consider the tumble dryer. A full load of clothes, swiftly extracted from the washing machine and pushed firmly into the dryer, can be painlessly dried in a couple of hours or less. To take that tangled mess of dripping underwear, shirts and tea towels and pin it on a washing line might take 15 minutes. Drying “by hand” would take several hours, possibly a day, and bringing the clothes indoors and folding them could easily take another 20 minutes. Moreover, rain could fall or the activities of birds could spoil your clean sheets.

However, the cost of the electricity to power the dryer will be around 25 pence (US$0.50), and the labour saved may be half an hour or more. As a result, the rational person who values his or her own time has little choice. Homo economicus slams the door of the dryer shut, feeling only a little guilty that another kilogram of CO2 has been added to the communal atmosphere.

Source: Chris Goodall on China Dialogue

On EBBF, a quote on the connection between CSR and the bottomline.

“The vast majority of CSR research is attempting to establish a
correlation between the bottom line and CSR. For an excellent overview
see a recent book by Vogel (2005): The market for virtue. His conclusion
BTW is that: there are indeed cases of companies that have gained a
competitive advantage from being responsible. However, that there are
also many companies with good records of corporate responsibility that
have done poorly financially, and that there are many companies who
have pretty irresponsible records of corporate responsibility that have
done very well.

He argues that corporate responsibility, purely from a
self-interest perspective, is like any other business strategy. It
makes sense for some of the companies some of the time. A strong
neo-liberal agenda does not only determine the research agenda but also
the focus of practical CSR efforts. As the CEO of GE remarked: “We are
investing in environmentally cleaner technology because we believe it
will increase our revenue, our value and our profits… Not because it is
trendy or moral, but because it will accelerate our growth and make us
more competitive.” (Economist, 2005).

“The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.” – Herman Daly

So open a window. Open the windows of your home, of your car, the bus, the train, the place where you work. Reconnect with the outside world again, not just to slow disease. Go beyond the city limits and remember the way man had lived for more than a hundred thousand years. Go beyond the forest and try to find a place where no human traces exist. It may feel “foreign” at first, but then again we must ask why it should feel foreign in the first place.

Sustainability Theory Dharma

“Every time I’ve done the right thing for the environment, I’ve made a profit.”
Yvon Chouinard

The significance India will have on the the world in the future will be extraordinary, we’ve only scratched the surface. The thing that remains to be seen is the importance green business has in India. Tackling mass poverty is the first thing that is happening, and it should be the first thing that the country emphasizes. India will be an economic powerhouse, and could be a leader in green business if they choose to be. The direction that business takes in India will have massive impact on the world. If business leaders there recognize the vast potential that green business has, and then decide to invest time, money, and effort, the world would only benefit. India is in a very unique position right now, they could either lead the world, or potentially aid in its destruction.

India, the world is watching. What’s your next move?

Source: Future of Business via Digg