The Exec-Ed Zone

The Economist ran an article this week on an executive education program being offered by a group of New England venture capital companies. They are running into a talent problem, along with the rest of the world, and have created this program to develop particular skills of entrepreneurs with proven qualities so that they can make the transition into the renewable energy sphere.  "A lack of talent, especially entreperneurial talent, was one of the big bottlenecks we identified in the clean-tech industry" Peter Rothstein of Flagship Ventures was quoated as saying. "In a recent global survey of 75 senior executives involved in clean-tech firms conducted by NEF and Heidrick & Struggles, a headhunter, over 90% cited top-level recruitment as a serious concern."

In the same vein Vanity Fair in its green issue has published an extensive examination of architect William McDonough's Cradle to Cradle manifesto. McDonough leads the way in rethinking how the world should design the things we make.

“One of the points we make in Cradle to Cradle is that being less bad is not being good—it’s being bad, just less so. To be efficient is the same as being less bad. If I left here and went north to Canada and found myself going 120 miles an hour toward Mexico, it is not going to help me to slow down to 20. I’m going the wrong way. We need a change in direction. What we really need is an eco-effective strategy, to go along with our eco-efficient one, where we look at the idea of actually inventing new things that will take us all the way up to our desired goals.”

‘The industrial revolution of 150 years ago was not designed...if you look at the first industrial revolution as a retroactive design assignment, it would be to design a system that puts billions of pounds of toxic waste into the air and the water, depletes our soils and washes toxins into the ocean or into the air, produces endocrine disrupters to affect our hormonal systems, creates and distributes carcinogens, causes climate change, and dumps plastics in the oceans. If this was the design assignment, we’re doing great. If it’s not the design assignment, then what is? And so instead of seeing what goes on today as inevitable, what we have to recognize is that it’s not possible any longer to say that it’s not part of our plan, because it’s part of our de facto plan. It’s the thing that’s happening because we have no other design. We need a new industrial revolution.” 

McDonough is leading ahead with this vision - but as yet it is not mainstream, and certainly not part of business school programs for leaders. 

The RSA, the venerable British organisation that draws together thought leaders from the arts, manufatures and commerce (and has been doing so for over 250 years) puts forward in its journal a critique of the current passion for biofuels and their inefficiency in global terms - even if they are more profitable per acre than food crops - and the consequences for food supply generally. Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, London notes:

"It has been calculated that the EU’s then 15 countries would need to use more than 70% of land currently down to cereals, oilseeds and sugar to produce biofuels equivalent to just 10% of those countries’ transport fuel. With the possible exception of Brazil’s use of sugar cane (arguably a much better use of its prodigious growth capacity than eating it), biofuels add to rather than resolve policy problems. They distort prices and land use, confounding rather than promoting a shift to sustainable lifestyles."

All these stories suggest that while business is clearly involving itself in clean-technologies, new design and alternative fuels there is at this early stage in the process a mess of ideas and processes that allows for great opportunities to appear but also indicates a lack of "joined-up thinking" - surely this is an area that management thinkers should be clarifying and developing frameworks for, so that leaders can be better educated on how they can proceed.