Getting Executives to Turn on a Paradigm

Yes there is a "new paradigm of business," said multilateral scientist Amory Lovins, in a round-table session of the State of the World Forum devoted to discussing that proposition. Lovins laid out the argument from the book Natural Capitalism, which he wrote with Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken.

The premise of the book is that all businesses should take account of the earth's natural resources and its ecological systems as inputs of value, not "freebies." The air, earth, water and all the diverse species are "natural capital"—and a business designed on this premise would be operating under a new paradigm. Lovins focuses most on efficiency, tossing out figures like, "One percent of the energy used by a car goes to moving the passengers," but he doesn't call this "inefficiency"—it's an opportunity for making money. A new paradigm car company would see profits not from spending more money on advertising to sell more inefficient cars, but in designing a car that uses half the fuel to do the same job. Large corporations, such as Dupont, have embraced the radical rethinking that the Lovinses and their Rocky Mountain Institute have for decades been promoting. Once these converts report their vastly improved bottom lines, more and more companies will embrace the Lovins' new paradigm. Those who don't will go down, in a struggle of the "survival of the fattest."

	Amory Lovins, CEO, Research, Rocky Mountain Institute

There is a rosy surety to Lovins's version of historical inevitability, but Body Shop founder Anita Roddick wasn't buying it. "I was in Nigeria two months ago," she declaimed, "and I saw ferocious criminal acts in the name of corporations. As many oil pipelines as there were miserable villages, children writing their lessons with rocks on the wall, women having Caesarean births with no anesthetics…." Shell Oil is the largest oil extractor in Nigeria, and has recently converted to some of the practices and principles of the "new paradigm." What Roddick found in Nigeria is that the changes haven't made their way to the field.

The competitiveness of these global corporations, said Roddick, comes from their use of women and child labor. The sweatshops of China and Saipan have the logos of Nike, Adidas and The Gap on the outside walls, because the same exploited laborers make all of them, she said. "And none of the unelected technocrats and government ministers who sit on the WTO say: 'I'm not going to allow garments made by children into my market.'"

Roddick believes the way to push companies to a new level of responsibility is through lobbying by the tens of thousands of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have sprung up worldwide, and through "vigilante or political consumer actions." She cited "wars" against the huge wall advertisements of companies like Old Navy and Nike. The new paradigm at The Body Shop is that "we measure our success by counting how many community-based businesses" her company has initiated around the world.

Elisabet Sahtouris, an author and biologist, took the long-term evolutionary view of things, suggesting that species that put so much pressure on their own environments that they threaten their own survival, respond by changing. But she wasn't sure that new paradigms in businesses or anywhere else would come in time to change our species' behavior and save us from species burn-out. While we as a species are on the brink, "The planet is a self-sustaining, living system," she said, "which will take care of itself, even as the northern ice-cap is melting…."

Marc Benioff, the founder and chair of salesforce.com, was more upbeat. His company is guided by decent values, he believes, because he and his fellow executives share decent values; as other business leaders change their consciousnesses, their corporations will change their practices.

An audience member, apparently unconvinced that an epidemic of consciousness-raising is upon us, suggested a government body be formed to police corporate behavior, "because the government's function is to protect human rights." Anita Roddick suggested further that such a body should be elected, and independent of corporations and governments.

Another participant recalled that many powerful companies agreed to be audited for their environmental practices in the wake of the Exxon-Valdez oil-spill disaster—because agreeing to that deal was better than battling Greenpeace activists in the trenches.

Amory Lovins remained sanguine that intelligent persuasion will convert the corporate elite. "We're seeing business plans from major companies now that read like they were written by those Greenpeace activists of a few years ago," he said. "Shell's latest sustainability report is eons away from what they were saying just two years ago."

Again, The Body Shop's Roddick was unimpressed. "There's still the same horrors in Nigeria." For her, the road to the new paradigm is the gentler road. "I say to the executives: Go there. Drink tea with the people. Take your time…"

But then she hedged her bets. "They'll change, really," she reflected, "only to improve the reputations of their companies. But how do you challenge them publicly, when the press won't report The Gap's misdeeds, because The Gap pays so much for all that advertising. It's got to come from you, from us, from consumers."

copyright © 2000 State of the World, Inc.