Nearly twenty years ago, a client called me with an unusual request. “Could you please tell us what to do? I mean exactly what to do. The truth. The whole thing. No holds barred. If we really wanted to do the right thing, what would that be?”
My response was unusual too. I flipped open my laptop, and words just poured out of me. Thirty minutes later, I had produced the Declaration of Leadership for Sustainable Business.
I let it rest for a day, and returned to polish it, but there was nothing to change.
So we asked our friends at Celery Design to turn it into a poster, which we sent to hundreds of CEOs, some of whom tell me they still have it on their wall. (You can download your own copy here of the second edition, designed by The Collective Spark.)
Sunday night, as I was packing for the SustainableBrands conference (where I’ll be speaking this week), my partner and muse encouraged me to turn another chum loose on it, and the voices at Google’s NotebookLM produced this fairly amazing podcast “conversation“ based on the Declaration.
Listen to it; it’s only 10 minutes. (And let me know what it provokes for you.) I know you’ll hear in it some of the shoulders that I stand on, and you might hear roots and seeds of some of what’s been unfolding these last 20 years—and some of the challenges that still lie ahead.
(Oh, and speaking of AIs, you can chat 24/7 with this AI trained on me and my work; text or call “me” at 254-739-6394; and of course you can engage the real me directly to work with you and/or your company.)