Gil Friend’s Blog

Living Between Worlds • Is Larry Lagging? • Can books change anything? • Sustainable Brands LIVING BETWEEN WORLDS My monthly ZoomSalon, exploring how we might live with calm, grace, and power in "the time of monsters," continues next Wednesday (and every third...

Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take   This may be the business book we've been waiting for…and that many of us have been groping toward for the last decade or two. A growing number of businesses have been embracing...

Here's a brief summary of Living Between Worlds conversation #2.4 (You'll find the recording here, and the entire series here. My extended written excursion on these themes is still in the oven, and will post here (and other places) when it's baked. Meanwhile, you can...

LIVING BETWEEN WORLDS…WITH GRACE, DIGNITY, AND POWER Our monthly webinar series resumes Wednesday, exploring the many ways we find ourselves "living between worlds"—trying, each in our own ways, to “build new worlds in the shadow of the old.” Who joins these...

Dear Councilmembers, As Palo Alto's first Chief Sustainability Officer (2013 through 2018), and the staff lead on the initial S/CAP, I hope you’ll permit me to offer a few comments for tonight's meeting, even though I am not a resident and no longer have a formal...

People are hungry for meaningful conversations—that move worlds. Let's have some! Last year, in the early days of the pandemic, some 500 people joined me for a series of online conversations about COVID, the climate crisis, and "living with grace, calm and power in a...

Sandra Pina of Quiero/Madrid interviews me about purpose, courage, the SDGs, and creating new worlds—and new ways of doing business that serve both stakeholders and the living systems of this planet, on which all we value depends.

I just watched Greta Thunberg's recent interview with the Financial Times. Greta seems not to be trapped by the past (in the ways that most of us are) in her calls to “treat the crisis as a crisis,” not as a call to improve and "do better." “We need to stop focusing...

"The ultimate, hidden truth of the world, is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently." —David Graeber, RIP Happy new year, and welcome back—to a year that we all hope is really new—and that is already busy shaking us up!  (I love...