Gil Friend’s Blog
Futureproofing, fault lines & “inevitable surprises”
It's been hard to write or think about much else this week besides America's profound racial divide and political dysfunction. Whatever your perspective on the George Zimmerman / Trayvon Martin case, it's clear that the racial fault lines in this society still run...
Might as well face it
A tweet from the perspicacious Jerry Michalski about "that troubling word, consumer" got me digging through my blog archives. I was looking for a piece (which I didn't find), that noted at least two problems with that troubling word consumption is a deception, since...
10 things you need to know about your value stream
A few weeks ago I wrote about the challenge of preparing your company for a future you can't possibly predict, and navigating it successfully. I'll explore that challenge further this week, and over the coming weeks. For starters, be sure you understand these...
How to deliver more value—and less stuff.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the challenge of preparing your company for a future you can't possibly predict, and navigating it successfully. I'll return to that theme next week. But first... I spent last week at the Sustainable Brands conference. (It's not really a...
Foresight. Design science. What your CEO would want to know.
As the ever insightful Seth Godin wrote recently: "The one who can see—see what's coming and see what matters—is the one you want piloting your boat." Foresight. At the risk of sounding immodest, I'm told it's one of the core skills I bring to the party: the ability...
What’s really the matter? Materiality, Money & Value.
In their otherwise excellent HBR post, "Sustainability In Financial Services Is Not About Being Green," Robert Eccles and George Serafeim may have missed the elephant in the room. They rightly say that The next time we hear about a bank or insurance company's 'green...
Does Wall Street really care about sustainability?
Does Wall Street really care about sustainability? This was one of the questions in the air at the Ceres conference last week, where managers of trillions of dollars of assets gathered to assess and advance the state of ESG/SRI/sustainable/impact investment....
What if your company…?
Last week I asked: "If your company were focused on building regenerative capacity—its own, of its value chain, of its communities, of the local and planetary ecosystems that support it—how might you do your business differently? What new opportunities might emerge?"...
Earth Day, “Sustainability” and Regeneration
"For 25 years sustainable development has been held up as the solution to the world’s problems. But instead we have had ever more pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change. Sustainability has been abused like few other terms in history. It is time to think not...