Gil Friend’s Blog
Beyond “Sustainability”: the constellation of profit, brand, risk—and purpose
Beyond "sustainability." It needs to be about more than minimizing the damage that modern society inflicts on the living systems that sustain it. And certainly more than minimizing the damage "only if we can afford to," or "only as much as we can afford to." Though...
The Upcycle
This morning I posted Beyond "Sustainability": Better Questions. This afternoon a new book arrived: The Upcycle, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. The subtitle: Beyond Sustainability: Designing for Abundance. Exactly.
Beyond “Sustainability”: Better Questions
Last week I began a conversation with you (and my Inside Sustainability subscribers) about "What’s beyond sustainability?"—and promised to continue this week what I'm thinking now. It's this: The best of "sustainability"—for all the momentum, progress and enthusiasm...
What’s beyond sustainability?
I've written the last few weeks about systems thinking, its power and challenges. (You can catch up here and here.) Here's where that thinking is currently taking me. For all of the initiatives around sustainability over the past couple of decades, for all the...
Systems Thinking. [Part 2.]
(Last week, I wrote about the power of systems thinking, my history with it, and some of the risks of taking a systems perspective for granted, rather than making a conscious effort to bridge the conceptual divide. I promised to continue with some suggestions.) It's...
Systems thinking. [Part 1.]
Systems thinking. It's trending. It's cool. It's not a panacea. (Hunter Lovins and I would blast a claxon horn at our Presidio MBA students whenever they used "systems thinking" as a selling point in their pitch presentations—as though it were a self-explanatory magic...
Here we are. And there is where we want to be.
Here we are. And there is where we want to be. There's a third player in this drama, of course: the obstacles—or at least gaps— that stand between here and there. Theories abound about what to do: Meticulously plan how to get there from here, mapping each step of the...
3 tools I absolutely can’t do without
Here are three tools that I can't do without (and a few more). SaneBox is a maniacally simple email overload. I've been using it for a few months, and watching it save me 10-12 hours a week that I don't have to spend wading through my inbox. The magic: it watches my...
Thought Leaders and Thought Partners
These days, everybody's talking about "thought leaders." Even me; I've been called one—and worse. Well, I'm guessing you might value having a thought partner. Tell the truth: How much of your time do you spend thinking? Not just designing, executing, managing,...