Gil Friend’s Blog

Please join me at noon (PDT) tomorrow (Wednesday, September 21) for our monthly exploration (our 22nd!) of the challenges of "Living Between Worlds—with grace, dignity, and power." Register here. (And before joining, be sure you've updated your Zoom client. Here's...

THE ESG BATTLE RAGES ON I've written before about the fierce debates over ESG from within the community. But it's pretty fierce outside too. Florida governor Ron DeSantis (whom the despicable Alex Jones calls "better than Trump") and his state Board of Administration...

One of the things most on my mind this week is the climate bill that just passed the Congress (in a week full of legislative accomplishments emerging from the deadlock)—officially the Inflation Reduction Act, with elements addressing health care and taxes as well, but...

50 YEARS AGO THIS MONTH… …my life pivoted in profound and powerful ways. While most of my friends ran off to the Rockies for the first Rainbow Family Gathering (a sort of proto-BurningMan!), I ensconced myself in the libraries and campus of Southern Illinois...

DEMOCRACY Winston Churchill's painfully accurate observation that "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried" comes to mind often these days. It's not just that I am engrossed in the brilliant Danish political...

CHANGE IS HARD In our 18th monthly session of "Living Between Worlds…with Grace, Dignity, and Power," we explored the mystery of change. A Natural Logic client—CSO of a "sustainability leader" that hired us to help "reset" their already impressive strategy—reported...

THE BURGEONING ESG HUBBUB Unless you've been sleeping under a sustainability rock, you've probably noticed lots of ruckus about ESG lately (the rating of corporate "environmental, social, and governance" practices). On one hand, it's stunning that the once fringe...

As Andrew Winston (co-author of Net Positive) wrote recently: "A banker approached me after a talk and told me that it would be great to invest in the clean economy and other sustainability priorities, but the numbers 'just don't pencil out'." His response: "Yes they...

SEEING PATTERN Some of my friends just don't like data, even though they use cell phones and fly on planes that depend on data. (You know who you are! 😉 But data—especially when presented visually, and well—can disclose trends we might not otherwise perceive—can let...