The Implications for Commerce
As we said earlier, it is not clear whether “corporations” as we know them today will be the entities which help us overcome the challenges of our time. As we examine below, there are some radical changes required which will impact the very nature of work and its relation to capital, resources, ownership and needs fulfilment which represent radical implications for current businesses.
As Jim Collins and Jeremy Porras say in Built to Last: “Superb execution and performance naturally come to the visionary companies not so much as an end goal, but as the residual result of a never-ending cycle of self-stimulated improvement and investment for the future.” Companies now need to apply the “core-values and purpose” examination and lens to all that they do if they are to be Fit For Purpose in the new sustainable world. Being visionary will come from tuning in to the three elements of the Perfect Storm: the “means” of full planet economics, Wellbeing “needs” of Citizens and the Digital Democracy. These three seismic shifts of our time will bring about radical changes to the landscape across which commerce will need to navigate and only the “audacious” will make the grade. Built to Last 2.0 will be about delivering to real needs, not the created relative-materialist desires, and about the planetary means to get that delivery. It will be about durability, thrift and resilience built into the service commerce provides for society.
The business world is waking up to the need for such change.
Indeed, a July 2007 survey of 151 British firms conducted by consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, found that taxes are often effective at delivering green improvements and half (49%) of the companies did not think current policy instruments actually encourage significant changes in behaviour. In the report Glyn Barker, managing partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers, states: “We believe that there is an urgent requirement for a much clearer policy framework to help business respond to the challenge of climate change. While it may be surprising to find businesses appearing to welcome further regulation, corporate leaders recognise that customer and investor pressure is not enough to change their environmental behaviour fast enough, given the urgency and scale of action required. Competitive businesses want a level playing field, and they want it to be green.”
In a speech at the 2006 Conservative Party Conference, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, Former Chairman of Shell and now Chairman of Anglo-American, although a firm believer in the value of markets, explained the importance of such legislation. “Without regulation to channel their power”, he said, “markets will not on their own deliver things which are of no immediate benefit to the individual consumer making his or her choice, even though they may be beneficial to consumers collectively – in other words, society. Markets without regulation would not have delivered unleaded gasoline, autocatalysts or seatbelts and airbags, nor would they in isolation have delivered clean air to London after the killer smogs of the fifties.”
A 2008 report by the CBI Climate Change: Everyone’s Business endorsed by 18 CEOs from companies as varied as Tesco, McKinsey, Shell, BA, BP, RWE and Barclays stated that “Market forces will drive big changes, but they will not by themselves be enough to do the job. The full range of public policies must be deployed to create the right incentives.”
In 2006 the Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change, which represents the CEOs of 18 leading UK companies, including HSBC, Vodafone, Unilever, BSkyB and Shell, said: “We ought to address the “Catch 22″ situation in which governments refrain from introducing new policies to reduce emissions because they fear business resistance, while companies find it difficult to take their investments in low carbon solutions to scale because of the lack of long term climate policies”.
The nexus of “Needs” and “Means” and a shift to thinking in terms of economic development rather than growth for growth’s sake would imply profits would be made from a company and economy that delivers maximum satisfaction to deliver long happy lives with least new material input. People don’t buy drills, they buy holes in walls – so companies, or whatever we call their replacements, would have to ask what do people really “need” and how can they give it to them with least resource input and waste output?
People don’t buy drills, they buy holes in walls – so companies, or whatever we call their replacements, would have to ask what do people really “need” and how can they give it to them with least resource input and waste output?
In The Upside of Down, Thomas Homer-Dixon – an adviser to (amongst others) the CIA, World Bank and WEF – says: “Our economic elites don’t just encourage Consumerism. Through their influence on the media and our society’s political process, they create, reproduce, and justify a pervasive and interlocking system of rules and institutions – from property rights and capital markets to contract and labour laws – that promote growth and that, in the process, buttresses their power and privilege.”
It is just this set of rules and institutions, property rights and capital market set-up which a New Green Deal (examined in Chapter Nine) would alter. This programme would use new taxes to rebuild economies around massive infrastructure programmes in saving greenhouse-gas emissions. Innovative funding models would encourage Local Authority bonds for capital infrastructure investment. Green armies of re-employed would go to work refitting buildings for low-energy living and working, constructing low carbon transportation infrastructure, and building a renewable energy network to power the new de-globalised world and its localised economies.
