Leading As If Life Matters: An Invitation to Attend a Future of Our Own Making

LEADING AS

IF

LIFE

MATTERS AN INVITATION TO ATTEND A FUTURE OF OUR OWN MAKING

Mary Mc Bride | Maren Maier | Xue Bai

Copyright © 2021 by Mary Mc Bride, Maren Maier, Xue Bai All rights reserved First ebook edition January 21, 2021 www.leadasiflifematters.com Cover design: Xue Bai Illustration: Xue Bai

AN INVITATION TO ATTEND A FUTURE OF OUR OWN MAKING

CONTENTS

2 s s e n t a e r G o t A Call

5 Mission: Leading As If Life Matters

13

23

Mores Matter

Models Can Muddle

33

Mindsets Need Resets

41 Methods: Designing Life-Centered Innovation

49

59

Material Choices: Designing Material Well-Being Measures Must and Can Be Meaningful

73 Future Forward: Pivoting For Purpose

79 Future Forward: An Invitation

CAN & MUST

1

THE BRIEF

A CALL TO GREATNESS

A CALL TO GREATNESS “Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great.

You can be that great generation.”

Nelson Mandela

We are a generation that can and must be great.

A generation challenged by changes that continue to destabilize and disrupt our lives, our economies and the social and biosystems upon which we depend.

Life matters. We matter. How we make our living in a living world matters. And, time matters.

We are an enterprising and innovative species. How we design our enterprise activity and focus our innovation will shape our shared future.

This book is about that. It is written for emerging and existing leaders willing to be great. And, it is intended as a call to action for the mission we must undertake — leading as if life matters.

If we do not lead as if our world and our lives matter, we will put our future at risk. It is important to secure a future for our separate enterprise. But, if we want to secure a shared future, we will need to align the aims of all of human enterprise. Our enterprise, the work we do, across all boundaries of sector and geography has helped to create the conditions which threaten to destabilize our climate and our lives. We now need to align our aims to restabilize those conditions.

We have one decade to align the aims of human enterprise with the aims of life. Ten years to design livable futures. There is work to be done. And much to be examined about the way we work.

2

THE BRIEF

We have organized human enterprise in ways that put us at war with the living world and each other. And, “invented an economic system that doesn't just kill life, it depends on killing life.” 1 Not our best idea. Time to invent an economic system based upon caring for life and each other.

Most of human progress has been achieved at great cost to living systems and human communities. We have waged a war of man against man and man against nature. Peace has eluded us even in times of plenty. It is time to shift our story and sort out our relationship to life and to each other.

To do that we will need to excavate some assumptions, innovate our practice and work in ways that enable us to survive and thrive — together. If we do not do that, the wars on poverty will not be won. And what we like to call nature will seem to be at war against us. Peace is possible. Prosperity and profit can be won. Possibility abounds. But, we must orient toward it.

This work can help with that. It is designed to stimulate thinking. To catalyze conversations and cultivate caring. And to focus existing and emerging leaders on the work that must and can be done in a century challenged by unprecedented risk.

We already know how to do most of what we need to do.

We just need to do it — together. Re-stabilizing the conditions critical to a viable future will require that we act to align our aims to achieve the Global Goals — the 17 sustainable development goals ratified by the 193 member states of the United Nations. 2

3

A CALL TO GREATNESS

We are designed to survive and to thrive. That is our collective calling — our shared vocation. Our individual genetic programs, ideally, support and sustain our wellbeing. When they do not, we need an intervention to put us right. Our cultures also, ideally, support our shared well-being. When they do not, we are collectively at risk.

We are now collectively at risk. Our climate is collapsing.

Our societies unstable. Consider this an intervention.

Spread the word. The work has begun.

Leaders from around the world are aligning aims to achieve the Global Goals.

Tackling our climate crisis and our equity crisis.

Using technology to learn and connect.

Partnering with life.

Innovating to secure a shared future.

Worldwide, leaders young and not so young, are rejecting the idea of “leading as usual.” They want more — and less. More opportunity to make their difference and less catastrophizing about a future they will actually inhabit and shape. They are rejecting apocalypse. Making new choices and choosing life. They are on a mission to lead as if life matters. This work is an invitation to choose life and join the journey.

E F I L E S O CHO

4

3

MISSION A mission is a calling to act toward shared purpose.

MISSION: LEADING AS IF LIFE MATTERS

“The most successful leader of all is the one who can see another picture not yet actualized.”

Mary Parker Follett

7

MISSION

LEADING AS IF LIFE MATTERS

The good ship Greta has already set sail. In full public view with much media attention, one very young woman with a sign and a heart shattering sadness signaled for all to see “how serious the situation is and how little is actually being done.” 4 Successful leaders in our 21st century will need to actualize another picture of the possible.

Greta has made it her work to actualize collaborative action. To begin to gather partners in purpose. And to demonstrate that change has arrived.

She pivoted passion toward the possible! Took aim at the climate crisis and gave voice to the voiceless disadvantaged by the reckless pursuit of more — our living systems and human communities.

She was applauded and then ignored. Innovators usually are. But, not always. Not when the idea meets the moment and action is actually possible.

8

MISSION

That moment is now, and there are millions of people worldwide ready to meet the moment. All of them are customers, constituents, investors, tax payers and donors. Time to make friends with the future. It has been trying to communicate with us for a long time. We don’t need tea leaves or prophesies. We have the facts.

Facts the young have easily grasped and are acting on.

A cautionary note. Our current systems are designed as if human need and biosystem vitality does not matter.

Leaders lead only in the interests of their particular “stakeholders.” But we are all stakeholders in an emerging future.

The most significant stakeholders being those not yet born and without voice or market power. It is expecting the unlikely to imagine that all current leaders will pivot quickly enough to make a difference.

9

LEADING AS IF LIFE MATTERS

Salaries and bonuses are designed to tether us all to quarterly growth goals. It can be far too seductive to ignore the real conditions of a world unaligned to growth targets.

Of course, there is a very simple solution to this. We can lead as if life matters. But that will require that we align leadership development and leadership compensation with the real work of real leaders in a real world — a world at risk. We will need to recruit, recognize and reward leaders able to align enterprise aims with the aims of human need and the reality of biosystems on the brink. Leaders willing to do the job that must and can be done, the job of creating economic well-being and a viable future. The job of leading as if life matters.

This work is for leaders who want to do that. Leaders who want to pivot practice toward, as yet, uncharted territory. Leaders willing to move past fashionable ideas about disruption rarely put forward by those who would actually be disrupted. Leaders focused on restabilizing our living systems and human communities. Leaders who will use technology, not as a weapon, but as a tool for designing life-centered innovation. Innovation that can provide solutions critical to shared survival.

Innovation that serves human need, sustains living systems and enriches our human community and our enterprise.

10

MISSION

Transformative leaders are always with us and they are at every level in every enterprise. Leaders willing to navigate our enterprise, our work, and livelihood, through the rough seas of change. Leaders willing to befriend a future, ever out of reach, but never beyond imagining. Leaders with courage. Willing to cycle through the very predictable pattern experienced by leaders who are truly innovative.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

The future will win. It always does. The question for leaders has always been what future are we leading to? We do have a choice. We will co-create that future with our decisions. We offer this work to weight that choice toward life-affirming decisions. The world is watching. And the clock is ticking.

For the first time in human history we run the risk of disrupting all of life on earth. There is no reward in that. We need shared strategies that can sustain and support survival. Innovation that is life-centered. And leadership that will transform the way we “make our living.”

JOHAN ROCKSTRÖM: 10 YEARS TO TRANSFORM THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY— 5 OR DESTABILIZE THE PLANET

11

LEADING AS IF LIFE MATTERS

IDEAS, REFLECTIONS, EXPERIMENTS SPACE

12

MORES Mores are the cultural code embedded in collective norms of social behavior about what is acceptable or normal.

MORES MATTER “Our system is one of detachment: to keep silenced people from asking questions, to keep the judged from judging, to keep solitary people from joining together, and the soul from putting together its pieces.”

Eduardo Galeano

15

MORES

MORES MATTER

This is meant to be the brief that strategic leaders need but rarely get. It does not speak to one industry or sector or government. It addresses every sector and every enterprise. And it identifies the fault lines in the way we are currently taught to think and act that will impact any strategy, all enterprise and the viability of our shared world.

Assuring viability is every leader’s most essential strategic imperative. In order to address that imperative we will need to expand the brief to include the dynamics of the world we actually live in. Spreadsheets are a map. They are not the territory.

Let’s explore the territory 21 st century leaders must navigate through — an ecosystem of global economic exchanges — interdependent human communities, life supporting biosystems and cultural containers.

This is the world where decisions are made, grow to scale and have impact. Think of it as an ecosystem of decision making — a multi dimensional view of the field of play for enterprise action. The playing field is not level — more like three-dimensional chess — movable pieces — multiple boards — knights and pawns. Our decisions are co-creating the conditions of that world. Every action produces another action. We are all part of that so-called butterfly effect. Making small decisions with significant impact, unintended consequences and inadequate information. Often insulated from any real understanding about how our enterprise aims put our collective aim of survival at risk. And we are hard at work — 24/7.

16

MORES

Our cultures contain that work and act to structure it. Culture socializes us.

It informs how we think, feel and act. It teaches us how to do things, and how to measure what we have done as good or bad, worthy or worthless.

It refines our behavior and defines what we can do without sanction. At its best, our ability to design cultures enables us to cooperate to survive and adapt to the very real and ever evolving conditions of our shared lives. At its worst, it can work against our shared survival.

Cultural code is embedded in collective mores, norms of social behavior about what is acceptable or normal. Ideally, normal supports necessary.

But not always.

If normal does not support our shared evolutionary mission to survive and thrive then normal begins to work against our shared aim.

And it becomes necessary to reject norms of common practice. This is not revolution. It is an evolution of our cultural mores. A reset for shared survival. An adaptation to changes in our ecological surround.

We share our genes, our world and a mission to survive and thrive. Any human enterprise that threatens that mission can hardly be thought of as normal. And yet, we have come to accept that the aims of human enterprise in service to the aims of a global economy can be separated from our aim of shared survival on a planet challenged by climate disruption and social unrest. Time for a mores reset. It is not a question of polarities:

Jobs vs. the environment Economic growth vs. planetary well-being

17

MORES MATTER

There is only one direction — forward. And our job is to care for and co-create with that upon which we depend.

In fact, our economic growth depends on how well we do that job. How well we design engines of enterprise able to move us into a shared future. If we care for each other and for our living systems we can create that future and grow our way there.

If we continue to detach our enterprise aims from the aim of caring about anything but economic growth, we will pit ourselves against that upon which our survival depends — social cohesion and the integrity of our biosphere.

Not a good idea. Not strategic. And not necessary.

Economic aims can and must be aligned with the aims of life. Our future depends on it.

Evolutionary biologists study the secrets of our shared survival. Carefully noting how we occupy and successfully sustain our ecological niche in the web of life. Human beings do not weave that web. But human activity can weaken or deepen it. What we do matters.

And how we organize to do matters. If we want to survive and thrive we will need to organize to sustain not weaken our human community and our community of life. We cannot continue to divorce our enterprise aims from our shared survival aims.

18

MORES

Cultural shift is already underway among our youngest. They are rising. No longer willing to be silenced by cultural mores that still suggest the young should know their place. They do — it is the future.

The young have grown up aware that culture is a container and an information system which informs us about how to think and feel and act.

“Our cultures and not our genes supply the solutions we use to survive and prosper. They “wrap us in a protective layer, not of muscles and skin, but of knowledge and technologies... language, cooperation and shared identity.” 6 Mark Pagel

The young have learned to use the muscle of technology and knowledge to challenge mores that put their future at risk. They know that any information system requires updates. Especially when our shared survival is at stake.

Cultural mores cannot assure survival if “by their nature they undermine the viability of the bearers.” 7

19

MORES MATTER

Our viability is being undermined by cultural mores that encourage economic gain without a transparent, accurate or responsible accounting of the cost to be borne by those not yet born. And already borne by those living at the water line and in the wake of polluters.

Time for an update. Fairytales of endless economic growth driven by the consumption of our future offer no information on how to secure it.

“Every system that ignores feedback dies.” 8 The Global Goals are feedback about the curves we need to flatten. They map the way ahead. Identify the gaps that innovation must address.

They are emblematic of a collective commons that is emerging. A sharing of targets and of resources. Products, services and experiences that enable sharing are already growth opportunities. But we need more than sharing.

We need caring. The current sharing economy requires caring about the resources we share. And caring may be the biggest and most currently undervalued growth market.

We need advocates for caring, like Reshma Saujani, CEO of Girls Who Code, who argues ably that women are the social safety net of societies and every community’s essential but unpaid or underpaid workers.

20

MORES

Imagine how municipalities might attract citizens more eager to contribute tax revenues in return for caring policies that compensate the work of caring.

Consider the value nonprofits could derive by acting as creative conduits for caring at scale and keyed to cause.

Think how firms could cultivate loyal fans and followers and friends who actually care about the company in return and help promote it.

Caring requires intention and working across our boundaries and biases. Leaders like Michael Robinson of NCCJ are helping communities care and connect. The NCCJ Initiative: Open Minds Respectful Voices can enable us all to craft cultural containers that can contain our aspirations for a new caring economy. And act as an ark as the tides rise. It offers Community Practices to engage and create dialogue. 9

S D N I M S E OPEN C I O V L U F T C E P S RE

The young are refusing to be silenced. They are rising and they will lead. We need only listen and steer our enterprise in the direction our new citizens, investors, donors and growth markets are leading toward. We are not witnessing protest marches. We are watching change happen. Mores are shifting and there is both risk and opportunity in that. Strategic leaders will need to attend to both as they pivot to align their enterprise aims with change. Give a listen below.

CLIMATE ACTIVIST GRETA THUNBERG 10 REBUKES WORLD LEADERS

21

MORES MATTER

IDEAS, REFLECTIONS, EXPERIMENTS SPACE

22

MODELS All models, including economic models, are meant to represent worlds.

MODELS CAN MUDDLE “There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat; And we must take the current where it serves, Or lose our ventures.”

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

25

MODELS

MODELS CAN MUDDLE

A quick look at the news of the day will provide many examples of how our nations and regions are challenged.

Daily we see stories about how our cities are struggling.

Our communities and cultures are straining to hold us together.

The tide is upon us. We must catch the wave or “lose our ventures” and watch our futures wash away.

Our futures will wash away if we do not acknowledge that life is a voyage on an unsteady sea with rapidly moving currents of change. On such a full sea we are now afloat. Our vision obscured by a model meant to help us navigate a world that we have invented, a world where the destination is economic advantage — profit — is presumed to have primary value. Of course, economic value is important — essential. We need to create it and sustain it. But we cannot do that without help from our communities of life and from each other. This is simply common sense, but easily obscured by culturally induced trance. Let’s take a look at the dance of cultural trance.

26

MODELS

One example, what might we think when our angel investors, venture capitalists, or Shark Tank reality TV hosts ask, “what is your business model?” This is the question investors use to interrogate the decision to invest. If we are like most people, or the sharks, that question will be narrowly interpreted to mean, “how do we make money in this business?” Not, how does your enterprise advance our shared aim of shaping a viable future? That seems somehow silly. Not quite muscular enough. A Mr. Rodgers kind of question best asked in a kinder, gentler neighborhood. Perhaps, but we will not create those neighborhoods if we do not inquire about how we make money AND build better value for the hood.

Frankly speaking, no one should pitch an investor unless they know how to make money. That ought to be a given, a baseline, not a finish line. We ought to be examining the use to which capital will be put and calculating return against risk. We are currently not using financial, human or natural capital wisely. We are not putting our assets to wise use. But what is wise use?

Simply put, capital is best deployed to create value not to destroy it.

27

MODELS CAN MUDDLE

It is not wise to invest in that which does damage to human health and well-being. But it may be profitable.

Social media companies are enriched by engaging rage.

Tobacco, war and trafficking turn a tidy profit. Petty crooks would do time for crimes against life. But those that institutionalize violence against life and human community continue to be well rewarded.

All models, including economic models, are meant to represent worlds. Worlds we actually inhabit. Worlds which require orienting not around a bottom line but a triple bottom line that allows us to measure enterprise impact on economic, social and biosystem well-being.

28

MODELS

Bottom line models with their singular focus on economic value do not represent, but rather distort the world in which enterprise actually operates.

“If our design intention is to create a more equitable, robust and secure financial future for citizens and to encourage cooperation among the citizens of this world, then we will need to design this into our efforts at financial reform.” 11 Krishen Mehta, Asia Advisory Council of Human Rights Watch, Senior Adviser to the Tax Justice Network

29

MODELS CAN MUDDLE

Single line economic models only muddle strategic thinking. A single bottom line confuses decision making and can slow action necessary to create new possibilities for a full return of value. Every enterprise takes from its social surround and from its biological base. Enterprise that does not return on those investments or recklessly spends down on social and ecological capital is wasteful. Simple. But somehow obscured by the way we use models to think. As leaders we need to pivot toward a new model for enterprise if we are to build a shared future.

Developing leaders focused on a triple bottom line is the best strategy for achieving global goals.

“Leadership is the key to solving the most intractable problems of our time and if we can bring a culture of leadership for social impact to corporations and other organizations... we think we will make the world a better place.”

12

Carrie Rich, CEO of the Global Good Fund

The Global Good Fund is helping to develop these leaders. Their vision is our mission.

“Every person should have access to the health care they need, enough money to pay their bills, education for their children, clean water to drink, air to breathe and the ability to participate in the global economy...”

30

13

MODELS

Our leadership models need to change and our leadership ranks need to be more inclusive. Women and people of color are on the front lines of climate risk.

Investing in emerging leaders can focus potential on the core challenges we all face. The All We Can Save Project is actively upending status quo leadership and supporting transformational change. 14

“Because we don't know what we’re building, we’re sauntering away from the apocalypse instead of sprinting towards this better future ... What the climate movement needs is more imagining.” 15 Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Marine Biologist, author and Co-Founder of All We Can Save.

Time to look at the future we are shaping with our single bottom line model. Time to pivot our economic model and upgrade our operating system. So we can sprint.

Click for more about how to upgrade our operating system from Douglas Rushkof at Google.

THROWING ROCKS 16 AT THE GOOGLE BUS

31

MODELS CAN MUDDLE

IDEAS, REFLECTIONS, EXPERIMENTS SPACE

32

MINDSETS Mindset is quite literally how we set our minds to think through and act on events and challenges.

MINDSETS NEED RESETS “Even as market triumphalists work to extend the range of private property, a movement has arisen to protect the many things best held in common.”

Heraclitus

35

MINDSETS

MINDSETS NEED RESETS

Heraclitus worried about the ascendancy of markets over societies centuries ago. But his concerns persist and vex. We continue to trouble over how to protect what we hold in common — life — and the need to make our living from it. Most of us in a global population of soon to be 8 billion, need work. We organize to secure it and sustain it. Ideally, we profit from it and prosper as a result.

But we cannot continue to profit or prosper when our work puts life at risk.

When our own enterprise, our work, the work of our heads, hands and hearts pits us against life, we are working against ourselves. Setting our minds to accomplish that which will consume well-being rather than sustain it.

Mindset is quite literally how we set our minds to think through and act on events and challenges.

If our mindset is set only on the survival of our enterprise, from quarter to quarter, it needs to be reset to assure our shared survival for the long term.

Leaders know that every strategic decision is a decision to commit resources. The way we use resources quarter by quarter either contributes to growing well-being or disrupts the possibility of thriving. Our mindsets need to be set on securing thriving. This will require leaders able to set goals that are both smart and wise.

36

MINDSETS

So called SMART goals which are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timebound are necessary, but will no longer be sufficient. Just as we need wise capital investment in innovation, we need WISE goals. Goals that provide a critical whole systems focus. Goals which acknowledge our interdependence and are truly strategic. Goals that draw upon our human capacity for empathic caring about the needs of others. And leaders who are SMART and WISE. Empathy is the key to caring.

Caring can enable us to connect, to innovate and to invest in shared futures.

Joshua Cooper Ramo provides one example in his The Age of the Unthinkable about Michael Moritz of Sequoia venture capital who used his empathic understanding of the needs of others to place his early bets on Yahoo, Pay Pal, YouTube and Google.

“Moritz cultivated a skill few engineers cared about: the ability to empathize with company founders. It was crucial to see their dreams exactly as they did, he believed. Even if they were deluded, you had to know how and where to adjust their imagination...I am terrified of losing that empathy.” 17 Joshua Cooper Ramo

SM

T R A

WIS

E

37

MINDSETS NEED RESETS

Our mindset reset will require seeing the dreams that are emerging and adjusting our imaginations.

And we will need to question delusional cultural mores that have allowed us to ignore key strategic questions related to enterprise and species viability like:

If our work does not enable human thriving, can we expect to thrive?

If we are not committed to working on the real “wicked problems” that threaten the viability of enterprise and our world, who is?

If our enterprise model is defined simply as how we make money, how do we create shared prosperity?

If our enterprise does not add value to the living systems upon which we depend, can we continue to depend on those systems?

Questions create new possibilities. The courage to ask them defines leadership.

The next ten years will be fateful. The fate of the world will depend on our ability to collaborate and innovate as if our lives depended on it. They do.

The 21st century is already turning out to be a demanding one. One that will call us to greatness and to reach global goals. It will require that we organize to transform the nature of our work, our relationships with each other, our world and our local and global economies. It will require that we agree to aim for shared goals.

No small task. But we have our innovative energy and the enormous power of our already existing engines of human enterprise. We need only fuel our innovation engines with an alternative energy and set our minds on leading as if life matters. Our future depends on our knowing this, feeling it and finding methods to act on it.

38

MINDSETS

This work is a call to action. A quest to reset mindset and to develop a sense of shared mission.

We are making progress. Making holes in the walls that divide our efforts and divert our attention.

Large companies like Unilever are making transformational change combating climate change and promoting human development. In 2010, they launched the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP).

“The USLP was a game changer...This wasn't a sustainability plan. It was a plan for a successful, sustainable business.” 18 We are in a state of what Paul Hawken has named blessed unrest. Led by industry leaders like Unilever and CEOs like Ray C. Anderson, who pivoted Interface from a mindset of plundering for profit to pioneering for purpose.

Anderson became a pioneer of caring. He broke through the mores of a polluting industry that externalized costs with little concern. He took leading as if life matters as a mission and then invented a few models of his own.

He was a CEO who knew that he was not only operating an enterprise but operating on industrial practice across an enterprise system that needed what he called a “paradigm shift”. He shifted mindsets. His company, Interface, continued to be profitable. But, it ceased being an organization that plundered the wealth of the world and began to profit from returning to life what it had been given.

Ray Anderson led the last century and died before he could fully align his enterprise aims with the Global Goals. But we can and must reach our goals.

See below about how Ray began.

CLIMB MOUNT SUSTAINABILITY 19 RAY ANDERSON

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MINDSETS NEED RESETS

IDEAS, REFLECTIONS, EXPERIMENTS SPACE

40

METHODS Methods are systematic procedures, processes and plans for attaining a purpose.

METHODS: DESIGNING LIFE-CENTERED INNOVATION “Efficiency is no longer enough.

Organic growth is critical to breakthrough results.”

Larry Keeley

43

METHODS

DESIGNING LIFE-CENTERED INNOVATION

Innovation strategies focused on achieving more efficient ways of acting on our world to profit from it will not provide breakthrough advantage. Rather, it will erode the advantage human enterprise and life has afforded us. It will put the viability of our world at risk.

We will need to act on and in our world so that we all profit from human enterprise activity.

We are indeed a very efficient species. Like most communities in the natural world, we are adept at obtaining what we need. If we were not good at that, we would not have survived and thrived. Our human enterprise excels at efficient extraction. Our plows have drawn up fuels from deep within the earth and ocean floor. Our vessels continue to empty the sea of its stores of life. And our data farms now milk us mechanically as we graze the internet. Unfortunately, we may be too good at getting what we think we need. We are one species among many. Busily using our enterprise to unweave the web of life we need for our own survival.

We misunderstand what it means to use our enterprise efficiently. And we misunderstand what we need. Our methods are not more efficient because they are faster, smarter or more automated. A quick glance at any dictionary would remind that efficiency is relative to “the ratio of the useful energy delivered by a dynamic system to the energy supplied to it.”

Simply said, the efficiency of any method must be measured against the cost of achieving ends.

The cost of achieving enterprise ends is being paid by the living systems and human communities of which they are a part. This is neither efficient nor viable.

We cannot take more than we give without consequence to the systems that support our thriving. Every successful species uses its enterprise to operate on its environment “efficiently” by adding value as it extracts what it needs. We are no different. We can use our enterprise energy and innovation budgets to erode value or to add it.

44

METHODS

PR OC ES S

E S O P PUR

LIFE-CENTERED INNOVATION How to innovate enterprise activity to add value? Not just create value which differentiates from competitors but value that contributes to life. Life-centered innovation. Three steps can help.

1

INNOVATE PURPOSE

2

INNOVATE PROCESS

Focus Innovative Intent on Creating Shared Value

Discover and Define Risk

We cannot thrive unless we innovate to address the destabilization of our ecosystem and social systems accelerated by an economic model with a single bottom line. We will need to pivot the purpose of our enterprise and our economies if we are to survive and thrive. We will need to design innovation that returns to a triple bottom line.

Methods are systematic procedures, processes and plans for attaining a purpose. If our purpose is to create shared value, we must also attend to shared risks. Designing lifecentered innovation will require discovering those risks, defining and developing methods for minimizing or eliminating them.

45

DESIGNING LIFE-CENTERED INNOVATION

DARE TO CA R

3

DARE TO CARE Design and Deliver Thriving

E

COVID accelerated our understanding of the impact of inequity and deepened our awareness of our interdependence with the natural world. Now we must dare to care and turn our awareness into an action plan to address our equity crisis and our climate crisis.

Climatologists are clear that the year 2030 will tip the scales in favor of viability or against it. We have 10 years to use all of our human enterprise to create results critical to surviving and thriving in a world at risk.

Stanley Gryskiewicz, founder of Association of Innovation Managers, 20 argues that challenges to the status quo can create positive turbulence 21 and catalyze creativity, innovation, and renewal.

We can design and deliver innovation that aligns the aims of human enterprise with the aims of surviving and thriving. Or we can continue to pick the low hanging fruit rather than to sow the seeds of a viable future.

Our choice will be fateful.

46

METHODS

How leaders use these three steps will vary from enterprise to enterprise.

But four factors remain constant across all enterprise activity. We will only make real progress if we agree to design life-centered innovation grounded in the following 4 principles:

1 2 3 4

The viability of all human enterprise is contingent on the viability of the eco and social systems which support that enterprise.

Life-centered innovation directs investments of financial, human and natural capital to create new processes, products, experiences and services that can vitalize and stabilize those systems while rewarding enterprise investment.

A viable future will require that we learn to lead as if life matters and begin the process of transforming the nature of our work and the structure of our economies; and revitalizing our ways of engaging with each other and with our world.

Meeting Global Goals will require partnering across boundaries of sector, demography and interest to identify and end practices that contribute to inequity and ecocide.

Simply said, the Global Goals define the targets we must and can reach. But they do not define the transformation required. Leaders will need to partner to do that.

A TIME FOR 22 TRANSFORMATIVE PARTNERSHIPS

47

DESIGNING LIFE-CENTERED INNOVATION

IDEAS, REFLECTIONS, EXPERIMENTS SPACE

48

MATERIALS Materials are nutrients that vitalize flows.

MATERIAL CHOICES:

DESIGNING MATERIAL WELL-BEING “Glance at the sun. See the moon and stars. Gaze at the beauty of the green earth. Now think.”

Hildegard von Bingen

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MATERIAL CHOICES

DESIGNING MATERIAL WELL-BEING

The choices that we make are material and moral. How we make those choices has to do with the mores of the moment. Mores guide our beliefs and our decision making about how to interact with our world and with each other. We do not gaze at the sun without thinking how to harness its power or see the moon without wondering if Elon Musk will bring it within our sway.

Not a bad thing, just something that we do need to think and feel about if we are to experience the beauty of the green earth.

The mores of the moment do not encourage us to experience the beauty of this world. Rather, they encourage us to imagine our world as a store of resource inputs — resources from which we can create cultures and economies based on material consumption. Beauty is to be found at the cosmetics counter; off road in a vehicle; or in an infinity pool. The green earth as backdrop to the good life. Again, these imaginings are not bad. Each offers an individual “user” or “user group” material and perhaps spiritual satisfaction. But these satisfactions come at a cost that is increasingly high.

We act on our material world with a deeply held belief that the more we grow consumption the more we will prosper. But believing won't make it so.

We actually do know that we cannot scale beyond planetary limits or continue to grow inequity. We are at a tipping point now.

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MATERIAL CHOICES

Our patterns of material use and waste are neither strategic nor moral. Nature wastes nothing. We have a lot to learn.

And we are beginning.

Our material world need not be exhausted to feed the voracious appetite of a mythical consumer fashioned to Frankenstein proportions. We can feed all the children and seed a future full of fecund possibility. But, we will need to consider together how to make moral and material decisions — decisions that create shared futures today.

It is time to consider other ways of glancing at our world and seeing each other. Ways that can enable us to survive and thrive. We could view the world and its many communities of life with reverence. Treat all communities with respect. And make caring a value. Sound soft and not much like what should be included in a strategic brief? Maybe but maybe not. Let’s glance around. Our modern experiment with reducing our world and its inhabitants to resource inputs is failing. We will need to respect ourselves, our human community and our living world. And we will need to demonstrate that respect, that reverence, by the material choices we make.

We will need to design and source with respect. Produce with respect.

Distribute with respect. Use and re-use with respect for human communities and reverence for living systems.

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DESIGNING MATERIAL WELL-BEING

At a time in which we are using measures like GDP to quantify how quickly we can consume that upon which we depend, reverence has a sepia tint. Seemingly relevant only for conversations about gods or flags. But, deepening our capacity for reverence, respect and even awe, can enable us to make the material choices critical to shared thriving.

The complex web of life inspired reverence and awe in our ancestors.

And as we weaken that web, we awaken ancient concerns about famines, plagues, floods and fires.

Old narratives about divine deliverance and retribution — apocalypse and armageddon are reemerging and animating popular culture and politics. Awe is back anyway. Evidenced in the ubiquitous use of “awesome.”

Why not add reverence?

"We could start all over again perhaps.

That should be easy.

It's the start that's difficult.

You can start from anything.

Yes, but you have to decide.

True."

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

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MATERIAL CHOICES

CEO Ray Anderson plundered for profit. And then he woke to reverence and started all over again. William McDonough showed us where to start. Fortune Magazine identified McDonough as one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders who are “transforming the world and inspiring others to do the same.” 23 His Hanover Principles helped leaders to operationalize a reverence for life. 24 But we have to decide if we will indeed revere life.

McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle, co-authored with Dr. Michael Braungart, specifies C2C methods for material use and enables enterprise leaders to calculate the true costs of wasting human energy and squandering biosystem wealth. And calculate the value of harvesting assets at the end of life cycle. McDonough and Braungart helped pioneer biomimetic methods that employ nature as nutrient that vitalizes circular material flows. Their later work, The Upcycle provides specific information on how to design for viability and abundance.

Janine Benyus, author and founder of the Biomimicry Institute focused the design community on learning from life and innovating in ways that were consistent with its principles.

We must and can do that now with our innovations.

Companies like Anna Sova are working to slow climate change and remove toxic materials from our interiors.

Whitney “Anna” Walker, CEO, designs well-being into products as diverse as drapery rods, textiles, and paint.

"Once you’re aware of how products are produced, you will only buy products that you know are responsibly produced."

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Whitney “Anna” Walker, CEO of Anna Sova

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DESIGNING MATERIAL WELL-BEING

Kering is crafting tomorrow's luxury. Shaping a viable future is an ethical necessity for Kering and is critical to value-creation and innovation for the Group, its Houses, and its stakeholders.

“Luxury and sustainability are one and the same.” 26 François-Henri Pinault, CEO of Kering

Intelligent Nutrients is demonstrating that the sensible solution to many global problems is to embrace earth conscious, sustainable alternatives.

Innovating with Nature can create prosperity and well-being and healthy beauty.

“The dark irony is that the things we put on our bodies to cover our perceived defects or make ourselves look better are often toxic.” 27 Horst Rechelbacher, Founder of Intelligent Nutrients and Aveda

Modern Meadow is creating a behavioral shift toward well-being. It is committed to combining expertise in biology and technology to make dayto-day sustainable behavior easy.

“Sustainability must be coupled with optimized performance, aesthetics and accessibility.” 28 Andras Forgacs, Co-Founder and CEO of Modern Meadow

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MATERIAL CHOICES

21st century enterprise leaders know that we cannot continue to prey upon that which sustains well-being and stabilize the conditions necessary for our shared survival. Darwin was clear.

Species wide survival depends on our ability not to dominate but to cooperate. To fit ourselves to the conditions of an ever changing world. Our mores, models, mindsets will need a reset for the 21st century.

Our patterns of material use and waste are neither strategic nor moral.

Nature wastes nothing. We have a lot to learn. But, we are beginning to pivot practice. Life-centered innovation methods abound.

We can enrich and enliven our world with our material choices. Benyus and McDonough can help. They are only a click away.

BIOMIMICRY AS A COOPERATIVE INQUIRY

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RESOURCE ABUNDANCE 30

BY DESIGN

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DESIGNING MATERIAL WELL-BEING

IDEAS, REFLECTIONS, EXPERIMENTS SPACE

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MEASURES A measure is a signal input to a feedback system.

MEASURES MUST AND CAN BE MEANINGFUL “Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”

Wendell Berry

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MEASURES

MEASURES MUST AND CAN BE MEANINGFUL

We can actually continue to grow. But we cannot th continue to measure growth with 20 century notions like GDP which now effectively measure the degree to which we are efficiently eroding viability.

It is time to develop 21st century measures and grow well-being, resilience and viability. We need to measure enterprise contribution to a triple bottom line.

Our ideas about how to measure progress need a refresh. We are not roaches and rats. We now know that it is actually impossible to continue to progress and to grow economic vitality on a devitalized planet with communities struggling for their lives.

We can already use measures to quantify the global growth in demand for police locks, protection devices, surveillance mechanisms and weapons of war. Anyone with a cell phone or computer or even a bike is quite aware that our collective safety has become more suspect and more expensive to maintain. We can count the number of times our hospitals have been held hostage by ransomware threats. Quantify the amount of economic value lost as cruise ships become hospitals to a virus. Count the economic cost of our climate emergency. Tally species loss. Calculate the cost of attempting to manage refugee flows. And add up the price paid by communities fleeing fires and floods. We can quantify declining global vitality. But we seem fixated on measures of national power, enterprise profitability, and economic growth.

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MEASURES

We prefer to measure what matters in the moment and fix our focus on the immediate environment in which we operate. Simpler that way. More easily measurable. Unfortunately, life is not so simple. Our political, economic and social environment is deeply embedded in a complex ecosystem of action. Pollution spreads, carbon accumulates, suffering festers into unrest.

Time to reset our mindset about metrics. We have all probably heard that we “cannot manage what we cannot measure”. True enough. And often used to discount the value of attempting to measure intangibles like caring.

But all metrics are measures of caring. We always quantify what we care about. In fact, we only measure what we care about. What we don't care about, we don’t measure. And then, indeed, we cannot manage.

We explicitly announce that “our company cares about profitability.” “Our community cares about economic development.” “Our country cares about global leadership.”

Implicit in what we care about is what we don’t care about as much or at all. Designing enterprise and economies and communities that care about human health and well-being and biosystem vitality — surviving and thriving.

What might those measures look like?

If we are to survive and thrive, we will need to care about what our genes care about — that which nourishes life and continues it throughout generational cycles. We will need to care about the availability, flow and use of system nutrients throughout the body to vitalize growth and to repel disruptive agents. So, let's think like a gene and not a machine.

Where to begin?

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MEASURES MUST AND CAN BE MEANINGFUL

We can begin by measuring the impact of our investments in innovation. We can calculate our return of value to our enterprise, our biosystems and our human communities.

The International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) are partnering to provide investors with a value-based reporting framework which will include global sustainability performance.

“In an era where the impacts of a global pandemic, climate change and growing inequality are intensifying, intangible value and the need for data-driven sustainability information have grown in importance.

Capital markets demand evidence-based, market-informed, and transparent data in order to deliver long-term value to shareholders while also helping secure the future of our people and our planet reporting is an important means to this end.”

Integrated Reporting That’s a start. Accurate and integrated reporting on risks is a requirement for enterprise viability. A measure is a signal input to a feedback system. Return on a bottom line signifies little about progress toward viability in a world where the costs are mounting in human communities and ecosystems. The cost of a climate collapse is incalculable and unthinkable.

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MEASURES

“Financial markets need clear, comprehensive, highquality information on the impacts of climate change.”

Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD)

TASK FORCE MEMBERS 32 INTRODUCE TCFD

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The TCFD recommendations provide a foundation to appropriately measure climate-related risk and opportunities, and are widely accepted from across the G20. Creditors and investors demand it. We must have a 21st century approach to risk assessment.

The 21st century will also demand a full return on the value of all investment inputs including human, social, cultural, natural and financial capital. It will no longer be sufficient to attend to a single bottom line. We will need to manage triple bottom line returns if we are to assure viable growth.

Sound scary? Abacus outdated?

We can help.

We recommend beginning today to shape tomorrow. Using innovation to pivot us toward the shared goal of surviving and thriving.

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MEASURES MUST AND CAN BE MEANINGFUL

How? Most innovation investments are considered in the context of minimal hurdle rates related to investment of financial capital. This is already standard procedure. We recommend an amendment to this procedure to enable organizations to explicitly calculate the minimum acceptable rate of return (MARR), or target rate investors can expect — all investors, not just financial investors.

The hurdle rate could be determined by assessing the true cost of capital acquisition and use, an analysis of the real risks involved, and an exploration of the growth opportunities emerging in meeting human need and assuring biosystem vitality.

Innovative enterprise is already beginning to calculate the cost of waste.

Quantify efforts to reduce carbon footprint and increase equity. Measure inclusive decision making. Value diverse hiring and promotion practice.

Assess the impact of good governance. Count the cost of building brand value by caring about their customers.

Across sectors, enterprise is beginning to quantify concern about risks too real to ignore. We are beginning to measure what we can and must care about.

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MEASURES

We already know how to discover materials, define methods and design meaningful measures that deliver accurate feedback about how to grow economic vitality on a vital planet with vital communities.

That should be good news. We know how to do it! So, why not do it?

In part, because the measures any enterprise uses to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of its methods only account for costs accrued by the enterprise not those borne by our interconnected and interdependent web of being. Those costs are quantified by public health experts chronicling the rise of chronic disease like asthma. Or development economists calling into account the methods of the so-called global north on the well-being of the global south. And by labor leaders counting the number of jobs lost as a result of decisions that finally require cutting heads and severing human beings from their economic livelihoods and communal identities.

But, there are costs to business as usual and enterprise growth at any cost.

And now, they are in full view and demanding an accounting as a result of climate disruption and COVID. We can see the connection clearly now between financial investments in life serving and life saving innovation and monies spent to distract and extract from consumers.

Public health economists, development economists and environmental economists are now providing the information critical to strategists.

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MEASURES MUST AND CAN BE MEANINGFUL

All strategists struggling to make sense of a world now irrevocably interconnected by two predictable mutually exacerbating emergencies with severe consequences for human life and enterprise viability. The web of life has us in its grip and we cannot continue to ignore the cost of accounting only for individual advantage.

In the blink of an eye, a health crisis became an economic crisis, a food crisis, a housing crisis, a social crisis, and a political crisis. Everything collided with everything else. Where were the measures for that?

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MEASURES

They were and are available. We knew how to measure the relative well-being of our citizens and how to map it against development that enriched across a triple bottom line. We just had to use those measures to innovate practice and anticipate and avoid a perfect storm of predictable crisis.

One example is SEDA, the Sustainable Economic Development Assessment which marries standard measures like GDP with measures more able to assess whether governments actually use their money and innovation capital wisely. SEDA measures success using values like public safety, clean water and access to education. Attempting to measure the actual well-being of citizens and avoid the paradox of “rich states, poor people” which has become a reality for some “developed” countries, like Japan.

No measure is perfect. Conditions shift. But measuring just use and merciful application of available monies is possible. Our economy is vitally interconnected with our ability to more justly address the need for food, shelter and the sustaining conditions of well-being. We ought to be working to enrich all and vitalize our world. And measuring progress against that intention. It is time to measure the meaning of all human enterprise. To calculate its contribution to serving collective well-being as it advances its own aims.

HOW CAN COUNTRIES MEASURE THE 34 WELL-BEING OF THEIR CITIZENS

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MEASURES MUST AND CAN BE MEANINGFUL

IDEAS, REFLECTIONS, EXPERIMENTS SPACE

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FUTURE FORWARD "We need longer tables, not higher walls" José Andrés, World Central Kitchen

FUTURE FORWARD

PIVOTING FOR PURPOSE “Economic growth without investment in human development is unsustainable and unethical.”

Amartya Sen This work has provided an introduction to a new ethos of enterprise in service to our shared aim to survive and thrive. That is our collective calling.

To doubt the need to pivot enterprise activity to achieve that purpose is, quite simply, to deny a mounting body of fact. And to ignore ever amplifying warnings about a “sixth extinction” and a “planetary emergency” coming from respected scientific bodies across our world. Leaders who ignore feedback are not leading. They are coasting on a set of assumptions unverified by fact. Not wise. The facts are simple. We are designed to survive and thrive.

To survive and thrive we will need to do what we have always done to achieve that aim. We will need to organize and collaborate. Fortunately we are good at that. Companies are good at that. NGOs already take on all but impossible missions. And no government can stand if it cannot protect and defend. If we align across enterprise boundaries, we can achieve almost anything and certainly 17 goals that can help to assure our shared survival. But we will need to work at it — literally.

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PIVOTING FOR PURPOSE

We will need to re-imagine our enterprise and economic activity as life serving. And innovate our current practice to support human well-being and the health of our biosystems. Anything else is a waste of time, money and human potential. Risky business to attempt a post COVID return to business as usual.

There is nothing usual about how our world is heating up. Nothing usual about the rise of refugee populations fleeing unrest and instability. Nothing usual about glaciers “in retreat” advancing a rising sea. Nothing usual about imagining that ignoring risk will make it go away.

Nothing usual and nothing strategic.

“Humanity is on the brink of disaster, but we have the opportunity to write a new story about a world that is interconnected, alive, and interdependent.”

Kelly Erhart, Co-Founder of Project Vesta We wrote this work as a brief introduction to the world in which leaders must actually plan, organize, direct and control. Not the fictive world of endless growth unperturbed by obvious limits and unconcerned with sustaining life. The real world, the one that needs us and the one upon which we depend.

As a species, we have been as predatory as any virus. Our mores, mindsets and models have encouraged predation. Our methods, materials and measures have enabled domination. We have been on a shared mission to consume. We now need to embark on a new and shared mission. We need to care about our world, not consume it.

HOW GREEN SAND MAY SAVE US

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FUTURE FORWARD

HERE THERE BE MONSTERS He was drawn to the edge of things. To the places old mariners knew, and warned, “Beyond here be monsters" Louise Penny No mission is without its risks. We have attempted to draw a map on these pages of predictable perils and monsters of our own making. Leaders will need to find a way to navigate them using both a strategic and a moral compass. We will need to continue to profit and to profit by enabling true prosperity. There are no easy answers. There is no one way forward. Goals, even Global Goals, are not strategies. But all strategy begins with intent.

If we intend to secure a viable future in a world seemingly at war with that possibility, we will need to create strategies to accomplish our goals.

But we know what we need to do. We need to close the gaps on inequity and find the opportunities inherent in designing for thriving. Align our economic activity and our enterprise with life. Care for each other and our shared world.

Every emergency is a call to greatness. An opportunity to move beyond what is expected and to do what is required. Leaders emerge in emergency. So do answers.

Questions can help evolve answers. We offer four “how to” questions that we believe world leaders will need to ask and answer if we are to achieve Global Goals and create the conditions for a viable future.

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HOW CAN WE COLLABORATE TO Design enriching economies based on caring Design enterprise to pollinate rather than prey upon life Design to grow and scale thriving Design to finance progress toward an inclusive, equitable, peaceful and sustaining future

HOW TO BEGIN TO PIVOT FOR PURPOSE We need to get out of our own way. The ways of yesterday. It is time to clear our cultural containers of the debris of mores, mindsets and models that helped birth our industrial revolution.

We need to take a real risk and emerge, clear eyed from a cocoon of accepted practice. And innovate as if our lives depended on every decision we now make.

We need to invest our human, natural and financial capital, every dollar, Euro and RMB to defend and protect and secure shared thriving. Measure our success by how ably we use our materials and methods to clean up the mess of what we now call success. And return full value to the social and biosystems upon which our enterprise rests. Life can sustain us if we reign in our desire to dominate all being.

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FUTURE FORWARD

We will need to align our organizational aims to sustain life across all enterprise activity. Doubt will lead to delay. Delay will cost us. Everything we care about is at stake.

It is not an exaggeration to say we are facing an existential crisis — one which threatens the viability of enterprise and our world. We know it. We feel it and Covid makes it more clear daily. Even those of us not fleeing for our lives from fire, flood or the tyranny of too little can feel the need to care for what we could so quickly lose to a microorganism.

Economic growth can be built upon a foundation of caring. Services and experiences can add real value and deepen our sense of being cared for and cared about. We can figure out how to get better at caring for ourselves, each other and our world. If we do that, we can prosper.

"When you’re part of figuring something out, you have much more invested in it."

Eileen Fisher, CEO

Consuming is something we have been socialized into by our cultural containers. Caring is soft wired into our genes. If we did not care, our children would not flourish. And if we do not invest in building caring economies, our economies will not flourish.

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We believe that the pivot toward what we call a caring economy has already begun. The success of Oprah Winfrey's media enterprise literally personifies the wealth attracting value of caring. But, it can be empirically demonstrated in the growth trajectory of most enterprise. Very few companies grow by being demonstrably unconcerned about well-being. Few governments can stand against the demand from the governed for the provision of care. NGOs attract monies that care about mission.

Customers and constituents are changing worldwide — very few are looking for experiences which will disappoint them or put them at risk. They are looking for what they cannot find elsewhere — caring in the form of safety, trust and truth.

HOW THINGS GROW

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FUTURE FORWARD

AN INVITATION TO ATTEND A FUTURE OF OUR OWN MAKING: DEAR WORLD LEADERS

“Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led. The most essential work of the leader is to create more leaders.”

Mary Parker Follett

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Our team is very directly involved with leadership development. It is our work. But we all need to take on the work of creating more leaders at every level. Leaders who are able to shape a viable future for their enterprise and our shared world. Leaders who represent the rich diversity of our world.

This work recommends that we re-examine the framing assumptions of traditional leadership development programs where equity and “the environment” are an afterthought. And argues that we reimagine what is necessary and possible.

The books have been written about a world at risk. The role of enterprise is being re-examined. Pyramids of power are being shaped into circles of collaboration. And there is a growing understanding that we are all stakeholders in a shared future.

But “business as usual” is still standard fare for those engaged in learning to lead and manage across all sectors. We have presented an alternate possibility and an urgent mission. This work, our work, is an invitation to join a growing number of leaders worldwide who are shaping a future of their own making. A future that can enrich and enable — a viable future. This work is dedicated to them.

m o c . s r e t t a m e f i l if s a d a e l

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They will succeed in figuring out how to achieve Global Goals. And they will create “right livelihood” — meaningful work — that organizes the aims and aspirations of our human community into enterprise activity that can secure shared well-being. Work that can enable good growth which can help take the heat off a planet and people on overload. A world where gender or skin color are not a limitation for leadership.

This is where we are heading to. Where we must and can go. We invite you to join us. We can lead from wherever we are to go where we need to go — together.

Leadership is not a position. It is a choice. A decision to rise, to influence and to act to effect.

The world is watching...

WE CAN BE GREAT BUT WE CANNOT WAIT

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AN INVITATION

DEAR WORLD LEADERS WE ARE WATCHING YOU

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FOOTNOTE 1.Paul Hawken, “Regeneration,” Bioneers Conference, streamed live on December 3, 2013, YouTube video, 29:34, https://youtu.be/q52WJjeara0.

2. Project Everyone, “The Global Goals for Sustainable Development,” accessed on December 12, 2020, www.globalgoals.org.

3. Project Everyone, “Choose Life Now | The Global Goals” The Global Goals, October 2, 2020, YouTube video, 1:58, https://youtu.be/h-iiuOXiF80.

4. Greta Thunberg, No One is Too Small to Make a Difference (New York: Penguin, 2019), 2.

5. Johan Rockström, “Ten Years to Transform the Future of Humanity — Or Destabilize the Planet,” TED, October, 2020, Youtube, 7:45, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sl28fkrozE 6. Mark Pagel, Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition, 2012), xxvii.

7. Mark Pagel, Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition, 2012), xxv.

8. Paul Hawken, “Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming,” Bioneers Conference, streamed live on November 13, 2019, YouTube video, 32:19, https://youtu.be/l3DTKUZsl2Y. 9. NCCJ, “Community Practices: Open Minds, Respectful Voices,” accessed on January 14, 2021, https://www.nccjtriad.org/community-practices/.

10. Greta Thunberg, “Greta Thunberg (Young Climate Activist) at the Climate Action Summit 2019 — Official Video,” United Nations, September 23, 2019, YouTube video, 4:07, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=u9KxE4Kv9A8

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11. Mehta, Krishen, “Policy By Design: The Role of Strategic Design in Financial Reform,” Catalyst Review, Issue 10 (Winter). Accessed on January 14, 2021. https://www.catalystreview.net/policy-by-design-the-role-ofstrategic-design-in-financial-reform/ 12. Carrie Rich, “Happy Hour for Hope: Social Good Fund,” January 14, 2021, YouTube video, 57:42, https://youtu.be/MQPsCMkICWU. 13. The Global Good Fund, “Our Mission,” accessed on January 14, 2021, https://globalgoodfund.org/about/mission/.

14. Madeleine Gregory, “The Marine Biologist Building an Inclusive Climate Movement,” VICE, Accessed on January 20, 2021.https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dpyn3/the-marine-biologistbuilding-an-inclusive-climate-movement.

15. Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Quoted in ClimateXChange Weekly Newsletter, December 23, 2020.

16. Douglas Rushkoff, “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus,” WebVisions, May 31, 2016, YouTube video, 44:08, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=rBrRvkPvvJg 17. Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable, (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), 151-152.

18. Unilever, “Sustainable Living: Ten Years On,” accessed on January 18, 2021, https://www.unilever.com/sustainable-living/ten-years-on/.

19. Ray Anderson, “The Business Case for Sustainability - Ray Anderson, InterfaceFLOR,” Natural Step, July 7, 2011, YouTube video, 5:03, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qrQKA0xMko 20. AMI, “Association for Managers of Innovation” accessed on January 14, 2021, https://www.aminnovation.org/.

21. Stanley Gryskiewicz, Positive Turbulence: Developing Climates for Creativity, Innovation, and Renewal (New Jersey: Wiley Publishing, 1999).

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22. World Resource Institute, “How Partnerships Can Accelerate The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),” A Time for Transformative Partnerships, November 2, 2020, YouTube video, 2:34, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VDKU68gs98&feature=youtu.be 23. Willian McDonough, “William McDonough named by Fortune Magazine as one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” May 13, 2019. Accessed on January 20, 2021. https://mcdonough.com/william-mcdonough-named-byfortune-magazine-as-one-of-the-worlds-50-greatest-leaders/ 24. Willian McDonough, The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability (William McDonough & Partners, 1992).

25. Starobinsky, Rachel, “A New Value Chain for Wellbeing: An Interview with Anna Sova’s Whitney Walker,” Catalyst Review, Issue 5 (Fall). Accessed on January 20, 2021. https://www.catalystreview.net/a-new-value-chain-forwellbeing/ 26. Kering, “Our Approach,”. Accessed on January 20, 2021. https://www.kering.com/en/sustainability/ 27. Maier, Maren, “Minding Your Business: An Interview with Intelligent Nutrient’s Horst Rechelbacher,” Catalyst Review, Issue 4 (Summer).

Accessed on January 20, 2021. https://www.catalystreview.net/mindingyour-business/ 28. Modern Meadow, “We Are a Catalyst for Sustainability,”. Accessed on January 20, 2021. https://www.modernmeadow.com/philosophy 29. Janine Benyus, “Janine Benyus - Biomimicry as a Cooperative Inquiry | Bioneers 2016” Bioneers, December 1, 2016, YouTube video, 32:27, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li7ifi83LV0 30. William McDonough, “Resource Abundance by Design | William McDonough,” World Economic Forum, November 25, 2015, Youtube, 21:44, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKlqL_nuh_c 31. Integrated Reporting, “IIRC and SASB announce intent to merge in major step towards simplifying the corporate reporting system” accessed on January 14, 2021, https://integratedreporting.org/news/iirc-and-sasbannounce-intent-to-merge-in-major-step-towards-simplifying-thecorporate-reporting-system/.

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32. Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, “Introduction to the FSB Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures”, Vimeo video, 4:49, https://vimeo.com/181695412 33. Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, “TCFD Recommendations” accessed on January 14, 2021, https://www.fsbtcfd.org/recommendations/ 34. Sustainable Economic Development Assessment (SEDA), “How can countries measure the well-being of their citizens?,” Boston Consulting Group, October 20, 2015, YouTube video, 2:23, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM5I9mlVm5U 35. Project Vesta, “Project Vesta Explained - Earth Day's 50th Anniversary & Project Vesta's 1st,” April 22, 2020, YouTube video, 3:12, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f6Rgb-otos 36. Leading as if Life Matters, “How Things Grow,” January 20, 2021, YouTube video, 4:24, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4qkF19YkrA. 37. Project Everyone, “Dear World Leaders. We are Watching You,” The Global Goals, January 29, 2020, YouTube video, 1:00, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmpMeAhI4kE

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GRATITUDE

GRATITUDE “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

African Proverb A special thanks to those individuals and organizations who helped this work go this far.

All the leader learners of the Design Management and Arts and Cultural Management programs at Pratt Institute who have accepted the invitation to lead as if life matters.

Nancy Napier Kelly Trager Leslie Kirschenbaum Hillie Pitzer Jonathan Sack Diana Vivas Denise Tahara Joe Tankersley Karyn Zuidinga Rob Brodnick Andrew Bennett Jamie Grau Mark L. Fuerst Ana Paula Tavares Dara Schechter Thor Lind Association for Managers of Innovation Corporate Innovation Summit European Forum Alpbach UMO Design Foundation Clark Hulings Fund for Visual Artists

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ABOUT US

ABOUT US Mary Mc Bride Ph.D. works as coach, communication strategist and consultant to enterprise leaders worldwide. She heads the leadership development practice at Strategies for Planned Change. Mary designed and leads the Creative Enterprise Leadership international graduate programs in Design Management and Arts and Cultural Management at Pratt Institute. She is a

MARY MC BRIDE

citizen of Ireland and the US and a poet.

Maren Maier co-founded Creative States to shape a more life-affirming world. She leads sector-based and community-level collaborations on climate and equity challenges at CoCreative. Maren is a faculty member of the Creative Enterprise Leadership international graduate programs at Pratt Institute. She is a citizen of Germany and the US and enjoys continuously

MAREN MAIER

exploring futures worth leading into.

Xue Bai is the author and illustrator of From My Window: Children at Home During COVID19, a United Nations publication. She is an artist, strategist, and social impact investment analyst. Xue is a graduate of both the Design Management and the Arts and Cultural Management program at Pratt Institute. She heads Lead As If Life Matters China.

XUE BAI

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RISE Everything I needed I needed to become Everything I became I needed to love I had no capacity for waiting for wailing, or for despair I moved even when I could only crawl It kept me alive Focused and adoring I came to love this world its every moment its invitation to stand to bend, to put a foot down Lift up And rise I rose And each and every awakening I remember That I chose To love this world M. Harte Mc Bride