If you don’t think Eco-System you cannot successfully run your Business

Here are some thorough reflections for my readers from the heath and drought that are plaguing Northern Italy this year.

A few days ago I had the lucky opportunity to visit the Mariposario (Butterfly House) of Benalmadena (Spain). The beautiful image that heads this article is one of a moth, I don’t remember the name now. This amazing flyer is the biggest in both families of moths and butterflies, with a wingspan up to 30 cm, and it has a peculiar characteristic: it has neither mouth, nor a digestive apparatus. It does not feed or drink during its whole lifetime of… 4 to 6 days! This perfect creature lives just long enough to mate and reproduce, so that its species can continue. As a human being with an inclination towards a quest for the meaning of life and an entrepreneurial mindset, I couldn’t help ask myself “What is the purpose of perpetuating such a life? Why not improve it in order to live e longer life and thrive in this amazing form?”. While I was pondering over such profound questions, I stumbled upon a panel with lots of informations about the world of butterflies and their relationship with the environment. And then I realized. (Just as a note, 98{f62d5d00145dc1761a46bb3b9876f4fb2b6782fa0e48784c716da9a8908fe5e5} of the eggs laid by a butterfly, mostly at the stage of caterpillars, serve as food for other animals).

If you only consider the life of the moth itself, its adult life, and even worse from the limited point of view of a human being, you will completely miss the meaning of its existence. You, as I was, will somehow justifiably think that there is something weird in such a life form and that it might very well be substantially improved. This is the “Ego-System thinking”, as U-Theory followers might appropriately call it.

If, on the other end, you “think Eco-System”, considering the whole context into which the life of this moth is inscribed, you will see the absolute relevance of its existence. You might as well see how wise was the evolutionary process that fitted the life of this amazing insect perfectly into the puzzle of life. The whole World would not function so well without this element, thus its 4 – 6 days of existence as an adult are as meaningful as, say, the 100 years of any Nobel Laureate human.

For as much as your Business can be “big”, there is no such thing as one that can have a meaningful life without strict interrelation with the whole Eco-System into which it is inserted. This interrelation has to do, like my followers and readers should know, with the impact that it has upon the Basic Needs of all of its Stakeholders, as well as on its own. Time is over for organizations that look just to their customers on one side, their supply chain on the other and the profit line of this year’s balance sheet.

Today’s entrepreneurs must “think Eco-System” because their businesses are strongly impacted by what happens in the whole World as much as their activities have an impact that has an effect on the same. It is clearer than ever that we all live on one planet, we all need to have clean water, clean ari, food, energy, materials in order to live and continue to exist as a species. If you don’t consider how your organization is impacting the whole – and for this I mean the Basic Needs of all of your Stakeholders, like I articulate in Sustainable Leadership, the CASE© Method book – your activity is unsustainable, and within a time that is becoming shorter any day it will crumble. Sorry for you… not really!

In the debate about Sustainability there are a few taboos: one is we don’t say that some activities are unsustainable and should just stop. One is the production and sale of some plastic materials, for example. Plastic bags, disposable plastic bottles, many other products that are made of non-renewable resources and cannot be reused or completely recycled as secondary matter… These products need disappear from the market quickly. Just to make an example, living in a Country where tap water is generally of excellent quality and abundant in quantity, I think that the massive sale of drinking water in disposable plastic bottles is just pure nonsense. I cannot understand why it has to go on. Don’t tell me that there are producers of bottles and bottlers of water. The harm caused by the waste from such industry are an externality that is causing enormous harm to the whole community and planet, and if we calculated correctly the REAL cost of a plastic bottle filled with water (including the cost of waste collection, treatment, pollution from burning plastic – which despite all the bla-bla is still what happens for the majority of it) such product would get out of the market in one minute.

As well as for the internal combustion engine of our most common transports: who does include the externality of health damage from traffic in the price of petrol or cars? It is due time that business leaders, long before politicians wake up from their timeless sleep, take on the challenge of real sustainability and think their businesses different, “Eco-System”. Like Ray Anderson and its Interface have so well shown, among other frontline business people, sustainability makes very good business, and there is no time to waste to seize this opportunity, either for your own pockets and for the survival of our species.

The good news is that in many businesses there are abundant capacities and creativity to make the necessary changes and adapt to the future that is coming, willing or not. If you want help in thinking your business different, just let me know: I and my Dreamteam will happily come to stand by your side and support your transition into an Embedded Sustainability based Business.